Josh Meltzer | The Roanoke Times

Dot's Salon of Beauty long-time customer Betty Kesler (center) gives a hug good-bye to her hair stylist Gelene Cogdill (left) as Cogdill's sister prepares for a customer at their store in the Patrick Henry Hotel where the two sisters took over the business from their mother who started the salon in 1958. The salon is closing on Friday.

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• Video inside the salon

Dot's Salon of Beauty is a time capsule hidden in plain sight behind drawn curtains and a windowless door in downtown Roanoke.

The treasures here acquired their value in the decades-long quest for style, fashion and glamour. But the plastic curlers and ankle-length smocks will soon be buried, perhaps fittingly, beneath a flower garden.

Today, sisters Mary Ellen Wheeler and Gelene Cogdill, owners of the one-room shop at the Patrick Henry Hotel, will close their doors for good. Gone will be the bubble-dryers, vinyl swivel chairs and the plaques and certificates that clutter the paisley-covered wallpaper. Also into history will go the picture of shop founder, Dorothy Stanley, which hangs in one corner under a birdcage brimming with foliage. Stanley died in 2000.

For 49 years, the one-room salon has stood as a fixture in downtown Roanoke. Even at a time when many businesses thought it trendy to relocate in suburban strip malls, Dot's stayed put along Jefferson Street, where it draws a dedicated following of clients, some in their late 90s.

"People have been right upset, but we're getting too old to do this," said Cogdill, 63, who started working with her mother at the salon when she was 16.

Wheeler and Cogdill, who took over the business in 1981 from their mother, say they're exhausted and ready for retirement. The sisters' decision was nudged on in part by the uncertainty surrounding the Patrick Henry's future. The iconic hotel is facing closure at the end of the month.

Dot's is the kind of place where finger waves and pin curls became popular, a throwback to a time when a beauty parlor offered more than just a shampoo and a cut. They were social hubs, conversation incubators.

Even so, it is a business that keeps a low profile, choosing to bolster its reputation through good service, not slick marketing campaigns.

Stanley was still in her 30s when she opened Dot's salon in 1958. The first shop was on the third floor of a building on Church Avenue in a room about the "size of a bathroom," said Wheeler, who is 65.

Haircuts were only $1, and many of the shop's first clients were working women who arrived looking for a speedy cut during their lunch break.

Word spread quickly.

They came from large downtown companies, places such as C&P Telephone and Appalachian Power. And before long, Stanley, who was operating the shop on her own, was working 12-hour days. It moved to the Patrick Henry in 1976.

From earlier on, Stanley pursued her work with a dogged scientific precision. She was among the first hairstylists in the Roanoke Valley to use a device called the "microgram," a hefty metal box used to measure the elasticity and tensile strength of a hair strand. She dabbled with dyes and permanents, attended conferences and seminars and claimed to have given the first oil treatment in town, her daughters said.

The clientele now ranges from newborns to centenarians. Wheeler and Cogdill are both Roanoke natives who know many of their clients from their days at Jefferson High School.

When asked how many clients come to the salon regularly, Wheeler had to look to her sister for help counting.

"Oh Lord, I don't know" Wheeler said.

"Way over 100," her sister guessed.

"Some of them have been coming here since Mama opened the doors," Wheeler said last week as she sat in one of the bubble-dryer chairs, her legs crossed and arms draping over her knees. She let her eyeglasses dangle from her hand.

To illustrate her point, she got up and retrieved a library-style catalog drawer stuffed with index cards. Each bound stack represents a client. And on the cards are notes on their hairstyle preferences and details about the techniques used, right down to the rod size of the curler used.

"This is history," Wheeler explained. Holding up one of the stacks, she flips to the back to a stained and crinkled card with dates in the 1970s -- the scribble signifying their first few cuts.

The salon still bears traces of its heyday. A large wooden kiosk with six workstations takes up the bulk of the room. Two of the stations are preserved. One for Stanley, where the sister stores her two micrograms in plastic bags. Another station was for Mary Whitis, a sister-in-law, who died suddenly in 2005. Each week, Stanley's son, Lynwood, buys a bouquet of roses and leaves them at Whitis' station. Many of the station mirrors have photographs tucked into the sides.

Asked whether they will miss the salon, Cogdill leaned back in her chair and said: "I don't know. To tell you the truth, I think we're burnt out."

"Well, I'll miss the people," Wheeler said.

"Some of them," Cogdill added.

"Most of them," Wheeler countered.

The sisters' conversations, wherever they wander, often return to Mama.

"I never went to beauty school. Mama taught me," Cogdill said.

"Mama cared too much about people," Wheeler added. "Sometimes too much."

Occasionally, the door would jingle and a sliver of sunlight would then spill into the entryway. A regular. They fret over being without Dot's. One even threatened to show up at the doorstep of one of the sisters.

"I just think of them as being a part of the family. I've been coming here for so many years," said Theresa Hylton, who had been a customer for more than 40 years.

"Let's put it this way, I don't remember going anywhere else," said Nancy Flowers, 61. "I didn't even know this was happening until last week. I thought 'Boy, what a rotten week.'"

Despite protests from clients in their swivel chairs, the two sisters are firm in their retirement decision. "One Thursday night, we were talking and we just decided it was final," said Wheeler, as she picked up sections of hair and tucked them under neon clips.

"Gelene and I have gone back and forth because we don't want to leave, because we love the customers."

"Well, I don't blame you," said Yvonne Ferris, 78, a plastic smock fastened to her neck.

"It's just that people get older and things change," Gelene said from her workstation.

"Well, I don't like change," Ferris said.

As for the shop, the sisters plan to strip the walls and shelves of its memorabilia -- the plaques, the cosmetology certificates, the wood-handled brushes and stainless-steel scissors -- and toss it into a trunk. "Well, our kids don't want it. No one else but Gelene and I would want it," Wheeler said.

So the two sisters who have run the salon together for more than a quarter-century plan to bury it in a flower garden like a time capsule. Every memento from the shop will go in the ground, they said, with the hope that maybe one day their grandchildren might dig it up.

Even this newspaper article.