A FAREWELL TO RED

PART ONE

Ladies born in the 1890’s owe me a posthumous apology.

They may have been Gibson Girl before the First World War, Flappers during the Roaring Twenties, Gold Star mothers in WW2, but by the time I encountered them in the early 1950’s they were dowagers, in the very best sense of the word: “Dignified older women.”

This would have been in Hempstead, an old railroad commuter town east of Manhattan, which in those days before malls still had a vibrant, heavily-visited downtown. My mother would bring me along on her errands to the butcher or baker there on Fulton Street, and at some point in our morning, between one shop and the next, I would see them advancing down the sidewalk—some linking arms in a dowagerly phalanx, others alone pushing old-fashioned wicker shopping carts, but all of them, all, when they caught sight of us, breaking into terrible awful horrible smiles…smiles aimed straight at me.

They came armored, these women. Heavy wool skirts draped over matronly black shoes; sweaters layered upon sweaters; hats far too fancy for everyday, some with gauzy veils, perfume wafting ahead of them in a smothering fog. The 1890’s cohort in action, and nothing for a four-year old to do but stand there and suffer.

‘WHERE,” they would say, leaning toward me until I was pinned, their Brooklyn-bred voices rising to all capitals, “DID YOU EVER GET SUCH BE-OOTIFUL RED HAIR?”

This didn’t just happen occasionally—it happened all the time. Women of that generation couldn’t help themselves, and while I don’t remember any of them reaching down to give all that redness a tousle or testing tug, they all looked like they wanted to—though at this point I would be cowering behind my mother’s legs, letting her do all the talking.

For what was I supposed to say? Rhetorical question, sure, but a question even so. Where did I get such beautiful red hair? The correct answer would have been “From my English forebears, ma’am, thank you for asking;” the sarcastic one would have been “From the Easter Bunny, lady';” and my favorite one, the answer I was always tempted to try, would have been “From Howdy Doody.”

Howdy Doody. He was the only other redhead I knew about, and that was just from television. Howdy was a smily-faced marionette, an early superstar of kids’ TV, along with his pals Clarabell the Clown and Princess Summerfall Winterspring.

“Howdy Doody,” I would mumble, just to spite them. All, without exception, responded “WHO?”

(While I’m remembering him…High on a bookshelf behind me sits a decorative plate gifted me for my fourth birthday. There’s Howdy painted in the middle, dressed in his signature cowboy outfit, a red shock of hair licking the freckles on his forehead. Walter is written across the plate’s bottom, and on the back From Millie. Though I’ve long since forgotten which of my mother’s friends she was, it’s been in my possession for more than 70 years.)

If I grew up shy and overly self-conscious, I blame those dowagers, the ladies who, confronting a bashful little kid, couldn’t help gushing—and yet what I wouldn’t give to have one of them gushing over me now. “Where did you ever get such beautiful red hair?”, that million-dollar question, has become, in recent years, “Uh, did you used to be a redhead?” And even that is only asked by dermatologists.

I’ll see a little boy with red hair at the supermarket checkout with their mom, want to sympathize with him without embarrassing, but even here it’s a lose-lose situation. “I’m a redhead, too,” I could say, without any evidence to back it up, or, worse, “I was once a redhead myself,” which sounds like it’s something you retire from voluntarily.

The good news? Since red hair never changes to gray, my hair continued certifiably red up to my seventieth birthday, and it’s only the last few years where I’ve lost most of the color—and with it, a treasured part of my identity. Arranging to meet someone for a business lunch, someone I’d never met, I’d always say “Just look for a tall redhead with glasses.”…and though the glasses are still there, the tallness mostly isn’t, and the red hair is well nigh invisible.

The back of my head still has two or three reddish dollops. On top it’s mostly a blond-cinnamon color flecked with white. “Still some red left,” my wife Celeste will say reassuringly when she plays barber, but I always respond in a huff. “Totally red,” I’ll insist—but who am I kidding?

