Betsy Thibodeau sits reflectively at the coffee table, her long thick white hair flowing against her red sweater, blue eyes sparkling as she recalled her first year of working as a hairdresser in Madison, when a friend asked her if she could cut her boyfriend’s hair.
“Why aren’t you cutting his hair? You’re a good hair cutter,” Thibodeau said she told her friend.
“And she didn’t answer me,” Thibodeau said.
Later her friend told her, “My boyfriend’s Black.”
The year was 1967.
“It hit me like a hammer,” Thibodeau said. “I’ve got a group of people, I’ve never touched their hair… how can I say I’m such a good haircutter?”
That revelation has helped shape Thibodeau’s career of cutting, perming and coloring hair for all Madisonians. Thibodeau saw that the city’s salons were behind the times, so she set out to learn and teach others how to style Black hair.
“I did not grow up with a Black mother, with a Black grandmother,” Thibodeau said. “I just thought if I figured it out, use science, and learned and worked as hard as I could, I could do it.” In the 1970s, she found a “young, good-looking guy from Milwaukee” who took her on as an assistant in some of the salons where he worked. He and Thibodeau not only styled a lot of Black hair, but also did “a lot of teaching.”
Years later, after her boss died, Thibodeau was at a Black beauty trade show where she noticed one of the instructors was doing a good job teaching. She thought, as she recalled,“My God… I’m hearing my own words.”
What she had taught her boss, he had gone on to teach the instructor now teaching a roomful of people at the beauty show.
After the show ended, the instructor came up to her, “Ma’am, do you need any help? Did you understand?”
Thibodeau remembers saying, “No, you’re doing beautifully. Keep up the good work.”
A Wisconsin State Journal story in August 2025 featured Thibodeau working with a loyal client and celebrated her storied 64-year career at the William Jon Salon at 2701 University Ave. in Madison.
Thibodeau said she’s learned from the “super, super intelligent clientele” she’s worked with over the years.
“I wanted to make people aware again that we fought a long time so that salons couldn’t say, ‘You’re Black, I can’t do your hair,’” Thibodeau said.
Thibodeau has come a long way from her upbringing in Yuba, Wisconsin, a small town about 100 miles northwest of Madison. Her father was 12 when his mother died, and her father’s father was an alcoholic and threw her father out of the house at age 14. Her father lived in a storage room of a grocery store where he worked his way through high school.
Thibodeau did not have running cold water until she was six years old. When she was 16, she was able to move out of the family’s log house and into a home with hot running water. Moving to Madison from Yuba in 1961 was the beginning of a long journey and career for Betsy Thibodeau.
In 1967, she rode her motorcycle up to the William Jon Salon, walked in with her helmet under her arm, in “full-black leather, and said, “Is William Jon here?”
“I’m over here,” William Jon replied.
After talking motorcycles for 15 minutes he said, “When can you start?”
Betsy gave her two weeks notice to her other employer and was fully booked when she started at William Jon Salon 64 years ago. She has been there ever since.
“You know in the ’50s and into the ’60s, there weren’t things in the newspaper. We didn’t really know what was going on in the South,” Thibodeau said. “There was so much to learn, and I’m still learning.”
