Ernestine Boone’s beauty shop on Halls Ferry Road was open for business Wednesday morning, but they weren’t there to have their hair styled.

They had come to talk over old times with Boone, 82, who after 62 years is closing Ernestine’s Beauty Shop in July and retiring.

“My license expires on July 27,” she said. “I figured that was a good time to stop.”

“She’s been doing hair since 1947,” said her daughter, Pat Thomas.

“I started out in the house where I was born, which is just back up the road,” Boone said, pointing north from her home and shop at 9395 Halls Ferry Road, about two miles south of South Park Elementary School. “I just went wherever someone called me. I’d go to their house. People would gather at one house, and I’d go there and work with everybody.

“Back then, you didn’t need a license,” she said. “The state didn’t require licenses until 1950.”

She said she learned to style hair by working on her sisters.

“Whenever she got the chance,” said her sister Willie Mae Singleton.

“And I went through a lot of abuse,” Boone said. “Back then, you used a burner heated by kerosene to heat up curlers and straighteners for hair. I had a left-handed sister, and I burned her with a straightener. She hit me as hard as she could with her left hand and it hurt pretty good.

“She told me, ‘If you don’t want to get hit again, don’t burn me.’ I never burned her again.”

Boone opened her first shop in 1950 at her home at 2936 Arcadia St.

“I had my shop in my kitchen until a state inspector came and told me I had to have a separate place, so I added a room onto my porch,” she said. “When my daughter was old enough, she was my shampoo girl, and I almost got in trouble with the state. An inspector said I couldn’t use my daughter as a worker.”

Thomas also served as a guinea pig each time a new hair style or product was introduced.

“She tried out all of them on me before her customers,” she said with a laugh. “I just had to sit there and be the guinea pig. What mama says, you do.”

Boone moved in April 1994 from Arcadia Street to a house on Halls Ferry Road near Timberlane Drive, not far from where she grew up. Her shop, which is a small room attached to the house, is a 15- to 20-minute drive from downtown, but her regulars still came.

“She’s been my beautician, my neighbor and my friend,” said Margaret R. Neal, who has been a customer of Boone’s for 40 years.

Neal, who still lives on Arcadia, said she visits Boone every two weeks, “except in the summer, then I see her every week.”

“I told her I’m not going to let her retire,” she said. “No one else has touched my hair except one time, when she went out of town. When she got back, I told her, ‘It’s about time you got back in town, woman.’ I never called her Ernestine Boone. I always called her ‘woman.’”

“We never had an argument or a cross word between us,” Boone said, looking at Neal. “People find that hard to believe, but it’s never happened.”

Elizabeth Taylor has the dual distinction of being a customer and a relative, Boone’s niece.

“She raised me,” she said.

“I would come over and baby-sit, and each time, I would do her hair,” Boone said. “I’d take her to church with me. She would always be right behind me.”

Rosie Mae Washington, a former Arcadia Street neighbor who has been a customer since 1951, said Boone needs to teach other beauticians.

“There’s a lot of things she knows that she could teach those people,” she said. “She was always working. She was good and she was a fast worker. Her shop was always packed. When she was open on Saturdays, you had to get there early or you would be there all day.”

If there’s one thing that upsets Washington and Neal, it’s Boone’s refusal to recommend another beautician.

“She won’t tell me,” Neal said. “I’ve asked her to recommend someone, and she refuses.”

“I won’t talk about another beautician,” Boone said.

Her policy of not talking about others extended to her shop. She said there was only one hard strict rule in her shop — no gossip.

“If someone started talking about somebody else’s business, I’d ask them in a friendly way to leave,” she said. “I had to do that only once.

“I’m plain spoken, and a lot of people don’t like that, but they kept coming back,” Boone said.

“That’s because people know you do good work,” Thomas said.

Boone said she decided to retire “because I wanted to stop while I was ahead.”

“She wanted to go gracefully,” Singleton said.

“I’ve served the good Lord and the Lord has helped me,” Boone said. “I’m a firm believer in prayer.”

Prayer helped her decide to be a beautician.

“When I was a little girl, I had one wish. I wanted pretty hair,” she said. “I had an older sister who told me if I wanted to have pretty hair, I had to go to the chimney and pray to God, and I did. He never gave me pretty hair, but he gave me the skill to do hair.”

Boone said she’s not sure what she’ll do after retiring.

“I want to stay active, but I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said.

Washington suggested she take up gardening, adding, “She raises vegetables in a small garden, and she’s a real good housekeeper.”

“I’m used to working with people,” she said. “I’ll find something. You don’t have anything open at the paper, do you?”