Of hats and those who wear them

As I watched television coverage of Queen Elizabeth hobnobbing with the horsey set at the Kentucky Derby a while back, it occurred to me that people may say what they will about the grand old dame of royalty, but there can be no denying that the lady sure knows how to wear a hat.

Granted, most of the hats she sports may resemble the shade that adorns the lamp in your average living room. But the fact that Her Royal Highness can pull off the feat with aplomb is an indication that she’d likely lend a touch of class to most any headgear she’d care to don.

By contrast, few people other than bona fide construction workers, telephone linemen and the like can wear a construction worker’s hard hat without looking like a dope. Certainly not the network correspondent strolling around Baghdad in hard hat and bulletproof vest. And for sure not politicians touring factories while trying to impress potential voters with their common-man credentials.

Nothing screams “pretender” quite so much as a politician in a hard hat at a job site, trolling for a spot on the 6 o’clock news. Well, maybe presidential wannabe Michael Dukakis in full battle gear sticking his head out of the turret of a tank while trolling for a spot on Page One a few years ago. But you get the point.

A hard hat must sit on the head just so. Too high and the wearer appears to be top heavy, his center of gravity out of whack, especially if he is a pencil-necked geek. Too low and the wearer comes off looking like Pvt. Schultz of Stalag 17 in a World War II German steel pot, minus the helmet liner.

You’d think major league baseball players would know how to wear a baseball cap after all the time they’ve spent running out from under one. But many seemingly haven’t mastered the feat any more than they have acquired a clue as to how to properly wear their uniform pants.

When you see a player with his baseball hat on semisideways or with it pulled down so low it covers his ears, you can rest assured that he is also wearing 20 pounds of gold chain around his neck and probably walks on the bottoms of his pants as well. Why major league baseball appears to have no on-field dress code, as other professional sports do, remains one of life’s minor mysteries.

A companion mystery to me is why students are allowed to wear hats while they are in the classroom. Once, after I had addressed an eastern Maine high school class on the rewards and discomforts of a career in journalism, I asked the teacher why students could wear baseball caps and chew gum in class without reprimand.

She replied that the faculty and administration had decided it was simply easier to let them do it than it was to fight it. In this touchy-feely age, no one wanted to hurt the self esteem of the poor darlings by suggesting that the person who wears his hat to class, or to the dinner table, or to bed, probably has an IQ roughly equal to his hat size. Maybe lower.

I thought of that learning experience the other night as I watched a televised report about a school that offered a class to prepare students for job interviews when they are finally turned loose upon an unsuspecting world.

Seated prominently in the front row was a guy listening raptly and taking notes, baseball cap atop his head, somewhat askew. (The hat, not the head.) My thought was that the first piece of advice the instructor should give the chap would be to lose the hat, but I figured the odds of such a recommendation being made were roughly zero, give or take a few ciphers. (See hurt feelings, above.)

And speaking of hats that seldom come off the wearer’s head for any occasion, most any mass of bystanders watching a holiday parade includes its share of yahoos who fail to remove their hats as the color guard carrying the nation’s flag approaches. Oh, if the late Henry Holcomb Bennett could be around to smarten them up with the opening stanza of his poem “The Flag Goes By”:

“Hats off!/ Along the street there comes/A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums,/A flash of color beneath the sky:/ Hats off!/ The flag is passing by.”

It might not work worth a damn on the harder cases, I suppose. But imagine the satisfaction it would bring to all within earshot.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.