{"id":16324,"date":"2022-01-26T19:04:20","date_gmt":"2022-01-27T00:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=16324"},"modified":"2022-01-26T19:04:20","modified_gmt":"2022-01-27T00:04:20","slug":"talking-through-my-hat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=16324","title":{"rendered":"Talking through my hat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Wyatt Earp and friends in Dodge City in 1883. Wyatt is 2nd from left in the front row. Bat Masterson is 2nd from the right in the back row. The rest of these guys you’ve probably never heard of. But there are several pristine Boss of the Plains Stetsons here.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Today I got more translation work,<\/strong> so that\u2019s what I\u2019ve been doing, pretty much. This puts us all at the mercy of my wandering brain, which alights on random topics in idle moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of us are well acquainted with cowboy hats \u2013 we think. But in fact, the cowboy hat as we think of it today is not one the old-time cowboys would have recognized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019d learned in his father\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s an interesting detail \u2013 John B. Stetson was a devout Baptist. The profits that came from selling hats to all those wild and wooly western characters \u2013 cowboys and rustlers and gamblers and saloonkeepers \u2013 went largely toward his charitable interests, to build the Kingdom of God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That original cowboy hat style was called \u201cThe Boss of the Plains.\u201d 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 \u201cTombstone\u201d). 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I realized recently that I\u2019ve carried quite a stupid id\u00e9e fix<\/em>e in my head all my life, about Wyatt Earp\u2019s hat. I watched the old Wyatt Earp show starring Hugh O\u2019Brien 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\u2019ve seen a Wyatt Earp movie since, I\u2019ve compared the actor\u2019s hat to that one. (There\u2019s another picture of Wyatt in the same, or a similar, hat \u2013 a group photo in front of the fire department in Tombstone. Wyatt is pretty small in that one, but it\u2019s recognizably the same style.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I realized recently, though, is that almost everybody wore a BOTP in those days. If I\u2019m going to obsess about Wyatt\u2019s hat, I should obsess about all the others. Wyatt\u2019s hat was in no way unique. Relax, I tell myself. It\u2019s just a movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, you know where those turned-up sides on cowboy hats came from (\u201cfour in a pickup hats,\u201d I\u2019ve 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\u2019s face from below, with reflectors. So when they shot Westerns, the hats were a problem. They shaded the actors\u2019 faces \u2013 a real obstacle in a silent film where facial expressions are everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life imitates art. Fairly often.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I got more translation work, so that\u2019s what I\u2019ve 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\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever talked about cowboy hats on this blog. I mean, what could be more appropriate for a book … Continue reading Talking through my hat<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[4037,4036,4035,3400],"class_list":["post-16324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boss-of-the-plains","tag-cowboy-hats","tag-john-b-stetson","tag-wyatt-earp"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16324"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16327,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16324\/revisions\/16327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}