What is it with men and hats?
When to wear them or not makes no sense.
A tool (right) wearing a hat in church.
Men wear hats when they don’t need to, but when they need to, they don’t.
Like the one who wears a hat while eating in a restaurant. Others don’t when it’s cold or blazing hot.
How did this happen?
Wearing a hat once was de rigueur. In my youth—1940s and ‘50s—men wouldn’t go anywhere without their felt fedoras, or their cousin, the Hamburg. Thus, hat racks everywhere.
Precisely on Memorial Day, they’d disappear, to be replaced by the boater, a straw job. There’d be a sea of them in the downtown commuter terminals, not a fedora in sight. Then, poof, fedoras replaced them after Labor Day, not a single boater in sight.
A sea of boaters in Times Square.
In grammar school, moms and the nuns saw fit to make you wear a hat (usually a goofy one with ear flaps). Except when you were inside; boys who didn’t remove their hats immediately upon entering the school door got a nasty reminding from Sister Mary Knuckles.
In high school, boys who wore hats were nerds who deserved a beating. Even in the dead of winter. That was even was before President John F. Kennedy almost single handily and virtually eliminated men’s hats by going bare headed. If he were bald-headed instead of having his mop, perhaps he would have stuck with the lid.
Now hat-wearing for men is regarded as unusual, if not strange.
Maybe I’m alone, but the sight of someone wearing a hat in a restaurant riles me. Or in church, like in the tool in the above photo taken in the beautiful Cathedral of St. John in Savannah, Ga. It’s disrespectful and crude.
One of my favorite scenes from The Sopranos was when Tony intimidated a “douchbag” into taking off his hat while dining.
At least he wasn’t wearing the hat backwards. What the hell is that? A baseball cap has a bill facing forward, to shield the sun from your eyes. Wearing the hat backwards, I suppose, keeps the sun off your neck, thus avoiding being called a “red neck. Guess it’s a fashion statement, meaning—what?—that you’re special? Nonconforming? Because so many are wearing it backwards, it’s a conforming way to be nonconforming, ergo defeating the entire purpose.
Next: What happened to women’s hats? (Or not.)
My hat fetish isn’t new. Below is a 1996 column in the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times February 6, 1996
Let's Put a Lid On Hat-Impaired
By Dennis Byrne
All right, all right. I know that wearing a hat makes me look like a dufus, maybe even a pervert.
So what? I may look bad wearing one, but without one, you look like a fool.
I swear, I can't comprehend people who think it's cool to be walking around with their ears getting stung by the cold.
My office window overlooks probably one of the most miserably cold and windy spots in Chicago - the IBM plaza and the connecting Wabash and State Street bridges. Regularly I see hatless, even scarfless and gloveless people (some with their coats flying open) getting freeze-dried, like so many fish sticks, while trying to negotiate this wind tunnel. "Hey, dummies," I'd like to yell down at them, "you won't look so cool after the doc surgically removes the frostbitten part of your ear."
But I'm overcome by my well-known compassion, which makes me ardently wish for a way to help them overcome their vanity and, for their own good, don a lid.
What we need is . . . a program. A fully funded, Washington-run government program.
Think of the societal costs of continuing to allow people to go bare-headed - the human misery, the increased health care expenses, the rest of us having to look at their mugs, turned red and ugly by the cold. It's time for government to do something.
First, we'll need a law making everyone wear a hat. We'll leave the specifics of the law to the hat lobby - the manufacturers, importers, unions, haberdashers and other special interests that know hats best. To show the importance of hats, the lobby will jet lawmakers to beaches, golf courses and tropical resorts where hatsare necessary for keeping the hot sun off their pale faces.
With a law comes the enforcers: an enlarged bureaucracy for publishing hat regulations, and the hat police, for issuing citations to the flagrantly hatless. The regulations will mandate such standards as hat size, shape, color, logos, heat retention, noggin coverage and, when applicable, minimum square inches of visors and rims.
Obviously, some people - through no fault of their own - can't afford hats. Hat subsidies and hat handouts will be necessary. City Hall will establish a hat hotline. The mayor, proclaiming a hat emergency, will promise at a press conference to deliver hats to those who would be putting themselves at risk by going hatless in cold to pick up their free ones at one of the city's hat distribution centers, located in each ward.
When enforcement fails, emphasis will shift to education. Government-issued lesson plans, fully describing the benefits of hats, will be sent to all schools. "The Cat in the Hat" will be required reading in preschools. Understanding the value of role models, all Abe Lincoln portraits will show him bedecked in his stovepipe. The Legislature will mandate Hat History Month. "Hat trick" will become preferred usage, replacing triple, trio, thrice and triplicate.
Because we have learned from public health experts that prevention is always better than treatment, grants will become available to study the root causes of hatlessness. Those who prefer to go hatless may have been hat neglected in their childhood. Or hat abused. Maybe they had an irrational attachment to a bald uncle. Or aunt. The hatless will be judged not responsible for their condition. Eventually "hatless" will be deemed no longer suitable to describe "people without hats."
Hat dependence will become an issue for conservatives, who will demand that free hats be taken away from those who can't find their own within two years. If they can't figure out how to get a hat, let 'em stay inside. Liberals will denounce the cold-hearted, er, cold-headedness of it all.
Thanks to their differences, government will shut down. Denied subsidies, the hat industry collapses, millions are laid off, their families turned out into the cold, without hats or shoes. Someone proposes shoe subsidies. . . .
Dennis Byrne is a member of the Sun-Times editorial board.