Today I got more translation work, so that’s what I’ve been doing, pretty much. This puts us all at the mercy of my wandering brain, which alights on random topics in idle moments.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about cowboy hats on this blog. I mean, what could be more appropriate for a book blog? (Hey, there are lots of books about cowboys. Some of them are even good. A few are excellent. As with every other subject.)

Most of us are well acquainted with cowboy hats – we think. But in fact, the cowboy hat as we think of it today is not one the old-time cowboys would have recognized.

The original cowboy hat, of course, was designed by John B. Stetson (1830-1906), a hat maker from New Jersey. He went west for his health (consumption), and used the skills he’d learned in his father’s hattery to make a wide-brimmed hat to wear under the western sun. Originally it was a joke, but he found it useful and comfortable, and later a cowboy bought it off him for five bucks. Eventually Stetson went to Philadelphia (the western climate had cleared up his tuberculosis) and started making hats for the cowboy trade. The rest is history.

Here’s an interesting detail – John B. Stetson was a devout Baptist. The profits that came from selling hats to all those wild and wooly western characters – cowboys and rustlers and gamblers and saloonkeepers – went largely toward his charitable interests, to build the Kingdom of God.

That original cowboy hat style was called “The Boss of the Plains.” It had a relatively tall, rounded crown and a relatively wide brim (though not as tall or wide as the one Kurt Russell wears so well in “Tombstone”). There was no idea, originally, of curling the brim or denting the crown. Those things happened, of course, when a fellow was working a ranch, but were considered slightly disreputable. A respectable man, like the Earps aspired to be, took pride in keeping theirs nice and flat and uniform.

I realized recently that I’ve carried quite a stupid idée fixe in my head all my life, about Wyatt Earp’s hat. I watched the old Wyatt Earp show starring Hugh O’Brien back when I was a kid. One of his trademarks was a flat-brimmed hat, sort of a Spanish hat really, which stood in for a Boss of the Plains on the show. When I first saw the photo above, where Wyatt (second from the left, front) wears a genuine BOTP, I associated that hat (often reproduced in images cropped to make the crown look higher than it is) with him. And whenever I’ve seen a Wyatt Earp movie since, I’ve compared the actor’s hat to that one. (There’s another picture of Wyatt in the same, or a similar, hat – a group photo in front of the fire department in Tombstone. Wyatt is pretty small in that one, but it’s recognizably the same style.)

What I realized recently, though, is that almost everybody wore a BOTP in those days. If I’m going to obsess about Wyatt’s hat, I should obsess about all the others. Wyatt’s hat was in no way unique. Relax, I tell myself. It’s just a movie.

By the way, you know where those turned-up sides on cowboy hats came from (“four in a pickup hats,” I’ve heard them called)? Not from the cowboys themselves, but from movies. In the early days of movie making, lighting was primitive. Scenes were shot out of doors or in open-roofed studios, in natural light. Nobody had figured out you could illuminate a person’s face from below, with reflectors. So when they shot Westerns, the hats were a problem. They shaded the actors’ faces – a real obstacle in a silent film where facial expressions are everything.

So the lighting people went around and turned the hats up on the sides, to let some light in. Then, in a weird twist, the real cowboys saw hats shaped like that in movies, and turned their own up on the sides to look cool.

Life imitates art. Fairly often.