Is it Worth a Paddling?

When my sister, Dessie, four years older, started trying to “look pretty”, she wanted to curl her hair. We, of course, had no curlers so we had to make some. I say ‘we’ because when she did something, I immediately thought I should do it also.

Prince Albert tobacco cans were available, as we had brothers who rolled their own cigarettes. We cut half inch wide strips from those cans with scissors and made them about three inches long. Yes, those were my mother’s only pair of scissors, and we probably ruined them. We then wrapped those strips in several layers of fabric.

Dessie used me as her guinea pig and rolled my wet hair that afternoon. Naturally my hair wasn’t dry by bedtime. My parents said there was no way I was going to leave those things in to sleep on them.

Dessie took my hair down and we went to bed with me crying as loud as I could. My Dad said that if I didn’t stop that hollering he was going to come in there and paddle me. Dessie was upset that she had to take the curlers out so she told me that if I would keep on hollering as loud as I could, she would change sides of the bed with me and take it for me. My Dad knew which side of the bed I slept on and he wasn’t going to light a lamp to see differently. True to her word, she took the paddling!