What's in a Hat?

Jun 28, 2024

Yesterday, I got a new hat.

How do you like it?

The previous one, The Santa Fe “Everyday Hat”, had finally seen its day. Was too worn, and tooooo worse…. for the wear.

This New One, purchased from the same Santa Fe Five & Dime, right on Santa Fe’s historic downtown central Plaza, built by the colonizing Spanish in 1609 (the Plaza, not the Five & Dime), should be a lot sturdier, with a hard crown & brim and a permanent “pinch” (crease in the top brim).

It matches the adobe hue and coloring of the town, right?

Of course, it’s from both the old Hollywood, and actual cowboy-wearing, Western tradition, paying homage to some of the most hat-toting good-guys and bad-guys of all-time Silver Screen lore.

As I’ve written before, I grew up on, and with, these guys, along with my temporary boyhood heroes on TV: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Lash LaRue, Maverick, Cheyenne Body, Surgarfoot, and Richard Boone’s bad boy bounty hunter, “Paladin”, from “Have Gun Will Travel”, along with actual historical lawmen, outlaws, and killers like Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickok (in whose Deadwood jail I was actually locked up), long before the comeback of 21st-century Western tv binge-series like “Yellowstone”, “Godless”, “Deadwood”, and “Justified”.

And how about Davey Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier”, the ABC-Disney 1954-55 pop TV series starring Fess Parker?

Come on?

You see Fess in that coooool “coon skin cap”?

That was everything to 7 and 8-year-old teatotaling Trules…

…who had (and still has!!!)… all 80, (count’em, 80!) of both the ORANGE and the GREEN decks of the ORIGINAL DAVEY CROCKETT CARDS!

Sadly, of course, I’ve long since grown up, realizing, as I’ve dishearteningly written about in my Rodeo de Santa Fe Substack post, that actually, I’m not much of a roughneck cowboy at all. That in fact, I never was. That I’m not even as authentic as Texas Jewboy and rock ‘n roll singing cowboy/prankster, Kinky Friedman.

(Kinky passed away just yesterday at the age of 79. The Twitter post announcing the sad news this morning read:

Kinky Friedman stepped on a rainbow at his beloved Echo Hill surrounded by family & friends. “The Kinkster” endured tremendous pain & unthinkable loss in recent years but he never lost his fighting spirit nor quick wit. No doubt, he will live on as his books are read and his songs are sung in perpetuity.)

Me? I just like wearing cowboy hats… more like a friendly, clown-like regional costume - here in Santa Fe.

“Oh yeh, there goes Trules, the New York Jewboy-cowboy”.

Nevertheless,

What’s in a hat? you say.

How about an Emperor? An empire? An ambition, genius, and military strategy that changed history, the early 19th century, and the map of Europe?

Or what about these two smiling co-revolutionaries? Cuba’s Fidel Castro in his iconic military patrol cap, and Che Guevera, his compadre, in his black beret with silver star? Both defining an era of “anti-Americanism” in our own hemisphere, and a near nuclear disaster with the failed U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961, and the soon-to-follow Cuban Missile Crisis by which JFK and the USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev barely “saved the world” with a thirteen-day negotiation in October, 1962.

Speaking of which, equally iconic: John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a top hat - not the first politician to wear one (Abraham Lincoln, Uncle Sam, Winston Churchill,

Woodrow Wilson, FDR) - this photo of the Kennedys, with Jackie in her chic 1960s pillbox hat, not only defined “Camelot”, the storybook era of American politics and culture before JFK was assassinated in November, 1963, after which we all lost faith in politicians and government, but which even today, recaptures it, with the image of two idealized personalities in two perfectly iconic hats.

Then… there’s The Little Tramp’s “Bowler Hat”.

From Charlie Chaplin’s slap sticking on the silent screen, to the outlaws and lawmen riding high in the Wild West, to its iconic presence in the city of London, the Bowler hat's unmistakable silhouette has made it as recognizable as any of its famous wearers. It is, most probably, Lock & Co.'s most famous invention, and it has been a staple for over 170 years. In the 1920s, “the Coke hat” (made in 1849 for nobleman Edward Coke, later called “The Bowler”) was chosen as the official headdress for Aymara and Quechua women in Peru, then thanks to the railroad men following work, moved further south, to Bolivia.

Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Jones, women of every era, every size and shape, who have perpetually donned hats, large and small… to define high fashion and inimitable style. One of my favorites, Annie Hall… aka Diane Keaton, has always been a unique trendsetter all of her own.

And then there’s the late Queen Elizabeth II, with a hat for every occasion.

You can’t mention an artist in a hat, at least I can’t, without including the 2016 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature. Here he is wearing the hat on the cover of his very first Columbia vinyl album - his itinerant Highway 61 “Huck Finn” hat.

Then there’s the prominence of The Fedora on the heads of two very different silver screen legends, each making their questionable claims to “the most famous hat in Hollywood history”.

Which one is it, Rick’s or Indy’s?

But wait…. upon further reflection, it just might…. have something to do with:

What’s under the hat?

Who’s wearing it?

N’est-ce pas?

Of course, contrarily, there’s always…. THE WORST HAT IN HISTORY… which, in my humble opinion… will always be… THE BASEBALL CAP… which is fine for playing ball, but, c’mon, this hat has neither style nor…. should it have… any collector’s value whatsoever!

And amongst the worst of the worst, here’s #1

….which I know, some of you may be wearing - at this very moment!

But…

…each to his, or her, own, right?

Hats, indeeeeed, are a matter of taste and style.

And the BEST thing about my NEW HAT?

Exsel, my son, bought it for me

on Father’s Day.

Slash, from Guns and Roses, donning, arguably, the most famous Hat in Rock ‘n Roll History

Best from,

“The Mad Hatter”,

Trules

Suleiman, the Magnificent, longest-reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, rocking his everyday Turban

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