HATS

As many of you know I love wearing hats. I didn’t always wear a hat, but when my hair started thinning, I needed some protection from the sun. Baseball hats were too hot but a nice straw hat was both comfortable and cool. Alas, in the winter I needed a hat for warmth. A baseball hat just did not go with a suit and overcoat, so I found a fedora to keep me warm and shield my face from the snow and rain.


I have seen many famous black and white photos of NYC in the 40’s showing all the men on the streets wearing a fedora. (A fedora is basically a brimmed hat with a lengthwise crease pinched at the front.) My father wore a fedora to work in the 50’s and all the men in my old family pictures are wearing hats: however, men stopped wearing hats in the early 1960’s when John Kennedy was sworn into office wearing no hat at all. That event caused men everywhere to jettison their hats.

Perhaps to grieve the passing of a refined tradition, Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, wrote Death of the Hat. He describes the poem as “Looking nostalgically at that period of time in the past century, in the twentieth century, when men all wore hats, in cities at least.”

The Death of the Hat

Once every man wore a hat.

In the ashen newsreels,
the avenues of cities

are broad rivers flowing with hats.

The ball parks swelled
with thousands of strawhats,
brims and bands,

rows of men smoking

and cheering in shirtsleeves.

Hats were the law.

They went without saying.

You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.

You bought them from Adams or Dobbs

who branded your initials in gold

on the inside band.

Trolleys crisscrossed the city.

Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.

Men with hats gathered on the docks.


There was a person to block your hat

and a hatcheck girl to mind it

while you had a drink
or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.

In your office stood a hat rack.

The day war was declared

everyone in the street was wearing a hat.

And they were wearing hats

when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.

My father wore one to work every day

and returned home

carrying the evening paper,

the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.

But today we go bareheaded

into the winter streets,

stand hatless on frozen platforms.

Today the mailboxes on the roadside
and the spruce trees behind the house

wear cold white hats of snow.

Mice scurry from the stone walls at night
in their thin fur hats
to eat the birdseed that has spilled.

And now my father, after a life of work,

wears a hat of earth,

and on top of that,

a lighter one of cloud and sky--a hat of wind.