Popular baseball caps strike out to classic hats

I have never been much for wearing hats.

When I was a kid, my father wore one everywhere he went – a fedora, I think they called it. Every other male over 25 wore one, too.

I saw a photo, circa 1940, taken at an amusement park in Spokane, and every man there was wearing a hat with a full brim – none of them of the Roy Rogers variety.

I don’t know what fashion phenomenon dictated the wearing of a fedora, but when my father and relatives gathered, it always reminded me of pictures I had seen of Elliot Ness and Chicago mobsters. The only thing missing was the machine guns.

On a formal occasion, a man would no more be seen without a hat than a woman without a brooch.

Somewhere in the late ‘50s, Dad quit wearing hats and Mom quit wearing a brooch. Neighbors began sporting baseball caps when they went fishing or worked in the yard, but my father thought baseball caps looked silly on anyone other than baseball players, and he went bareheaded for the rest of his life.

I wear a baseball cap on occasion, but never to play baseball. Mostly, I wear them when I am fishing (to prevent my balding knob from getting burned) or when hunting geese or turkeys (to reduce facial glare).

Other than that, a baseball cap tops my head only when I haven’t had time to comb my hair (such as it is), though I find this problem can be more permanently resolved with an electric dog clipper.

There do not seem to be any rules involved in wearing baseball caps. You are just as likely to see them in the audience at a formal wedding, on the beach, or at the dinner table.

Not my dinner table, however. My father never would have considered wearing his fedora in the house, and I am not liberal enough to allow caps at my dinner table, despite the protests of sons and (heaven help us!) daughters.

I have tried, I really have, to be more forgiving of those who still don their baseball caps inside, but just when I thought perhaps I had gained a modicum of tolerance, they started wearing them backward!

Backward, a baseball cap has absolutely no value other than as a nonfashion statement. Worse, I am now seeing baseball caps worn sideways. Sideways, a baseball cap screams, “Doofus!”

A very tolerant lady friend of mine suggests that perhaps a sideways-worn baseball cap is the equivalent of assorted fashion statements from my own day, but she cannot provide a defining example. Skinny belts? Cuffs on my jeans? Penny loafers? Nah.

For Father’s Day six years back, my son gave me a felt, camouflage, fedora-type hat. I was planning a safari to Africa at the time, and judging by the bwana-type hats he had seen in sporting magazines, he figured I could not possibly chase an impala or blesbok without one.

It was a very nice hat, really, and I did wear it in Africa. It shielded me from the rain and sun and made me feel ever so competent.

My professional hunter, however, as well as all the trackers and gun-bearers, wore baseball caps.

Last week, for the first time, I saw a baseball cap I think I actually willl enjoy wearing. It was a plain dark blue, and stapled to the back just inside the adjustment band was a long, gray ponytail that matched my own hair perfectly.

I think my father, who had a great sense of humor, would have worn that one.

I’m going to buy it for myself, just for fun, for when I take my evening walk.

I won’t wear it in the house, though, and I’ll never, never wear it backward or sideways.