The Hat

The Hat:

I forgot to explain the hat. About a week ago, I went to Sackett's up in Jasper, Georgia, where I had been told there was a gentleman who could clean a hat. I had my grandfather's old silverbelly Stetson with me, which has had an eventful life. It had oil stains from his days as a mechanic, burns from his days as a welder (and from my days using it to fan campfires into life), soot stains from the same, and so forth. I wanted to have a man clean it who really knew how.

I met the gentleman mentioned in the post below. Now eighty, he is one of only sixteen remaining independent hatmakers in the United States (indeed, I saw in Shoot magazine that another of them is getting out of the business. Then there were fifteen, I suppose). He took one look at me, and said, "That is an old hat you're wearing."

"Yes," I agreed, taking it off and handing it to him.

"Ninteen forties," he remarked after a moment. "Don't see this bash any more." 'Bash' refers to the way the hat is creased on the top. "It became popular in the 1930s, and people pretty much stopped making it by the end of the forties. Don't see this quality of leather in hatbands anymore either. Grand old hat."

He spent an hour cleaning it, while we talked about my grandfather and his grandfather, the days he'd spent as a boy learning to work hats with an old man who lived near their ranch, and his time in the army. At the end, he gave it back. I asked what I owed, but he refused to take even a dime. "It's just a pleasure to work on a fine old hat like that," he said.

So I went back this week and bought a hat from him -- he handles all hat sales from Sackett's -- and what he sold me was a Stetson. He said he thought I'd like this better than anything else he had in the store. "The newest thing," he said. "It's made from buffalo hide and fur felt. Whole thing is buffalo, including the leather hatband. It wears like iron. Took Stetson years to develop it."

When I bought it, the hat looked like this. "Tatanka" is Lakota for "buffalo." (I should also mention, in case any of you are wanting a hat and are planning to be down Georgia way, that he sold it to me for a whole lot less than the listed price. Sackett's is a good place to do business, if you're interested.) It's got a bash called a "cattleman's crease." This is pretty much the standard bash for "cowboy" hats these days, and I've frankly always hated it. I asked him if he'd be willing to lower the brim's "wings," and put a different bash in it.

"Glad to lower the brim," he said, and did, "but I can't change the bash. Once you put a cattleman's crease in, it never looks right with anything else. It's too tight a bash to undo. You'll cause the felt to crack if you try to undo it, which will ruin it."

Felt hats can be remade by the use of water, especially hot water, and best of all steam. You normally use the steam to heat the felt, making it pliant; it will keep whatever form it dries into. So, you heat it up, work it until it's what you want, and then let it cool and dry. It will set that way, like concrete.

Apparently the buffalo felt is a lot tougher than the usual beaver felt, or horsehair felt (the Australian Akubra hats use rabbit). He said that, to work it, you had to put it in a chemical bath.

Well, I thanked him and took it home. I hate to be told that something can't be done, though, so I gave it some thought. I figured some of those chemicals probably dried into the hat, so if I could get them lubricated again they ought to work. I put the hat in a bath of very hot water, and let it soak it up for an hour or so. Sure enough, it became pliant -- not very much so, still much stiffer than any other hat I've handled. Still, I gently worked out the cattleman's crease, and put in an open telescope bash. It worked beautifully.

Nothing makes a man happy better than doing something a master of the art said couldn't be done.