Barbara does not complain about the lost opportunities that the sexism of that era cost her, but reflects optimistically that the graduate social work program at least put her in a place where she could make a difference. Her excellent performance in that program earned her a National Institutes of Mental Health contract funding her work to study the mental health issues of minority populations in California. She was even offered a faculty position, but she turned it down, saying, “I just couldn’t connect with the bureaucracy above it.”

Barbara had been told to be quiet in class during her formative years in a world where men were in charge. She was told she was intimidating the men, but credits these experiences with turning her into a hippie and a jokester. Barbara also enjoyed being a “blues mama” in a blues band, playing conga and African drums, and rebelling by interracial dating—very risqué behavior for her time. She was briefly married but chose not to have children.

So, how did she get into dog grooming? She answers, “At University of Arizona, I had a friend of a local who worked at a kennel and had become a ‘scissorhands.’” Watching him work, Barbara reports being “mesmerized by the artistry.” She first worked as a bather for him, then she got hired and apprenticed to groom. It took months, but she says, “He instilled the importance of breed profile in me; what makes a dog look good. Today we see Asian groomers, for example, who are big on style and artistry but less on breed profile.”

Barbara worked for him for four years, but the best thing she did was to introduce him to conditioners. She spent much of her 20s showing Lhasa Apsos with her mom in the ring. Here she learned to de-tangle and the importance of conditioning. She would walk around the grooming area at the shows asking questions, which is where she learned about coat damage. “Going to dog shows is essential to style. See the prep work, the meticulous layer combing of drop-coat breeds,” Barbara shares.

With the arrival of the 1970s and the rise of the Women’s Movement, Barbara spent her 30s grooming, but also running a feminist newspaper. Her “high feminist value system,” articulate scholarship and social work abilities moved her into a feminist counseling job at Alternatives for Women. She was, not surprisingly, a very good counselor.

Barbara dropped grooming for a while, but when the counseling business later failed, she found a mobile grooming franchise that was hiring, and she needed a job. She says, “It was hard to be a breed profile groomer when others were not.” She was in high demand from her clients because of her more elegant work, but the mobile scheduler was frustrated because they wanted their mobile units to be indistinguishable from each other. She stood out too much.

In 1977, the pressure drove her to open her own grooming business, Transformation Pet Center, which she has rented all these years without a lease. As an International Certified Master Groomer (ICMG), Barbara is one of the very few of us who have both collegiate master’s degrees and their CMGs. Amazingly, Barbara is still working at Transformation Pet Center to this day, grooming five to six dogs a day at age 83.

With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, Barbara reconnected with her scholarship and writing. She had been bathing with dog show products, thinking they were better, but when she got down to the last few inches in a jug and added water to it, she realized it was still very thick. It kept re-thickening. She was intrigued and started to research it, discovering that the product had thickeners added to it that changed the surface tension. She discovered surfactants and realized she knew nothing about the products she had been putting on all her dogs.

As she tried to get more information, she found that companies at that time would not tell her anything about what was in the products. Back in those days, people would say things like, “You girls wouldn’t understand all that,” which rose up her feminist ire. She would tell them, “If you start publishing the ingredients, I will make sure that they can understand what you are saying.” Barbara feels that this push to open up product information and make it more accessible to groomers, a 50-year journey from which we all now benefit, has been her greatest life accomplishment.

Her speaking and teaching career grew with her studies into ingredients. With Barbara’s substantial academic skills, she created the program “Beyond Suds and Scents”, which she began teaching online and in person. Her educational background also made her a good speaker, and she later developed the “Coat Damage” seminar. Before there was Facebook and social media, Barbara used email groups and online discussion boards to share information. She managed “Groom TNT” (Tools and Tips) for Curtis Hanvey, where she discovered his re-circulator and she rediscovered her writing.

Barbara was always ahead of her time, and she was perhaps the first to use the term “holistic groomer” in marketing her own grooming. In the 80s and 90s, she sold health foods, oils, supplements, alternatives to pesticides and healthy treats. Later, the larger marketers began to do the same. She developed a relationship with EZ Groom founder and cosmetic chemist, Elly Meisler, who appreciated her scholarship and wasn’t threatened by her smarts. He assured her that she was on the right track and helped her gain confidence to turn her course into a book.

I first read Beyond Suds and Scents: Understanding Shampoos and Conditioners more than 20 years ago and was impressed by Barbara’s ability to explain complex chemistry in an accessible way for most groomers. I learned, for example, that surfactants are all different. It has been very helpful in teaching my staff to bathe and clean properly to know about the “hydrophilic heads” (likes water) and “hydrophobic tails” (hates water, grabs onto other things) in all surfactant molecules that make them effective cleaning agents. Many agree her book is one of the most indispensable tools for every groomer.

Barbara first met Susy Scott at the Atlanta Pet Fair in 2007 where they bonded as groomers over their mutual love of Bichons, hand-stripping and not muzzling dogs. Together, they are The GroomPod podcasters. And although Barbara calls herself “a Buddhist soul,” she loves communicating with humor, and it shows. In co-developing The GroomPod with Susy, she was once again ahead of her time. She says of its success, “The GroomPod saved me. It made me relevant, keeps me sharp and staying up on things. I have made thousands of friends because of it, and I am grateful because I know I am making a difference.”

Barbara’s ability to research and explain information to groomers has been acknowledged with her two Cardinal Crystal Achievement Awards for “Best Grooming Journalist” in 2006 and 2007. Over 100 articles for groomers can be found at her blog site, www.groomblog.blogspot.com. Her blog was awarded the Barkleigh Honors Award for “Best Blog” in 2011 and 2012, and the GroomPod won the Barkleigh Honors Award for “Best Podcast” in 2021.

Barbara says, “Hair and skin are a system. They work together to preserve the life of the animal. Hair is of the skin—it is a form of the skin.” However, she is gentle to those of us who do not know as much as she does about skin and coat science: “We’ve all done things in our past, things we did not know. It’s a journey. You’re here now and you know,” Barbara concludes.