At Emily’s Salon, They Can Let Down Their Hair
In the unrushed manner of an artist, Emily Fields stood in her Long Beach beauty shop, amid its quiet conversations and radio ballads, and sewed hair from a cellophane bag onto the hair of a customer.
Fields, 33, owns Emily’s Classic Beauty Salon on Atlantic Avenue near Willow Street. She has fulfilled her dream of being a successful businesswoman, a dream born in the mid-1970s when she studied cosmetology 10 blocks down the street at Poly High School.
A gentle, religious-minded woman who works in jeans, high-topped tennis shoes and a smock, Fields intends to stay in the area, although her shop’s barred windows and locked front door during business hours attest to the neighborhood’s roughness.
“I like being part of the community I grew up in, and I think I provide a positive service the community needs,” said Fields, who lives on Long Beach’s west side, not far from the inner-city area near Poly where she was reared.
“God has been good to us here,” she said in a soft voice barely heard above the fierce traffic outside the door. “We’ve never been held up.”
But among the spectrum of topics in the ammonia-scented air, crime gets its fair share of attention. On a recent afternoon, the murder of an inner-city child was being discussed.
“You live in the ghetto, and from the time you get up you don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Mary Ware, sitting in a worn swivel chair while her hair was being worked on. “The devil’s so busy. That rascal never sleeps. My, my, my.”
“He sure is,” Fields replied, her own hair in a beehive.
Fields has held forth in the white-walled beauty shop, adorned with wood-framed mirrors and hanging baskets of artificial flowers, for five years.
After graduating from Poly, she worked for six years at another salon until she was told to talk about God on her own time. With her earnings and a small business loan, she opened her first shop on Pacific Avenue, and stayed there a year.
Her current shop is bigger, with an adjoining room containing hair dryers and displays of combs, conditioning creams, shampoos and styling gels, along with old Ebony magazines, pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a sign that reads “Say No to Drugs” and the cellophane bags of human hair imported from the Far East.
To accommodate a clientele of 200 regular customers, Fields employs three stylists and gets help from her mother, Shirley Fields, who schedules appointments and keeps an album with snapshots of customers before and after their new hairstyles. “I’m retired,” Shirley Fields said. “I help her out a little bit. It keeps me from sitting at home by myself.”
Her daughter tries to make sure that customers leave the shop happier than they were when they arrived.
“You feel at home in here,” said Lynette Richards, a regular who was waiting her turn. “She’s very professional and congenial. She’s good to spill your guts to. And she tells you what to do to your hair when you leave.”
The next patron, Monica Harper, complained that the hot lights of the music production business had made her copper-colored hair go straight.
Fields came to the rescue with a curling iron, and then began to discuss Christian rap groups. “A lot of them are coming out, and they’re good,” she said.
“Emily,” Harper said as steam rose above her head, “have you heard that song ‘Optimistic’ by Sounds of Blackness? Oh, girl. . . .”
Fields then talked about hair shows in Las Vegas and Atlanta that she was planning to attend to promote her own brand of hair spray.
A divorced mother of three small children, she has dedicated her life to her family, business and church.
“I’m not a partyer,” she said. “In our home we pray a lot. Whenever we don’t have a hair show, I’m in church, at the Crenshaw Christian Center.”
Harper smiled in the mirror at the sight of her springy new curls and told Fields that she would see her in a week.
“You Are Everything,” a song by the Stylistics, drifted in from the radio in the next room as the afternoon wound down gently.
“I enjoy the feeling that I can make someone happy,” Fields said, checking with her mother to see who was next. “That’s a blessing, definitely a blessing.”
* Katie Ann Rodriguez, 9, a fourth-grade student at Ernie Pyle Elementary School in Bellflower, recently spent a week at the NASA Space Camp near Orlando, Fla. An essay she wrote on the “home of the future” enabled her to become one of 50 students nationwide to win a scholarship to the $800 camp. Katie Ann, who wore a spacesuit and experienced weightlessness at the camp, wants to be a doctor.
* Virginia Williams, interim director of the Long Beach Unified School District Head Start Centers, has been honored by the Long Beach chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. She received the 1991 Gene Lentzner Human Relations Award, which recognizes contributions of local leaders toward reducing prejudice.
* Richard B. Caldwell, outgoing superintendent of the Paramount Unified School District, was honored as part of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Community Heroes Program, which recognizes people who have furthered education. Caldwell, an educator in Paramount for 39 years, was honored before a recent game at Dodger Stadium.
* Kenneth N. Leestma, senior pastor at New Life Community Church in Artesia for the past 15 years, has retired.
* Jeanne Spence has been promoted from controller to chief financial officer of W. Simmons Mattress Co. in Cerritos.
