Rumor in School

On January 31, 1963, I wrote the following in my diary:  “In the paper there was an article and it is going around school.  A girl didn’t wash her hair for three weeks.  And didn’t unrat it.  And three black widow spiders got in her hair and bit her.  She fainted in class.”  The next day I wrote, “The story about the girl with the black widows may not be true.”

"Unrat" means to comb out your hair after teasing or back-combing it.  For "big hair" or extra fullnes, girls did something called back-combing, teasing, or ratting (tangling the hair to create a cushion to lift the style and then smoothing over the top). 

I didn't rat my hair very often.  It caused my ends to split.