71 Years of Hairstyling Nets Hall of Fame Status

Louis Corday, 83, was recently inducted into the California Cosmetology Assn. Hall of Fame, and it seems about time, considering that he started styling women’s hair when he was 12 years old.

“I could do it as well as anyone when I was 12,” said the Anaheim man. “God gave me the talent and I fit right in with it.”

These days he tutors others trying to pass the state test for a cosmetology license.

In between, he plays golf three times a week (he’s a 14-handicap) at the Anaheim Hills Golf Course where he works once a week as a ranger who speeds play and enforces golf etiquette.

He recently collaborated with beauty school owner Janet Thorpe on a 15-minute hair-styling video she shows at her Career Academy Beauty School in Anaheim.

Earlier in his styling days, Corday said he sold 25,000 books entitled “Curls and Rollers in Action” at $7.50 a copy. “I made a lot of money from it, but my first wife spent it all,” he said.

Now unmarried, he is the father of three daughters from two marriages.

Corday is not reluctant to share his thoughts about the way women look today.

“Beauty operators today have lost their basics,” said the Anaheim man who was both a hair stylist and owner of beauty salons. “All they do is cut hair, and now women look like they are wearing an upside-down mop.”

He said it is up to the stylist to fit the hair to the body and the head of a woman.

“You don’t make a heavy woman’s hair bushy because it makes them look heavier, and you don’t style long stringy hair for a tall thin woman because it makes her look longer and skinnier,” he said.

“I could still do hair, but who wants an 83-year-old guy for their stylist?” he asked.

Corday says he feels that people today are greedy and unfriendly, “but people were always very nice to me in the old days.”

Especially the women.

“I love women,” said Corday, who says he once drove a car when he was 14 years old for a bootlegger. “I’m an Italian stallion. It all came naturally to me.”

And so did driving. “My father taught me to drive when I was 9 years old. Those were different days, and I remember driving up and down the street with fruit in the car hollering, ‘apples, oranges, bananas.’ It was just another way of making money.”

But he stayed with hair styling and devised pin curls to set the hair of his clients.

“I was in a hair-styling show in Boston, and they introduced me by saying Heinz had 57 varieties of pickles and I had 59 varieties of pin curls,” recalled Corday. “ ‘He’s two up on the pickle man.’ ”

Corday said: “Being named to the Hall of Fame makes me feel like I accomplished something in life and in my profession. I have over a 100 trophies from beauty shows, but this is the best honor.”