Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 13, 1995                   TAG: 9504130045
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HENRY STREET STILL ALIVE IN HER FOND MEMORIES

When James Brown came to Roanoke, she did his hair, curling it and setting the waves with her fingers.

She booked Fats Domino and Nat King Cole into the Club Morocco in the 1950s.

Now that people are talking once again about bringing back Henry Street, nobody's happier about it than Louise Williams.

Before desegregation and urban renewal rendered it a wasteland, Henry Street was a happening place, and Williams was in the middle of it all. "There was something there practically every night. We were on the ball, honey."

Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Ruth Brown - Williams said they and many of America's best-known black entertainers played either the Morocco or the nearby Star City Auditorium.

It's First Street Northwest now, but people used to call it Henry Street, or "the Yard."

Black women came to Williams' salon from the foothills of Appalachia, some all the way from West Virginia. They were in the distinct minority out there, and no beauty parlor would do their hair. Call girls who worked the Hotel Roanoke came, too, for a shampoo and a set.

Williams' last shop was at the south end of the street, in a stone-studded building she shared with an insurance office and with dentist Dr. Harry Penn. She closed it when the street went dead. Then one day last year, "A lady called me and said they're getting ready to tear your beauty shop down. ... It was gone in no time."

All but a few Henry Street buildings have been demolished, but city officials and Memphis' Beale Street developer, John Elkington, have dusted off old street studies and promised a new land-use plan by summer.

Williams could tell them all a few tales, and not just about the Sunday school side of life, either.

After nights of big-band dancing at the Star City, illicit couples could retire to a private dining room at Nick's Place, she said, "where you could hide if you were married."

Williams, now on the city's Board of Zoning Appeals, brought with her to a Wednesday interview several sheets of ripped-out notebook paper filled with her handwritten names of Henry Street people and businesses of long ago. She probably could talk for an hour about anybody or anything on her list - Wheby's Grocery, the Palace Hotel, Dell's Luncheonette, Cannaday's ice cream parlor, Prunty & Prunty cleaners.

Williams booked Gloria Jean, a female impersonator from Washington, for packed shows at the Morocco. A bald black man who wore long wigs, Gloria Jean danced, sang and "flew across the stage," Williams said. "He dressed real fine. He had a personality that could flip you. He kept the people flowing and going."

One of the most popular guys on the street was a cook they called "the pie man." He made the best sweet-potato pies, a hit after any Star City gig by a nationally known act. But some of Williams' women friends still remember being driven off when he joked and said he cleaned his pie pans with his BVDs - his undershorts.

Williams and her longtime partner, Lillian Tucker, ran Louise and Lillian's Beauty Nook, at 301 Henry St. in 1955. They had a jukebox, which Williams said made them a bunch of money. "Paid rent with it," she said.

Some Roanokers, black and white, say now that Henry Street was a rough place where murders were practically commonplace and gamblers poured from buildings after late-night raids. Williams says that isn't so.

"They tell lies on Henry Street," she said. She says it was so safe, she didn't bother to lock her shop doors when she'd go downtown. "We never had no irons stole, no money."

As young women, Williams and Tucker would go to New York and bring some of the big city back home to Roanoke - wild clothes and the highest platform shoes. Soon as they got back, they'd leave their shop and take a wobbly stroll in their new heels over the railroad bridge and into downtown. Later, their hair customers would clamor for the same fashions.

"We'd go to New York and bring something crazy back," said Williams, who still wears purple high heels and some of the biggest and most glittery hats in town. "We used to wear these big hairdos, honey. We brought the style here."