Comer Cottrell Dies at 82; Made Jheri Curl Available to the Masses

 
Comer Cottrell, right,confers with adman Jerry Metcalf. Cottrell began with $600 and a broken typewriter.
(Los Angeles Times)

Los Angles Times Obituaries

By Elaine Woo

October 8, 2014 

Comer Cottrell, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who turned a small Los Angeles operation into a multimillion-dollar success story by catering to the hair care needs of African Americans, died Friday at his home in Plano, Texas. He was 82.

His death from natural causes was confirmed by his son-in-law, Eric Brown.
With $600 and a broken typewriter, Cottrell opened Pro-Line Corp. in downtown Los Angeles in 1970. It was not the first black hair care company but it became one of the largest with the Curly Kit, an at-home hair relaxer that made the loose, gleaming Jheri curl — a style popularized by celebrities such as Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson — available at a fraction of the salon price.

"That's when his company went from $1 million to $10 million in sales," said Lori L. Tharps, co-author of "Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America," published in 2001. Through his company, Tharps said, Cottrell "democratized the Jheri curl."

With his brother, James, Cottrell turned Pro-Line into one of the most successful black-owned companies in the United States, worth $80 million when they sold it three decades later.

Cottrell headed the Los Angeles Black Businessman's Assn., which represented about 40 black-owned businesses, and during the late 1970s helped them expand through federal contracts and other opportunities.

After moving to Dallas in 1980, he became the first African American admitted to the powerful Dallas Citizens Council and forged political connections that helped pave the way for the election of the city's first black mayor, Ron Kirk, in 1995.

In 1989, he became the first African American to own a stake in a major league baseball team when he joined fellow Republican George W. Bush and other investors in purchasing the Texas Rangers.

He used his position to press for more minority involvement in professional sports management. He also plowed some of his wealth into expanding educational opportunities in black communities, including spending $3 million to preserve the Dallas campus of a bankrupt historically black college as the new home of Paul Quinn College, an institution affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Born in Mobile, Ala., on Dec. 7, 1931, Cottrell acquired a passion for business when he accompanied his insurance salesman father on visits with prospective clients.

"I'd see him give them a piece of paper and promise to pay them something when they died, and then he'd walk away with their cash. It fascinated me," Cottrell recalled in Forbes magazine in 1981.

By the age of 9, Cottrell was eager to make his own money and went into business with his brother selling rabbit furs and meat.

He briefly attended the University of Detroit as a pre-med major but left to join the Air Force during the Korean War.

While managing an Air Force PX on Okinawa, he discovered that the military did not stock the grooming products requested by black servicemen. "Twenty percent of the people on the base were black," he recalled in Nation's Business in 1988. "I talked to the authorities, and they told me there was no need for such products."

After completing his military duty, he settled in Los Angeles and held a variety of sales jobs. He was a sales manager for Sears in 1969, when a friend convinced him to start his own business in the underserved black hair aids market.

He found a rundown warehouse, promising to upgrade the facility in return for a six-month reprieve on rent. He also saved on manufacturing costs by getting local chemical companies to develop Pro-Line's products in their labs if he bought the raw materials from them.


Cottrell advertised Pro-Line as "A Black Manufacturer That Understands the Hair Care Needs of Black Consumers." But being a black businessman brought challenges. When he issued a company check, for instance, "People I was dealing with would call the bank and sometimes I had to see the manager" to prove he was legitimate, he told the Los Angeles Times in 1985.

Pro-Line's first product was an oil-based spray used to enhance the popular Afro hairstyle. A detangler and a spray that held hair in place came next. Military bases accounted for much of the company's initial business, but sales eventually spread to barbershops, beauty parlors and drugstores. The Cottrells opened plants in Gardena and later in Carson.

In 1980, the company began marketing Curly Kit, the first do-it-yourself product for producing the loose waves favored by many top black celebrities. At about $8 a box, it was a huge savings over the $200 to $300 charged by salons. Pro-Line also sold a similar product for children called Kiddie Kit.

