My hair’s getting kind of long. It’s below my collar, and probably longer than is strictly suitable for a Bible school librarian. I take it as a sign of great sophistication around work that nobody’s brought it to my attention yet.

I intend to get it cut next week. But this weekend we have the annual Viking Feast of the Viking Age Club & Society, so I figure I’ll keep it long until then.

Also it helps keep me warm.

I’ve worn my hair longer than not most of my life, and have continued to do so even though fashion has long since passed me by. My motivations, so far as I can discern them, are historical.

I recall when I was a kid, somewhere within a margin of error around 1960, my dad stopped at a gas station (I think it was a Texaco) and picked up a giveaway brochure about American history. Or the flag. Something patriotic.

And I remember looking at it (American history was one of my childhood fascinations) and examining a picture of a family putting a flag up on their porch sometime in the late 19th Century. The father’s hair was longer than was fashionable at the time the booklet was printed—swept over the ears and about collar length. And I thought, “That’s a good length for a man’s hair. I like that.” And that length’s been my default ever since (though I wore it a lot longer through the 70s).

This was before the Beatles. Before hippies. A guy who wore his hair just as short as every other guy’s, but just combed it forward over his forehead, or who wore a little goatee, was considered a minor threat to the social order when I was a boy.

This ideal of hair length and style went back, at that time in America, about 60 years. (Short hair as a style was invented, I believe, by Alexander the Great, who had his warriors crop their hair and shave their beards in order to deprive their enemies of anything to grab in a fight. The Romans copied it).

The short-haired, “clean-cut” American fashion for men can be traced to a novelist and journalist named Richard Harding Davis, who’s almost forgotten today but was a very big celebrity around the turn of the 20th Century. If he’d lived today he might have been a documentary filmmaker. He went all over the world to write about wars, and was the adventuring hero every man envied. If you’ve seen the very funny movie “The Great Race,” with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemon and Natalie Wood, the Tony Curtis character was clearly inspired by Davis. Davis was clean-shaven and wore his hair short, probably (I suppose) to keep clean in Third World hotels.

It wasn’t just his reputation and writings that made Davis a male fashion plate, though. That was the accomplishment of Charles Dana Gibson (we had a serious plague of three-named men in those days). Gibson was the most popular illustrator of the day, most famous for his creation of “the Gibson Girl,” the feminine ideal of that time (and whom I still consider extremely hot). Gibson drew his model in various settings and participating in various activities, social and leisure. Sometimes she needed an escort, and “the Gibson Man” who squired her around was modeled on Richard Harding Davis.

(One of the models for the Gibson Girl, by the way, was Evelyn Nesbit, sort of the Brittany Spears of her day. Her husband Harry Thaw famously murdered the architect Stanford White over her affections in 1906.)

The subliminal message of Gibson’s illustrations, which appeared in all the popular magazines, was clear—girls who looked like Evelyn Nesbit liked men with short hair and no facial hair. Very rapidly, beards, mustaches and any hair longer than half an inch went down bathroom drains, being left entirely to classical musicians, tenured university professors, and the Amish.

And this lasted until the Beatles.

But I like my hair longer, and in the Viking Age a buzz cut meant you were a slave.

I’d probably cut my hair for the Gibson Girl, though.