Way back in 1955, Eunice Boddie resolved to ask her boss a question.

It was a strikingly bold question to ask at the time.

“Mr. Gould,” she said. “Would you ever let me work in your shop?”

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Mr. Gould was Sam Gould, who founded Gould’s Salon. Boddie — 21 at the time — had been hired as a housekeeper at the salon at Poplar Avenue and Highland Street. 

But now she wanted to work as a cosmetologist, a stylist. She wanted to know if that was even possible.

“See, there had never been a Black stylist at a white hair salon in Memphis,” she said. “Mr. Gould thought about it for a week. And then he said to me, ‘Well, if you do, you know you’re going to catch h---.’ I told him I knew that, of course. Then he said to me, ‘I’ll let you start next Tuesday.’ And that’s how it all began.”

Boddie tells the story before embarking on yet another workday, this time at a location in Germantown. 

Today, she is celebrating her 68th consecutive year of working at Gould’s. It isn’t some ceremonial celebration, either. Boddie — 89 — still does anything and everything there is to be done.

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“Perm, color, tint eyelashes, wax eyebrows,” she said. “And I’ll stay as long as you like. I’m not partial to time.”

Boddie is funny and blunt. She said she aims to work until she is 90, at the very least. Except she doesn’t really consider it work.

“I was one of 11 children,” she said. “The 13 of us — the 11 children and my parents — shared three rooms. We didn’t have running water and we didn’t have electricity. We didn’t even have enough money to have a porch.

“We’d sit on the steps and look at the Sears Roebuck catalogue because there wasn’t anything else to do. But I knew in my mind that someday I’d have enough money to buy the things in that catalogue. And I knew I wanted to be a hairdresser.”

Boddie applied for that job as a housekeeper at Gould’s. That got her in the door.

“I started helping out as an assistant, too,” she said. “I was shampooing on the side. The only thing Mr. Gould requested was that if I saw a guy walk in with a suitcase — that would be an inspector, see — that I pick up a broom and start sweeping. You can believe I kept a broom real close.”

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Eventually, Boddie worked up the courage to ask if she could be a stylist. Gould — who played the drums professionally and had played alongside Black musicians throughout his career — resolved to give her a chance. 

It would be nice to report that everything was easy from that point forward but this was Memphis in the 1950s. Racism was the city’s organizing principle.

“The customers that didn’t want me, I didn’t do them,” Boddie said. “I knew how it was. And my daddy always told me, ‘Don’t worry about what names other people call you. I named you Eunice. That’s who you are.’”

Years passed.

Decades passed.

Boddie kept showing up for work. 

She married, had children and grandchildren.

She kept showing up for work.

“She has taken care of four generations of customers,” said David Gould, one of Sam’s sons. “She’s a legend here now.”

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Not long ago, the Goulds asked Boddie to speak to a class at their cosmetology school.

“We blocked out 45 minutes,” said David Gould. “But then she started telling her stories, and nobody wanted her to stop. At the end, everyone wanted a photo with her.”

The secret to Boddie’s longevity?

“Drinking gin and juice,” she said.

Which can’t be it, not really. Boddie knows this, too. She had the will to do something that hadn’t been done before — that was essentially unthinkable. Now she has done it longer than even she could have dreamed. 

So she’s celebrating her decades of work by going to work, by starting in on her 69th year.

“I can tell you exactly how long I’m going to do this,” she said. “Until the good Lord sits me down.”