Dr. Willie Lee Morrow was born October 9, 1939, in Eutaw, Alabama, to parents Olean and Hollie Morrow.
As a child growing up in the south, Willie knew at the young age of four years that he wanted to be a barber. He first took to hair-cutting when he was twelve. It became his ticket to bigger things.
The United States Department of Defense contracted Mr. Morrow as an American civilian to teach military barbers how to treat and cut black hair. This was done on military bases around the world. During this time of traveling, he also wrote several hair styling and barbering technique books.
Dr. Willie Morrow had a special red “barber chair”. The chair represents not only history, but his story and those stories of all who have taken a seat on them, waiting for a haircut. Morrow said, “Lives – you learn about everything from people sitting in the barber’s chair.” Morrow charged only 20 to 25 cents for a haircut. His philosophy as a barber, he said, has always been to carefully listen to the customer. “Always do what the customer asks you to do, no more, no less,” he explained.
Morrow recalled that only the “A” students had a shot at college, and lacking that, “you couldn’t be nothin’ but a cotton picker or a brick layer or nothin’ but a sharecropper.” From earliest childhood, however, he dreamed of achieving far more. The answer seemed to lie in the barbering to which he was first exposed at the age of thirteen, when he began cutting his seven siblings’ hair. He worked very hard in the cotton fields being the son of a sharecropper.
The story goes that Morrow’s father, Hollie scraped up the money to send his eldest son away to barber college in San Diego, California. Willie lived with his uncle near 30th Street and Logan Avenue while he attended classes at the Independent Barber College downtown on Fifth Avenue. He graduated Barber College in July of 1959 and returned to his home in the south, but Willie said, “When I got back, it didn’t look the same anymore.” “The fields seemed harder.” And again. ‘‘The sun seemed . . . hotter.” So he came back to San Diego where a barber named Horace Smith gave him a job and he earned seventeen dollars in his first week of work at “Smitty’s.” Smith’s shop stood in the middle of the same block that would later become the Morrow Facility, a two-story California Curl Company complex, on the south side of Market between Forty-second and Morrison streets.
Willie Morrow met and married the love of his life, Gloria Lacy. Together, this loving couple raised Todd, Cheryl, and Angie. Gloria traveled with Willie on many of his business trips, including to Africa. They worked together to build the Morrow empire. They celebrated fifty-six years of a great marriage. After Cheryl moved away to New York City for ten years, she returned home and worked diligently and faithfully with her father publishing their family community newspaper, The San Diego Monitor News.
In 1975 Morrow perfected something that he called the Tomorrow’s Curl, the first permanent-wave process designed for naturally curly hair. Then in 1977, it was renamed “California Curl” and that’s “how it all started,” Morrow said. He started a company called California Curl after creating a product that relaxed the hair in gentle curls, a style he says inspired the popular 1980s look known as the Jheri Curl.
In one of his final contributions to the Black community, Dr. Willie Morrow established San Diego’s Black Business Boot Camp for striving Black entrepreneurs. He provided a space for interested participants to meet at least once a week to share their ideas and help each other in their businesses, as well as inviting business leaders, politicians, and others to guest speak.
Dr. Willie Morrow joined St. Stephen’s Church of God In Christ under the leadership of the late Bishop George Dallas McKinney in 1977. Willie was called home to glory on June 22, 2022 after succumbing to an extended period of illness.
This multifaceted giant of a man blazed a trail of which few have paralleled. It is not possible to summarize his contributions and achievements on a few pages, so suffice it to say, the world is a better place because he came this way, and many that had the privilege of meeting him are better for it.
Dr. Morrow was preceded in death by son Todd. He leaves to treasure his memories and continue his legacy his loving wife Gloria Morrow; daughters Cheryl Morrow and Angie Morrow; four sisters and three brothers; other family members, and many friends and associates. Dr. Willie Morrow will be dearly missed . . .
