This New England

The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The mem'ry of all that --
No, no! They can't take away from me!

-- Ira Gershwin

So many New England cities used to have nifty occupational monickers, now remembered by few people more than a few miles from these burgs. Consider Spindle City (Fall River), the Shoe City (Brockton), the Granite City (Barre, Vt.) and so on.
Then there's Danbury, Conn.-- the Hat City -- which was celebrated yesterday, in the Nutmeg State anyway, on Hat Day.

The city, up almost on the New York border and thus close to the center of hat-buying in the Western Hemisphere, was famous well into the 20th Century for being America's capital of hat-making, but a decline in hat-wearing, especially among men, after about 1960 brought it down.

Before then, you'd see few bare heads in American cities. Even the anarchists wore hats at outside rallies. Now it's but a nodule in the New York City exurban area -- some financial firms looking for cheaper rents than in Manhattan or Stamford, some high-tech, some abandoned old buildings, etc.

I remember when virtually all men in downtown Boston and New York wore hats to work. Then new President John F. Kennedy strode around bare-headed frequently, as if to show off his fine head of quasi-auburn hair and to distract reporters from investigating his remarkably bad health, which he treated with a truckload of drugs. His brazen behavior may have been the coup de grâce for the men's hat industry.

I don't consider baseball caps worn background to be hats.

 Tags  Conn. Danbury Hat City

Comments

Old School said:

Don't be so cruel to those who have their baseball caps on backwards..

the hate are on correctly, it's the head that turned the wrong way.

Look closely and you'll see what I mean.

Link | May 22, 2009 11:26 AM
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