Historical Hats

I began my morning yesterday realizing I had a few things to do that didn't have anything to do with any of my goals or work....making appointments for others....finding paperwork for others....washing clothes for others....and thinking about two or three projects I needed to finish up for others.

It's not that I mind doing these things...hardly.  I like to help, but more and more I find my day is full doing a list of things that don't have anything to do with a table of contents I must flesh out, articles to write, and seeing writing opportunities......or at least answering the emails when the opportunities seek me out.

Just a normal day for me as I grew more frustrated by the minute, but this time my thinking and my realizing left my brain, moved down my arms and out my fingers to a Facebook status that said, "I wear too many hats that aren't mine...some by misguided choice, some that are inherited and some are foisted upon me.  I'm going to stop.  Take your friggin' hat and wear it yourself....'

Later, while I was working out at the gym I thought about my status, and then my mind wandered to hats in general.

My first introduction to hats was at Greenbriar Mall west of Atlanta when I was five or six.  Mother frequented  Rich's department store....an Atlanta mainstay....quite often.   Well, actually......very, very often.  She knew most of the clerks by name, and they knew her, too.    I can close my eyes and actually walk around the store in my mind I was so familiar with the layout.  

Right in the center of the store were the escalators with the bakery on one side and the hat department as well.  Every now and then if I caught Mom in the right mood she would give the clerk a smile, and they would let me sit down at the table and chair in the hat department and try on a few. 

I generally went for the flimsy, wide-brimmed pastel creations...but secretly I really loved the veiled concoctions.   At the time I just knew I liked them....now I know I liked them because they were deliciously sexy...add in a pair of matching leather gloves you can only remove by unbuttoning five or six covered buttons, and.....

Oh my....

In another life I had to have worn hats....I MUST have....and mourn the fact that they just aren't worn that much anymore....at least not in the circles I travel.  

I turned away from my hat desires to think about other hats....hats in history.

Historical hats....

There had to be some.....right?

Earlier this year the Victoria and Albert Museum had an exhibit regarding hats.  Of course, since the exhibit ....a collaboration between the museum and Stephen Jones....was in Great Britain the collection included hats belonging to former queens including Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

When we think of Queen Victoria we tend to think of a rather large aging lady in black as she spent the last several years of her life mourning the passing of her husband, Prince Albert, but for many years she dressed very colorfully including fancy bonnets.  The collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum included a bonnet from the 1840s....a construction made of plaited horse hair and salmon pink ribbon.   You can just make it out along the bottom half of this picture.  

The beige tulle and lace hat worn in the late thirties by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was also in the collection.   She wore the hat for a series of well known photographs taken by Cecil Beaton on the grounds of Buckingham Palace.  

Turning towards American History the most iconic man's hat would have to be Abraham Lincoln's use of the top hat.  Lincoln was already a tall man.  It is said he was taller than most no matter where he went, so wearing a top hat was like a six foot woman deciding to wear five inch heels.  

This hat is the one President Lincoln wore on the last night of his life...April 14, 1865.  It's on display at the Smithsonian Institute.  

My research indicates President Lincoln bought this particular hat from J.Y. Davis, a Washington hat maker.  Notice the black silk band....Lincoln had this added to the hat in remembrance  of his son Willie.  

Following the assassination the War Department took possession of the hat and other items left behind at Ford's Theater.  From there the hat became the property of the Patent Office and later was transferred to the Smithsonian where it has remained.  In those days the employees of the Smithsonian Institute were instructed not to exhibit the hat and not to mention that it was there because of the furor it might cause in those early years following the President's death.

The hat remained in a basement storage room for almost thirty years before it was finally displayed in 1893 when the Lincoln Memorial Association borrowed the top hat for an exhibition.  

Of course, today....it's one of the most popular artifacts of American History the museum owns.

Unfortunately, another iconic hat in American History is also connected to an assassination ....the Kennedy assassination.

The American public was first introduced to the pillbox hat during the Kennedy inauguration.

This article states:

[The hat was] a fawn-colored domed pillbox created by a then unknown 29-year-old named Roy Halston Frowick.   The hat sat tilted toward the back, nearly doubled the size of her head, frankly, and creating a pretty contrast to her striking dark looks.  She was nothing the country had ever seen.   A fashionable, beautiful and highly cultured First Lady, one who not only spoke fluent French but effortlessly shopped in Paris and New York.   Across the country, women unanimously agreed:  This young woman was their new fashion icon.  For his part, Halston had no idea what was coming.

Jackie Kennedy also wore a pillbox hat on that fateful date in Dallas, Texas.

The pillbox hat First Lady Jackie Kennedy wore the day her husband was assassinated is as iconic as the pink suit.  

This article from 2011 advises the suit was turned over to the National Archives, but the hat is missing and remains missing to this day.

Somewhere inside the hospital [that fateful day in Dallas], the hat came off.  "While standing there I was handed Jackie's pillbox hat and couldn't help noticing the strands of her hair beneath the hat pin.  I could almost visualize her yanking it from her head," Mary Gallagher, the First Lady's personal secretary, who accompanied her to Dallas, wrote in her memoir....

The pink suit, blood-stained and perfectly preserved in a vault in Maryland, is banned from public view for 100 years.  The pillbox hat...is lost, last known to be in the hands of [Gallagher], who won't discuss its whereabouts... 

