Going out with style

On Saturday, 85-year-old Catherine Boardman will pull the plug on the large helmet-style hairdryers in Catherine’s Coiffures, ending her 41-year career as a Spokane hairdresser.

“Work has been my pleasure,” said Boardman, black rubber gloves covering her hands as she bleached a faithful customer’s locks in her North Crestline Street salon earlier this week.

“I don’t ever regret a day that I worked.”

Born in 1921 and raised on a North Dakota dairy farm, she got her start at home.

“I had four older brothers and I used the curling iron on them,” she recalled, a generous smile brightening her finely-lined face. “Those were the country days and we didn’t have electricity.”

Instead, you poked the curling iron down a kerosene lamp chimney to heat it, she said.

She graduated from a Bismarck, N.D., beauty school, married and moved to Spokane in the mid-1940s so her sons could eventually attend college in the city.

After she arrived, she recalls local soldiers returning from the South Pacific flocking to salons to have their sun-bleached hair dyed back to their God-given shades.

She first set up shop in a salon her husband created below the family’s Broad Street home, where she teased tresses for 18 years.

“My first priority was to be there when the children got home from school,” said Boardman, a registered cosmetologist.

She remembers when hair cuts were 75 cents. Shampoos and sets ran $1.50 and permanent waves ranged from $5 to $15, according to the texture of your hair.

“Of course you were working for 50 cents an hour,” she added with a laugh. In 1965, she launched Catherine’s Coiffures in a former grocery store now shaded by a bright orange canopy emblazoned with the shop’s name.

The beauty parlor looks as if it’s frozen in time: White vinyl swivel chairs; shampoo bowls at every station; bright pink, yellow and blue permanent rods and plastic rollers and stacks of magazines.

Over the decades, she’s seen hairstyles of all shapes and sizes.

“I can’t say I hated any of them. But the most glamorous were the bouffants the women wore in the 1950s and ‘60s,” she said. That’s when ladies donned hats and gloves to shop at The Crescent, a now-defunct downtown department store.

She’s worked six days a week all her life. And she likes to keep her work atmosphere friendly and light.

“We don’t put up with cranky people. If they’re cranky, we won’t have an appointment for them next time,” she said.

She’s also learned to be a good listener. Seems women really do tell hairdressers their closest secrets.

“If you just listen and don’t say anything, it’s the best therapy some of them have,” she said. “You let it go in one ear and out the other and never say another word about it. You get to be a family.”

Some of her family are her customers, too. Earlier this week, Boardman’s niece, Nitzy Wilson, sat while her “Auntie” colored her hair. She’s been a customer of Boardman’s for more than 20 years, Wilson said.

“When Auntie does it, no one knows I’ve had my hair done. She’s an expert on bleach,” Wilson said.

The unexpected death of one of Boardman’s two longtime salon employees — a woman more than 20 years her junior — got her thinking about retirement, she said.

As soon as the announcement appeared a week ago on a lighted sign outside the salon, the phone started ringing. And the line’s been busy ever since.

The doors officially close at 6 p.m. Saturday, she said.

“But I’m going to have to work through the night,” Boardman said, chuckling.

“Everybody wants to come in for just one more hairdo.”