"You couldn't find a black person in America in their 30s or 40s who didn't have a Curly Kit or Kiddie Kit at some time in their childhood or adulthood," said Tharps, the hair historian. "Everybody had a story — about a Curly Kit gone wrong or an addiction to Curly Kit. Comer and his company made this very elite style something the masses could have."

As Curly Kit took off, Cottrell moved the company to Dallas to lower operating costs and be closer to Pro-Line's largest market. Soon he was licensing Pro-Line products in Nigeria, Kenya, Trinidad, even Taiwan.

Cottrell retired after Pro-Line became a division of Alberto-Culver in 2000. Married four times, he is survived by his wife, Felisha Starks Cottrell; his brother, James; a daughter, Renee Cottrell-Brown; sons Comer, Aaron, Bryce and Lance; nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Rise and Shine

What kids all around the world eat for breakfast.

Photographs by HANNAH WHITAKER 

  Text by MALIA WOLLAN

Saki Suzuki, 2 ¾ years old, Tokyo

The first time Saki ate the fermented soybean dish called natto, she was 7 months old. She promptly vomited. Her mother, Asaka, thinks that perhaps this was because of the smell, which is vaguely suggestive of canned cat food. But in time, the gooey beans became Saki’s favorite food and a constant part of her traditional Japanese breakfasts. Also on the menu are white rice, miso soup, kabocha squash simmered in soy sauce and sweet sake (kabocha no nimono), pickled cucumber (Saki’s least favorite dish), rolled egg omelet (tamagoyaki) and grilled salmon.

Americans tend to lack imagination when it comes to breakfast. The vast majority of us, surveys say, start our days with cold cereal — and those of us with children are more likely to buy the kinds with the most sugar. Children all over the world eat cornflakes and drink chocolate milk, of course, but in many places they also eat things that would strike the average American palate as strange, or worse.

Breakfast for a child in Burkina Faso, for example, might well include millet-seed porridge; in Japan, rice and a putrid soybean goop known as natto; in Jamaica, a mush of plantains or peanuts or cornmeal; in New Zealand, toast covered with Vegemite, a salty paste made of brewer’s yeast; and in China, jook, a rice gruel topped with pickled tofu, strings of dried meat or egg. In Cuba, Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, it is not uncommon to find very young children sipping coffee with milk in the mornings. In Pakistan, kids often take their milk with Rooh Afza, a bright red syrup made from fruits, flowers and herbs. Swedish filmjolk is one of dozens of iterations of soured milk found on breakfast tables across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. For a child in southern India, the day might start with a steamed cake made from fermented lentils and rice called idli. “The idea that children should have bland, sweet food is a very industrial presumption,” says Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University who grew up in India. “In many parts of the world, breakfast is tepid, sour, fermented and savory.”

Doga Gunce Gursoy, 8 years old, Istanbul

The elaborate Saturday morning spread in front of Doga includes honey and clotted cream, called kaymak, on toasted bread; green and black olives; fried eggs with a spicy sausage called sucuk; butter; hard-boiled eggs; thick grape syrup (pekmez) with tahini on top; an assortment of sheep-, goat- and cow-milk cheeses; quince and blackberry jams; pastries and bread; tomatoes, cucumbers, white radishes and other fresh vegetables; kahvaltilik biber salcasi, a paste made of grilled red peppers; hazelnut-flavored halvah, the dense dessert; milk and orange juice. While certainly more elaborate than weekday fare, this Gursoy family meal is in keeping with the hodgepodge that is a typical Turkish breakfast.

