I had a hard time finding a job after I graduated from cosmetology school. I finally got a job at a small mom&pop salon that had just opened.

Things were going along all right until the owners decided to put in a tanning booth. They expected the employees to make use of it as an advertising tool.

I have very light, sun-sensative skin and had a hard time with this tanning booth. I finally had to stop using it, and got complaints because of the medicated cream I had to use on my “sunburn”. I was sent home early one day, just before the weekend, and I was so upset that I forgot to take my lunch with me (that was in my station). There was milk in it and it soured and, well, I got fired because of that.

This was in Columbus, Ohio, back in the ‘80’s. During that time, the city schools had instituted “bussing” to try to integrate the schools better. It was a dismal failure and many people tried many ways of getting around having their children bussed to the other side of town.

The owners of my salon had a son just starting kindergarten and they found that he was going to be bussed from the north end of town to the extreme east end of town. They couldn’t find a private school (he was Protestant, she was Catholic, so parochial schools were out). They couldn’t afford to move to one of the suburbs that had their own school systems, and therefore were not involved in bussing. Then they got the good (to them) idea of using his great aunt’s address as their own to get their son enrolled in a school in the closest suburb.

I knew a guy who worked for that school district and asked him who was in charge of tuition students. He said he was, so I told him about my former employers’ little scam.

Later, I was talking to another former employee and told her what I had done. She said “Oh, that was YOU??” then told me that the school district had pulled their son out of that school and they had to put him in the school that was going to bus him. But, we don’t know if it was my tip that did it, or the fact that my former employer told one of her clients what she had done, before she found out that the woman was on the Board of Education of that school district.

That, and a couple other things they did to get around certain rules and laws finally ended up closing their shops.