My grandmother, who had red hair, told me that a woman she had never seen before stopped her on a street in Evansville, Indiana. this would have been about 1900.

The kids she knew teased her about her red hair. Apparently they thought red-haired people were promiscuous (a superstition still current in some places.) Anyway, the woman told Grandma that her hair was beautiful and unusual, and she was very lucky to have it. It changed Grandma's view of herself, and fifty-five years later she still remembered that encounter.

Believe it or not, in 1972 I talked to a young girl from an Italian family who had glorious, thick red hair. (The others, whether boys or girls, all looked like they had been popped out of the same mold.) She told me that she hated her hair, that the others teased her and called her weird. I did my best to talk her out of it.