The Story of Bill Hylan's Threatened Baldness as told by Bill and Set Down by His Grateful Customer Lester Adams.

PRESENTED AS A GIFT TO HIS BARBER

Sole edition, likely unique. Ten original photographs laid down. Typewritten text. 8vo. Cloth-backed boards, some edgewear and pale stains, text evenly toned throughout. 12 leaves, rectos only. Greenwood Mt. Maine, Easter Sunday,

Surely the only copy ever produced, this wonderful example of social history was compiled by Lester Adams, the medical director of the Western Maine Sanatorium, and presented as a gift to his barber, Bill Hylan.

 

While recuperating from typhoid fever at the age of fifteen, Bill Hylan lost his hair over the course of two days. Soon after, he began applying Glover's Mange Cure to his scalp and spent the following years waging a war against the hairs which re-appeared the size of ten-penny nails. They were so thick and straight they prevented him from sleeping and he resorted to using bear grease and skunk oil (yummy) to try to soften them. In time, a halo of hair returned and his story is illustrated with good-natured photographs.

 

Amidst all this is a vivid sense of what life was like in Western Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. Adams notes that they had to wait six years for the first snow plough and that most cars were "jacked up to wait for Spring, so most of us stayed on the hill and let our hair grow." Others made more frequent trips in and "went to the office early to reserve one of the fur coats hanging by the telephone booth .. and receive from stay-at-homes lists of errands to do in town." He notes that the trip to Lewiston to get a hair cut would usually take an entire day. In Hylan's section he notes the poverty in the region: "Some families would be so low on food, come Spring, that they would have to live on pine saliva and milk. They would peel the bark off, then scrape the sap wood with a case knife until they got a wab of saliva as big as your finger. They'd put that in milk and drink it. Of course some families would still have a few potatoes and some a little salt pork. Another thing they ate was box berry plums and milk. You understand all supplies had to be brought from Rumford on ox teams and that took time ... The pine saliva and milk wasn't that bad tasting, only your mouth would taste awful oily when you got through."

 

A surprisingly rich account of life in Maine disguised as a scientific study.

Stock Code: 243417