Some of the opposition at the time could be outrageous—and unconstitutional. In Wyoming a rogue state senator, J.W. Myers, proposed an amendment to the 19-year-old vote requiring all voters to met military grooming standards. "If we're going to give these youngsters voting privileges, they should look like citizens," Myers insisted. Their hair should be "at a length and grooming to meet standards prescribed by the military service." A Montana state senator, Joseph B. Reber, made the same claim. If young people are going to vote, "they should get a shave and a haircut and be like the rest of us."

Although Myers's amendment may have started as a joke, the Wyoming Senate initially passed it before finally removing it. "Young people in Wyoming were not laughing. They were embarrassed. They were shocked," wrote Philip White, the editor of the Branding Iron, the student newspaper at the University of Wyoming. Making appearance a qualification for suffrage was unconstitutional, and Myers knew it. Neither hair, clothing, nor skin color could be taken into consideration for determining voting rights, White explained. Young people wanted the vote. "But we will not stand to be judged by the length of our hair." In the end the controversy subsided, and the Vote 19 referendum would go before the state's electorate in November 1970.

Paul Kammerer, an Austrian biologist of the early twentieth century who is chiefly remembered for his fraud over the midwife toad, discovered a "law of series" in which coincidental events run in (say) threes. For example, a bus ticket and a theatre ticket (bought the same day) both bear the number 9, and they are soon followed by a telephone call in which the same number is again mentioned. Kammerer would spend hours, wherever he went, recording the height, hair colour and type of hat worn by every passer-by. He made the observation that men with red hair tended to pass by in clusters with long gaps in between.