Way More Than A Head Warmer

You talk about Black Friday! Cathy chose that day to do some serious cleaning out. It seemed anti-cultural to me. Maybe even illegal. Weren’t we supposed to be shopping…adding things to what we have. Not throwing them away!

She’s been mumbling about my hats for 51 years. You can probably hear her from where you’re sitting, “Way too many. Why do you have all these hats? You can only wear one at a time…”

I think what pushed her over the edge last Friday was the 15 hats resting innocently on the desk in the Stan Musial room. My only defense is we don’t use that desk very often.

I did point out that she boxed up 100 hats back in’04 and put them in the attic. Wasn’t that enough? This time she was taking them straight to the garbage can. One of those hats I’d worn when we visited Pebble Beach. Another one I had picked up at a Porter Wagoner concert. Where is her sentimental side?

My first hat was a baseball cap.

Now, I am not counting that multicolored knitted toboggan looking thing that Mom posed me in for my very first picture. And I have spent a lifetime trying to forget that gosh awful fake fur insulated hat Mom made me wear to my first snowman building outing. It had ear flaps for goodness sakes!

I looked like Admiral Byrd trying to find the South Pole.

One of the first rights the American colonists fought for in the freedom seeking years of the 1770’s was the civil liberty of every individual to select his own headgear. Only a rare oversight by Thomas Jefferson kept that “truth” out of the Declaration of Independence.

Collecting head covers is a patriotic thing.

That’s why my first one is so important. It was green. With no insignia, catchy phrase, or lettering on it. There was no magic affiliated with it. You couldn’t fly when you put it on. There was no secret code emanating from deep inside the thing. It didn’t change you into Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle…or even Jim Brideweser.

Oh, but at the time, it was so very special. It had the required six panels, a green button on top, and a genuine leather sweat band. It matched our Little League uniforms that were sponsored by the Lions Club.

I wasn’t a good enough player to earn a cap with the “L” factory stamped on the front like the older kids. Mom had to hand sew mine on. The important thing was I had made the team!

I worked for hours bending the bill of that cap “just right.” I practiced rounding a base at full speed and lifting my chin slightly so the wind would catch under the bill and blow it off my head.

That’s the way Willie Mays did it.

I slept with that cap. It was the beginning of my “capology” journey.

Bobby Jack Cantrell was the master hat guru in our little world. The first money I ever earned I bought a genuine New Era St. Louis Cardinal cap. I’m sure you remember the one; it was blue, with a red bill, and a red button on top. I immediately ran the mile and a half out to Bobby Jack’s house on Fields Street.

He laid the front carefully over the bill and ironed a permanent crease in my hat. I wore it proudly everywhere I went. As you sweated on the leather band inside, it would automatically “shape” to fit your head.

We’re talking the real deal here.

I had a Toledo Mud Hens cap that was the envy of everyone in town. My Golden Flow granary hat kept the sun out of my eyes in many ’a hay field. That tall girl down in Huntland had my first college baseball cap. I had to slip through the window in the bathroom when no one was home and steal that one back.

The cowboy hat I picked up in Nashville the summer I worked at the Grand Ole Opry.

I have an old Cleveland Indians cap that I drenched with sweat a thousand times pitching batting practice all over Gulf County. It’s so stiff it might break like a China tea cup if you dropped it on the floor. I especially love all three John Deere hats.

The torn, worn out, and still a bit soggy purple and gold cap means the world to me. It doesn’t look like much today. But I was wearing it the night Steve Bass, Rodney Nobles, and Phil Earley threw me in the locker room shower…after we won the football state championship in 1971.

Every hat has a special story, unique and memorable. I can give you the rundown on every one of them if you’ve got a spare month and a half…and you bring the barbeque.

Cathy is right, of course. As always. But each hat that gets tossed out is like losing a piece of me. I’d rather throw out the refrigerator. Dump the TV. Get rid of the living room furniture.

Then, just maybe, we’d have enough room to put in a new hatrack…or two….

Respectfully,
Kes
kesley45@aol.com