Posted by
Richard Davis on Monday, March 12, 2007 5:28:29 PM
I saw a driver with one yesterday, and it occurred to me that I hadn't seen one in a long time.
A hat. A driver wearing a hat. A fedora to be more exact, that iconic piece of haberdashery that defined the first part of the twentieth century.
My car raced up to the bumper of the eighties model car and I slammed on the brakes. The phrase that raced through my mind was a popular one maybe twenty years ago: "Never Follow a Hat"!
I guess you can attach a number of meanings to that phrase, but in this case it referred just to making the right choice when young and driving. Guys with hats were speed traps. They chugged along in all lanes and trapped or boxed you in, so your jets were cooled as they said.
The fedora itself was probably sent to the hat box by jets, because prior to that most serious men needed to be topped off with one in public.
It is popular history that John F. Kennedy killed the fedora in 1960 by not wearing one at his swearing in as President at his inauguration. He was young, good-looking and somehow a fedora would have looked just plain old on him, no matter how rakish the angle.
My grandfather wore a fedora right up until he died in 1992, at the age of eighty-nine. So did his known and unknown contemporaries. You won't know his pals, but you do know Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and of course Clark Kent. (I wonder how many orphan hats were found in phone booths in Metropolis?)
These hats were the uniform of the private eyes, newspaper reporters (think press pass in the hat band), and the man disappearing into the marble and limestone skyscraper to accomplish some important task for his work day.
My father didn't wear a fedora. He owned one. It sat on the coat closet shelf for the thirty years he lived in the our house. The only time is saw the light of day is when I used to take it down and play gangster with it. "Yeah, yeah, you doity rat!" When asked why he didn't wear it, he would just say that he had enough of hats in the navy.
This time, when I recovered from jamming the car brakes, I caught myself and didn't scream, yell and curse to myself. Or at him as would have been my normal custom as I raced around the offending hatted driver. Instead I took a breath and thought about the barley visible man reaching up to the steering wheel.
He could have been Superman. He may have fought in the Battle of the Bulge, been an old gumshoe, perhaps he was a not-so-mild mannered reported for a great daily newspaper. Maybe he was old school gangster.
At any rate, he is a dying breed. Literally. You just don't see them on the road that much anymore. Or anywhere but maybe doctors offices.
There is a haberdashery selling hats of different types within walking distance from me, The Optimo Hat Company. It makes custom hats, and claims that it is one of the last of its type in the world.
Thanks to Optimo and a couple more like it, a younger man can wear a fedora and at least look like their grandfathers. But in reality it will only be the look. The fedora in American history is ingrained in our memory as the hat that built the country, then was removed in war time to save the country and of course tipped to women as a courtesy.
The modern young man in the thousand dollar suit will only be following a hat, no matter how rakish the angle.