It was always in the cards for me to be a hat guy, even if it took me a half-century to fully embrace my destiny.
My father never left the house without a hat. Part of that was because he was bald, but it was also largely generational. Being born in 1922, he came of age when pretty much all men wore hats, usually fedoras. Dad wore fedoras well into the 1980s, mainly those little tweed numbers like Coach Bear Bryant was famous for wearing (but with more subdued patterns than Bryant’s!) He also had a generous assortment of trucker caps for gardening and flat caps for golf. The hat I most associate with him was the white hard hat he always had on during his long workdays at the Birds-Eye frozen-food plant.
My father had several of those hard hats throughout his time at Birds-Eye. They were always white, always looked about two sizes too small perched atop his head, and always had label-maker sticker tape with his name applied to the front.
Of course, hat wearing, outside of baseball caps, is rare among my generation, and for most of my life I only wore baseball caps or knit winter toques. That started to change a few years ago. I can’t point to any one factor leading to that. It was probably a combination of being bald, my overall wardrobe veering more into the traditional and somewhat nostalgic, and reaching the age where I no longer cared about standing out in public. Whatever the reasons, I, like my old man before me, almost never leave the house bareheaded.
Here are a few hats I have accumulated over the years:
I bought this flat cap during a 2018 trip to England. It was made in Yorkshire and purchased at the Stonehenge gift shop. This was one of the first non-baseball caps I started wearing with regularity and it served as something of a headwear gateway drug.A heavy Harris Tweed flat cap I wear quite a bit in the winter. (Despite how it might look with the sunglasses, I was not cosplaying as some obscure jazz musician.)I bought the patch on eBay and applied it to this generic red and blue toque in an attempt to recreate the look of those Sears catalog NFL hats that were everywhere in the 70s and 80s. Wearing this has earned me a few nods of appreciation (and double-takes) from other Gen-X guys who had the Sears version of their team’s hat back in the day.Speaking of Bills hats, here’s a Starter cap I’ve had since the early 90s. I don’t wear it now due to the fact that it looks like it’s been through a war, but this was a daily wear for me when I was in my 20s.I keep it around now as proof of my fan bona fides amid all these newly minted Bills fans who can’t name any players who pre-date Josh Allen.For a while, I resisted the siren call of fedoras because I didn’t think I could pull one off. Whether I can or can’t is in the eye of the beholder, but I broke down and got this Akubra Stylemaster a few months ago and wore the heck out of it until the weather got too warm for fur felt. A Stetson Stratoliner in hemp straw. This is a perfect warm-weather option to keep the sun off my head during my nature walks.And, oh yeah — here’s one I found packed away with a bunch of my parents’ old belongings.
Researcher. Marketer. Teacher. Father of adult children and dogs. 20th Century holdover. Central New York native. Long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan. History nerd. Traveler. Vintage advertising enthusiast. Hat wearer.
a.k.a. V.J. 
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