Comer Cottrell, Who Got Rich on Hair Curling, Dies at 82

Comer Cottrell, who started with $600 and a borrowed typewriter and built a fortune making and selling hair-curling products to African-Americans, died on Oct. 3 at his home in Texas, where he had become the first black person to own part of a major-league baseball team. He was 82.

His family announced the death without specifying the cause.

Along with his brother, James, and another partner, Mr. Cottrell opened the Pro-Line Corporation in downtown Los Angeles in 1970. They rented a small warehouse, borrowed a typewriter from Comer Cottrell’s daughter, took $600 from savings and started mixing hair-care products by hand. They produced a few more successes than failures, but in 1980 Pro-Line struck gold. The partners came up with a way to replicate a hair style called the Jheri curl — named for Jheri Redding, who invented it — that involved softening the hair with one solution and curling it with another. At a time of Afro styles, the glossy, loosely curled Jheri caught on with celebrities like Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. Pro-Line’s product was intended to allow people to do their own Jheri curls at home instead of going to salons, which had been charging $200 to $300.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/business/comer-cottrell-pioneer-of-hair-products-for-blacks-dies-at-82.html?_r=0