....[At some point following the assassination], a box arrived at the National Archives, where such treasures as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are kept.  In it were the suit, blouse, handbag, shoes, and even her stockings, along with an unsigned note on the letterhead of Janet Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy's mother:  "Jackie's suit and bag worn November, 22, 1963.

No hat.

One has to wonder about the  hat.....

Ah.........yet another mystery in history.

November Remembrance, Part One

Is it possible to love someone through another’s memory? To love and admire someone you never met, someone you will never be able to meet, someone who at the moment of their passing caused an incredible upheaval of grief and gouged an enormous chasm of longing for things that can never be, someone who a large number of people still speak of with reverence, awe, and thankfulness?

I believe it is possible.

I know it is possible.

I know it because I participate in this kind of love and admiration everyday for two vastly different Americans who left this Earth almost a year to the day from one another. My admiration for these two inviduals stems from my mother who shared her memories of them with me during my formative years where they became entertwined and linked indelibly in the murkiness where actual memory and grafted memories blend.



I was six months old on Saturday, November 24, 1962. Naturally I have no real memories of this day. What I know comes from Sister Dear who was six at the time. We had just celebrated Thanksgiving the previous Thursday. More than likely my parents had driven my sister and I to their shared hometown to visit with my Dad’s folks and then my Mom’s. Little did anyone know it would be the last time my Mom saw her mother alive. Sister Dear recollects the phone ringing that Saturday afternoon and nothing ever being the same again. She tells me now that Mother began wailing and flung herself across her bed. Sister Dear remembers simply standing and staring at Mother as she became a grieving, heaving mass of pain. When she remembers that moment she sees a collage of images of mother mixed with the piney hardwood floor of our hallway, the old radio that had been mothers as a teen now used as a phone table in the hallway, and how time seemed to stand still. Sister Dear was watching Mother’s agony as she had been told her mother had been found dead of a heart attack at the age of 62.

It was sudden. It was cruel. It was not what anyone would have expected. In writing that my Mother has left behind she states Nanny was tall and slender with broad shoulders. She had beautiful skin and dark, thick, course hair. She was a great cook and seamstress----most of the clothes my mother wore were handmade by my grandmother. She was always a cheerful person---smiling, laughing, and always hid any problems she might have---plus she always wanted to do something to help people who were less fortunate than herself.

Sister Dear speaks of our “Nanny” by describing her simply as FUN. She remembers having great times with Nanny. In every picture I have ever seen of my grandmother she is wearing a June Cleaver type dress…..shirtwaist, short sleeves, and full skirt. Sister Dear tells that Nanny would place her in the hem of her skirt and swing her back and forth. That had to be fun. Sister Dear tells of waking on warm mornings and gazing up on the wall where a picture hung of a little boy and a little girl. They were about to cross a bridge and an angel was hovering at their shoulders. She has told me this picture actually scared her. We were told as children that the boy and girl were on their way to Heaven. I remember the framed print too…….it scared me as well. Sister Dear has told me she would lie in bed the longest time and try NOT to feel sorry for the kids, but it was hard. As an adult I now understand the significance of that print. My grandmother had bore tragedy upon tragedy as young woman. Her first husband had been shot to death in front of her, and she had lost three children….one to sickness, one got ahold of some medicine that had been left out, and a baby boy had been born dead. The print that scared my sister and I so probably gave comfort to our grandmother and might have been the reason it hung in the spare bedroom.

Once up Sister Dear would walk into the front room and find a big bowl of blueberries on the floor between the screen door and door jam. She’d sit on the gritty floor and munch away. It always seemed, Sister Dear says, that Nanny would just know she was up and awake. She’d turn from her chores in the garden and give a hearty good mornin’ wave, and Sister Dear's day of fun would begin by building a playhouse out of tongue and groove planks and a cardtable Nanny would provide for her. I’ve always been told Nanny loved working with plants and apparently she could get anything to grow anywhere. Sister Dear remembers Nanny always smelled deliciously of outside, sunshine, and fresh turned earth. Things could be done at Nanny’s house that could not be done at home. Nanny always allowed Sister Dear to make mud pies on the porch not with water, but with real honest to goodness buttermilk.

Sister Dear remembers Daddy holding her as they stood in front of the casket set up in the front room of my grandparent’s home, and she remembers the funeral which took place at the one room wooden church with the obligatory outhouse in the back plopped in the piney woods where three generations of my mother’s family scratched the dirt. The land for the church had at one time been part of the family farm, but my great grandfather had donated it to the church folk. Nanny was laid to rest in dirt that was home to her. Sister Dear remembers a long service, our distraught mother who we now know had been given something to keep her calm and quiet, and the long row of our grandfather’s half-sisters who were actually more in line with our mother’s age than our grandfather’s. Each dear aunt took her turn holding Sister Dear in her lap….first Dee, then Blanche, then Claudine, then Nelle, and Elizabeth and then back to Nelle, then Claudine, then Blanche, and then Dee where the whole process started over again.

Mother grieved. Years later Mother spoke of grieving hard. She often said the knowledge that she had to take care of Sister Dear and I got her through, but there were days she didn’t know if she could make it. Our grandfather grieved hard as well. Sister Dear remembers his home being fun. I remember it as dark and dusty shrine much like the Haversham bedroom in Great Expectations. Many things were left exactly like they were the day Nanny left us even down to her pin cushion which always hung on a nail in the hallway with the pins in it just like they were the last time Nanny used it. As I grew older it remained hanging on its nail fading in color with the dust eventually caking over it until it was practically rotten.

The remainder of this post can be found at American Presidents Blog here.