I wonder when and why men stopped wearing hats? I wish it were still the custom, because I look dang good in a hat — even if I do say so myself.
My daddy and all of his friends wore hats all the time and he always had several stacked on top of our chifferobe when I was a little boy. Most were felt, with leather hatbands, but there were always a couple of straw ones with sporty little feathers for summer wear.
All the men wore hats to church. Stump Ivey always placed his in the church window, right next to his cigar, when he went into the sanctuary. The men would wear hats any time they were dressed up. In what few Easter photographs we have of me as a child, I am wearing a chapeau myself.
Sometime between the early ‘60s and the 1970s, along about the time the designated-hitter rule ruined baseball in the American League, men’s hats just disappeared from the fashion scene. Maybe it was Vitalis that caused the decline of men’s headwear, or Wildroot Crème-Oil. It couldn’t have been Brylcreem. It had to be some of that greasy kid stuff. I think possibly men were preoccupied with their pompadours and didn’t want to risk having hat-hair when they stepped inside a building. Oh, yes. You always had to take off your hat when you stepped inside. It was good manners. Even the great Bear Bryant — the only football coach in history to have an animal named after him — took off his signature houndstooth and went bareheaded when Alabama played in the Superdome. His mama raised him right.
Now understand that wearing broad-brim hats is not to be confused with wearing baseball caps, which many men do today. Baseball caps are OK on kids and baseball players, but way too many middle-aged men wear baseball caps today, and seldom take them off, even inside the house.
I’ll never forget the first time I went to a fancy dinner — it was an athletic banquet — and half the men in the room sat down to eat wearing baseball caps. The other half were dressed in coat and tie, understand. I stood to speak and asked them to remove their hats before I said grace and you would have thought that I had asked them to stand naked before the queen in Piccadilly Circus.
It would drive me crazy when my son, Jackson, and his teenage friends would wear their baseball caps backward. Not a single one of them, to my knowledge, ever played hindcatcher. It would embarrass Jackson to death when his friends would come to our house and I would tell them to take their hats off before coming to the dinner table. It was my house, understand, and we observe my rules in my house. And my rules, passed down from my mama and them, included no hats in the house — not even baseball caps — and especially not at the table.
You weren’t supposed to throw a hat on the bed, either, because that was bad luck, but that’s another story for another day.
Nowadays, kids drive me crazy because they don’t bend the bill of their baseball caps. You’ve seen them. They wear them straight across and leave the price tags on them. That just looks ridiculous, like wearing a straw hat in the middle of the winter or a felt one with a seersucker suit and white bucks in June.
You may be wondering why I have hats on my mind today, although my head is bare — which is not the same thing as being bald or being empty. I saw a great movie last week — “Bridge of Spies,” starring Tom Hanks. It was set in the Cold War and told the story of Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 spy plane incident. The film covered a time period roughly between 1956 and 1961. All the men in the movie wore business suits and hats, and they looked so cool. They all took their hats off before entering a building, and I didn’t notice a single one having hat-hair. But, of course, that was Hollywood, so who knows what they really might have looked like.
All I know is that it made me nostalgic for the time when men didn’t go outside without their head being covered. I might try to bring that trend back. The next time you see me dressed up, I just might be wearing a nice felt Stetson, if I can find one. And if I can find a nice chifferobe to keep it on, I’ll really be in business.
Darrell Huckaby is an author in Rockdale County. Send email to dhuck008@gmail.com.
Huckaby: Hats for men is fashion trend that should come back
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