Parents who want their kids to accept more adventurous breakfasts would be wise to choose such morning fare for themselves. Children begin to acquire a taste for pickled egg or fermented lentils early — in the womb, even. Compounds from the foods a pregnant woman eats travel through the amniotic fluid to her baby. After birth, babies prefer the foods they were exposed to in utero, a phenomenon scientists call “prenatal flavor learning.” Even so, just because children are primed to like something doesn’t mean the first experience of it on their tongues will be pleasant. For many Korean kids, breakfast includes kimchi, cabbage leaves or other vegetables fermented with red chile peppers and garlic. A child’s first taste of kimchi is something of a rite of passage, one captured in dozens of YouTube videos featuring chubby-faced toddlers grabbing at their tongues and occasionally weeping.

Children, and young omnivorous animals generally, tend to reject unfamiliar foods on the first few tries. Evolutionarily, it makes sense for an inexperienced creature to be cautious about new foods, which might, after all, be poisonous. It is only through repeated exposure and mimicry that toddlers adjust to new tastes — breakfast instead of, say, dinner. That we don’t put pickle relish on waffles or eat Honey Bunches of Oats for supper are rules of culture, not of nature. As children grow, their palates continue to be shaped by the food environment they were born into (as well as by the savvy marketers of sugar cereals who advertise directly to the 10-and-under set and their tired parents). This early enculturation means a child in the Philippines might happily consume garlic fried rice topped with dried and salted fish called tuyo at 6 in the morning, while many American kids would balk at such a meal (even at dinnertime). We learn to be disgusted, just as we learn to want a second helping.

Sugar is the notable exception to “food neophobia,” as researchers call that early innate fear. In utero, a 13-week-old fetus will gulp amniotic fluid more quickly when it contains sugar. Our native sweet tooth helps explain the global popularity of sugary cereals and chocolate spreads like Nutella: Getting children to eat sugar is easy. Teaching them to eat slimy fermented soybeans, by contrast, requires a more robust and conservative culinary culture, one that resists the candy-coated breakfast buffet.

To sample the extensive smorgasbord that still constitutes breakfast around the world, Hannah Whitaker recently visited with families in seven countries, photographing some of their youngest eaters as they sat down in front of the first meal of the day.

Nathanaël Witschi Picard, 6 years old, Paris

Whenever Nathanaël stays at his father’s house, his weekday breakfast is the same. It consists of a single kiwi; tartine, an open-faced baguette with butter and blackberry jam made by his grandparents; cold cereal with milk; and freshly squeezed orange juice. (He would prefer crepes and hot chocolate, which many French children gulp down from bowls and into which they dunk their morning tartine. But Nathanaël’s father, Cédric, is health-conscious.) On weekends, Nathanaël eats croissants for breakfast and also makes his own desserts, a passion inherited from his grandfather, a pâtissier.

Emily Kathumba, 7 years old, Chitedze, Malawi

Emily lives with her grandmother Ethel on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. Because Ethel works in another family’s home — doing cleaning, cooking and child care — her extended family of nine rises before 6 a.m. to eat breakfast together before they disperse to work and school. Here, Emily is eating cornmeal porridge called phala with soy and groundnut flour; deep-fried fritters made of cornmeal, onions, garlic and chiles, along with boiled sweet potato and pumpkin; and a dark red juice made from dried hibiscus flowers and sugar. (She is fortunate; half of the children in Malawi are chronically malnourished.) When she can, Emily likes to drink sweet black tea in the mornings, a common beverage for Malawian children.

Birta Gudrun Brynjarsdottir, 3 ½ years old, Reykjavik, Iceland

Birta’s oatmeal porridge is called hafragrautur, a staple breakfast in Iceland. The oatmeal is cooked in water or milk and often served with brown sugar, maple syrup, butter, fruit or surmjolk (sour milk). Birta also takes a swig of lysi, or cod-liver oil. For part of the year, when the sun barely clears Iceland’s horizon, sunlight is a poor source of vitamin D — but the vitamin is plentiful in fish oils. (The word lysi is related to the Icelandic verb lysa, meaning ‘‘illuminate.’’) Birta’s mother, Svana Helgadottir, started giving her four children lysi when each was about 6 months, and now all of them gulp it down without complaint. Many day-care centers and preschools in Iceland dispense cod-liver oil as a regular part of the morning routine.

