THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, June 19, 1996 TAG: 9606190534
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: 55 lines
Used to be, this time of year, men would be wearing straw hats.
Flat-topped, wide-brimmed, hard-edged, the sort worn by barbershop quartets. Boaters or sailors, they were called.
On the morning of May 15, the male population emerged in straw hats as if they had bloomed overnight.
You've seen them in photographs of crowds at old-time ballparks or along the railing at racetracks, everybody sporting a pale halo.
On Sept. 15 they took off the straws. Only the neighborhood butcher wore one year round. He kept four boaters moving.
Each year he bought a new straw hat to wear on Sunday, wore last year's Sunday hat to and from work every day, wore last year's everyday hat about the market, and gave last year's market hat to the horse that pulled the grocery cart and would have been lost without a straw hat. The butcher wore one to warm his head, trekking in and out of the freezer.
In the Quality Shop in Norfolk, John Dunlap said he hadn't worn one in 30 years. ``I liked 'em,'' he said. ``I thought they were cool.''
They phased out in the 1960s. ``When John Kennedy took off his hat, the whole nation did,'' he said.
At Beecroft & Bull, Eddie Huffman said that men, like JFK, let their hair grow long and refused to wear hats that would mess it up.
The boater with the flat top seemed as crisp as if it had been cut straight from the pressed straw.
``One day recently a customer came in wearing a seersucker and a straw hat,'' Huffman said, ``and I swear he looked terrific, fantastic!''
Try Stark & Legum, Huffman advised.
At that store on Granby Street, Sonny Legum said that only that morning a gentleman had called from Franklin inquiring about a boater.
Not long ago a customer in Arizona ordered one, then called back for six more, all the same size with customized black bands.
``He said he didn't want to give out,'' Legum said.
The straw is coming back!
``For a while, nobody would touch it. Now it's very popular. We can't get any more this year,' he said.
He does, however, have three shelves filled with them out front and as many in back.
The boaters, he said, originated among English rowing clubs. Thence, reached the Ivy League. The sporty hat bands were school colors.
With what a sense of discovery to learn how the names boater and sailor had derived!
What a pleasure it would give me to so inform all the fathers who used to wear them.
And what do butchers wear nowadays to warm their noggins?
And where are those wonderful horses who wore hats? ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
You've seen them in photographs of crowds at old-time ballparks or
along the railing at racetracks, everybody sporting a pale halo. by CNB