I don’t know what you do for kicks, but my friend Tiger Small snatches toupees.

Not just anybody’s toupees, understand. The Tiger’s selective. He’s been working the Catskill-Manhattan-Miami circuit for years, dealing only with the best people. The cream of the show business crowd. Doctors. Professional men.

When he came to Hollywood last month he brought quite a reputation with him.

“But in this town,” he was telling me yesterday, “they bloat everything way out of proportions.”

The Tiger — an animated conversationalist — explained that it was just a sideline with him. That he lifted his first toupee strictly as a favor for a chorus girl friend and then sort of fell into the habit.

Paul Coates knew some interesting characters, like Tiger Small, who stole toupees.

This column originally appeared in the L.A. Mirror in 1959 and was republished on latimes.com in 2009. The entire post is here, via Archive.org..