“Former redhead” is who I am—and so I would like to take advantage of that bittersweet turning point to get down on paper a brief memoir of what it was like: to have been so vibrantly redheaded, so copiously freckled, that I can still remember, there with the very earliest of my memories, sixty-year old ladies harassing me on the street.

***

Only two percent of the world’s population has red hair, but there are significant global clusters. In England and Ireland, up to eight percent are redheads, seven percent in Iceland, and just over two percent in the U.S.; in much of the world, its incidence barely registers. (In comparison, when it comes to being different, ten percent of the world is left-handed.)

That makes redheads rare enough to deserve some comment whenever you encounter one. Here in rural New Hampshire, driving our back roads, a crow or even a bluejay flying in front of the windshield won’t merit a second look. But if it’s a cardinal?

“Look at that red!” one of us will gush. When it comes to being noticed in this world, a splash of scarlet never hurts.

You get red hair from a mutant MC1R gene; both parents have to carry it, and, if they do, there’s a twenty-five percent chance one of their babies will have red hair. How this played out in my family I’ve never quite understood, since my father was blond, my mother brunette. I had an Uncle Wesley with red hair; a rare presence in our life, but I remember a handsome gent, hair the color of rust, a weathered look to his skin, and one eye narrowed in a perpetual wink. So MC1R was certainly lurking, but never in a big-time way.

And if it’s a mutant gene, I must have had its mutant version. Many redheads have an ethereal, vulnerable look—many are pale—but that was never for me. I was a swarthy redhead, whose face reddened easily over all those freckles; in photos take when I was five I look inebriated, like I just staggered out from an Irish pub. And, much to my mortification, I’ve always been a blusher.

As for hair texture, mine was curly in an anarchistic way, more than a match for any comb or brush that tried flattening the strands into obedience; crewcuts, leveling everything, were made for me, at least when I was a kid. I can go to a hair “stylist’ even now, but it makes no difference; the moment I leave the chair, my hair does what it wants to do, which is to fly up on one side, bulge out on the other, curl up on top, doing its stubborn redheaded thing, like the moon is tugging at it, some elemental tidal force working around my head in the course of the day.

I was a redhead, sure, but always an asymmetrical one.

There were also issues with the platform. I was born with a big head—no ego, but sheer mass, my hat size close to a full 8. As a kid, this manifested itself as the inability to find a hat or cap that would fit, even in XL. My dad took me to see the Dodgers at Ebbets Field; I desperately wanted one of their blue caps with the simple B on the front, but we couldn’t find any that came anywhere close to fitting. The same problem happened on a family visit to Gettysburg, where all the Union forage caps in the gift shop refused to even settle over my forehead.

I’ve made up for this since…I’m infamous for my crazy wide-brimmed hats…but I’ve also paid for it with frequent visits to the dermatologist, always trying to repair the sun damage I suffered when I was a flammable kid and couldn’t find the proper protection.

Which brings up a depressing point. Being redheaded can seriously endanger your health. Sunburn, sun damage, skin cancers—they’re always a risk. Our Celtic ancestors managed to thrive in cold dark climes just fine, but once we migrated southward we were asking for trouble.

Redheads are also said to have fiery tempers…red, fiery, temper—get it?…and, in truth, I did struggle with that when I was younger, had to work hard to bring it under control. Too much sun didn’t just burn my skin, it made me irritable…makes me irritable to this day when out fishing or canoeing…and so there is definitely a link between having red hair and being pissed.

Any more negatives before we move on? There’s a great danger of being teased by your peers, and/or given a nickname that you despise, such as “Rusty” or “Carrot Top.” Somehow I avoided this, maybe because I was a pretty husky guy, or maybe because kids sensed that latent temper. I’ve always thought it might be nice to be called “Red,” a la Red Grange the legendary football player, or Red Norvo, the famous jazzman—but for reasons that aren’t still quite clear, no one has ever once referred to me as Red Wetherell.

Up next—Part Two.