DiabetoBlog: the blog of the Diabeto, Jim Varagona

Before I could have a real job, and before I actually worked in the fertilizer industry with Scotts earlier last year, I worked with FertHairlizer. My mother worked at a copy shop here in South St. Louis back in the early 1990s. Next door was a barber shop run by Bill Black. What was interesting about his place was that he was a C-level celebrity. He had photos on the wall of him on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman, and others. Black made and still makes clothing from hair, including bras and underwear, which may get itchy, but they still earned him exposure at Ripley's Believe It or Not museums around the world. He also had this amazing innovation called FertHairlizer, which was a fertilizer for plants that had human hair in it, because of its nitrogen content. When the hair from the shop was swept up, it was swept into trap doors in the floor. In the basement, the hair was gathered in trash cans for use in the clothing, ferthairlizer, and potting soil lines. On a few occasions, I was the one that mixed the sterilized hair with the soil and bagged it. Good times.

Bill Black later closed up shop here and moved down to Texas. I spotted him about a year back on a segment on The Tonight Show where Tom Green searches states for their most interesting person. Unfortunately, he wasn't Texas's, but he did get an honorable mention for his hair vests and bikinis.

Now, according to an article I found from the Austin Chronicle, Black is still hawking his usual hair stuff, but now he's expanding his horizons to include insulation made from hair and nutritional supplements for animals made from liquefied human hair. So far his ideas haven't caught on and it is a shame. He claims they all work great, so why not?! If only he could fuel cars on liquefied hair, then he'd have something to cure America's oil addiction.