Viv Bourdrez, 5 years old, Amsterdam

For Viv, breakfast is a glass of milk with bread, unsalted butter and — most important — sweet sprinkles, which come in multiple flavors (chocolate, vanilla, fruit) and sizes (small, large, shavings). A government-run website promoting tourism boasts that every day the Dutch eat at least 750,000 slices of bread topped with the chocolate sprinkles called hagelslag (‘‘hailstorm’’), making it the country’s most popular bread topping. For a nation of nearly 17 million people, that’s close to 300 million slices a year of hagelslag-covered bread. In June, a successful Dutch Kickstarter campaign raised more than $11,000 to create bacon hagelslag. Viv is partial to the multihued sprinkles called vruchtenhagel (‘‘fruit hail’’), while her twin sister, Rosie, reaches for chocoladevlokken.

Aricia Domenica Ferreira, 4 years old, and
Hakim Jorge Ferreira Gomes, 2 years old, São Paulo, Brazil

Aricia’s pink sippy cup is full of chocolate milk, but her brother Hakim’s cup contains coffee (café com leite). For many Brazilian parents, coffee for kids is a cultural tradition; the taste evokes their own earliest memories. Many also believe that coffee provides vitamins and antioxidants and that a small milky serving in the morning helps their children concentrate in school. Hakim ‘‘gets more agitated after he drinks it,’’ his father, Reginaldo Aguiar Gomes, admits. ‘‘I can feel his mood change.’’ But their pediatrician told them that coffee is fine in moderation. Brother and sister are eating ham and cheese as well as pão com manteiga, bread with butter.

Phillip Kamtengo, 4 years old, and
Shelleen Kamtengo, 4 years old, Chitedze, Malawi

Phillip and his twin sister, Shelleen, start their day with a sweet, cornbread-like cake called chikondamoyo, which their grandmother, Dorothy Madise, cooks in an aluminum pot over a fire. Breakfast for the Kamtengo twins and their older siblings also includes boiled potatoes and black tea with a heaping spoonful or two of sugar.

Koki Hayashi, 4 years old, Tokyo

If Koki and his older brother had a choice, they would prefer an American-style breakfast. Occasionally, their mother, Fumi, lets them eat cold cereal and doughnuts, but she wants her children to grow up knowing what it means to eat Japanese. Here, Koki eats green peppers stir-fried with tiny dried fish, soy sauce and sesame seeds; raw egg mixed with soy sauce and poured over hot rice; kinpira, a dish of lotus and burdock roots and carrots sautéed with sesame-seed oil, soy sauce and a sweet rice wine called mirin; miso soup; grapes; sliced Asian pear; and milk.

Oyku Ozarslan, 9 years old, Istanbul

The foundation of breakfast for Oyku, a fourth grader, is brown bread. She supplements it with green and black olives, Nutella spread, sliced tomato, hard-boiled egg, strawberry jam, butter soaked in honey and an assortment of Turkish cheeses: among them, a crumbly, feta-like cheese called ezine peyniri; eski kasar, an aged, cow’s milk cheese; and tulum peyniri, a variety of cheese made of goat’s milk that was traditionally aged in a goatskin casing.

Tiago Bueno Young, 3 years old, São Paulo, Brazil

Tiago likes chocolate milk and often wakes up asking for it, but sometimes even that is hard to get excited about at 7 on a weekday morning when his mother, Fabiana, has already left for work and he still has to get ready for kindergarten. Cold cereal is the favored breakfast food of the three Young sons. Here, Tiago, the middle child, sits before cornflakes, banana cake and bisnaguinha, a sweet white bread popular with Brazilian children and served with a mild cream cheese called requeijão.