In November 2025, the Ann Arbor Observer featured our founder Fran Coy's remarkable journey from an eleven-year-old girl with big dreams to building a thriving salon business. We're honored to share their article here.
Fran's Story
A crown, a sash, and a life in hair.
Early Life
By the time she was eleven, Fran Coy knew two things she wanted to be: a hairstylist, and Miss Saline. At eighty-four, she's retired from her namesake salon on Wagner Rd., but remains close to the pageant she won in 1958—and that her granddaughter won in 2017.
In her home on Trinkle Rd., Coy perches on a comfortable leather armchair with a nebulizer nearby—a bout of pneumonia has given way to a lingering bronchitis. Her softly curled auburn hair frames her face, and a nail tech from her salon has just done her fingernails in her favorite shade of coral.
She was born Frances Visel, "on a farm about four miles from Saline," she says. "My mother died when I was one," leaving her the youngest of seven siblings. Her sister Toddy, fourteen, "left school to help take care of us until Dad found someone, a cousin, to take care of us."
When she was six, her father remarried, sold the farm, and moved to Saline. She and her sister Pat would sit by a heat register in their house on Michigan Ave. while Fran made "finger curls" in Pat's hair.
In 1951, her cousin Ann Taylor (now Tommelein) won the Miss Saline contest. "When I saw her being crowned," Coy recalls, "I thought, 'I would like to be Miss Saline.'" She took a trial run when she was sixteen in 1957. "The very first Miss Washtenaw County was going to be held in Ann Arbor," she recalls. "I got first runner-up." The next year, she finished first in a field of sixteen to become Miss Saline.
Education and Early Career
At Saline High she was in the junior and senior plays, but hair was what interested her most.
When the Guy Cari Ann Arbor Beauty College opened on Washtenaw Ave. in 1959, she saw her opportunity. "I talked with my principal and I said, 'My grades are good enough and I was going to be graduating that year.'" Could she miss school two afternoons a week to attend?
The principal said yes, but she needed a car to get there. "This is a funny story, because I didn't spell well, but I got a job at the Saline Reporter as a proofreader.
"I could see when something was wrong, but I didn't read well enough to write it correctly," she explains. "But all I had to do was mark it."
She saved her money and her father lent her the rest to buy a used Dodge Coronet. She practiced and practiced driving into and out of their narrow garage, learning so well that in a safe driving contest, she "beat all the guys because I could back up."
She excelled in hair styling, too. "I loved it. And I loved the teacher. She was fabulous." She graduated from both high school and beauty college in 1959, and was married the following spring. A week after returning from her honeymoon, she joined her beauty college teacher and two classmates in opening a salon called Tiara off W. Stadium Blvd.
She'd met Ed Coy two years earlier, at a square dance at the Pittsfield Union Grange. "I saw him from across the room," she remembers. "I flirted enough that he came over and he asked me to dance.
"He was in college at Michigan State, and his dad was a dairy farmer, so he went to college for the short dairy farming course." After a year off to serve in the air force, he finished the degree and farmed for more than a decade before switching to real estate.
Building an Empire
Fran moved on from Tiara when her sister Toddy, who'd been living in Chicago, got divorced and moved back to Michigan. Together they opened the Magic Mirror salon on Jackson Rd. and built it to fourteen stylists before Toddy remarried and moved to Florida.
Ed then found the property on Wagner Rd. He told her, "'These are the payments,'" Fran remembers. "'Can you make them?' I said, 'I can make enough myself to make them.'"
Fran Coy's Hairstylists opened in 1977 with three other stylists and a front desk person. It's now Fran Coy's Salon and Spa and employs fifty, including twenty-five stylists.
Family and Legacy
The couple built their home on property that had been in the Coy family since the mid-1800s. Sons John and Todd grew up there, along with Vern, who started as Ed's farm helper and became one of the family. "He was in both of our boys' weddings. Our boys were in his," Fran says.
Todd now works in computer database management and lives in Saline with his wife, Molly, a regional manager for DTE. Their daughter, Amanda, was Miss Saline in 2017; she's now a physician assistant at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York.
John bought the salon in 2015. Though Fran officially retired, for many years she continued to style women's wigs and men's hairpieces, which are less physically demanding. "Unless something changes, that's [now] behind her," John says.
Ed Coy died in January. A photograph of him keeps Fran company on an easel by the window.
Though she has her own health issues, she still goes into the salon when she can. And when she does, says stylist Troy Girard, everyone "stands a little straighter."
She's also proud of a second legacy: in the 1980s, she persuaded the Saline schools to launch the Huron Valley Beauty Academy, a public-school program open to students from seven area districts. It "consistently has a waitlist for admission," says director Elaine Sines, and will open a new facility next fall.
Todd Coy's wife, Molly, is now codirector of the Miss Saline Scholarship Pageant. The family sponsors a scholarship, and at the Saline Summerfest in August, Fran was once again on hand for the crowning of the new Miss Saline.
"Because of going to the pageant once a year and because of how proud I am of Molly, it brings it back," she says, remembering her own day starring on that stage. "It's wonderful."
This article was originally published by Jan Schlain in the Ann Arbor Observer in November 2025.