Hats of A Lifetime

 There's always a reason that people do what they do, and do it the way they do it. When it comes to wearing hats, it's a natural part of my life because I'm just old enough that hats were very much a part of the world around me when I was young in the South, and the Midwest USA. The year I started kindergarten, men were still wearing hats en masse. Plus, my folks were both from the South and there were a lot of cowboy hats on the men, and large straw hats or bonnets on the women on both sides of the family.

Stetson Open Road (LBJ)

 As far back as I can remember, every male around me wore some type of hat. My dad always wore cheap looking straw hats that were a size too small, and reminded me of the hats horse race bookies wear in the movies. He cocked his hat severely to one side of his head, pulled down in front. His dad, my grandpa, was a lifelong law enforcement officer, and always wore a straw or fur Stetson, depending on the season. These were called an Open Road. It's now popularly known as the LBJ. He also had a gray Stetson fedora that he wore with his three piece suit. Most of the men on my mom's side of the family wore cowboy hats. In today's society, hats aren't regarded as a wardrobe essential by much of the industrialized world unless it's required on the job.

The first few years of my life, all of my hats were cowboy hats or furry hoods.

 By the time I made it to 7th grade, it was the summer of love, 1968, and all of a sudden people were wearing all sort of floppy wool, and especially , leather hats. I continued on with the cowboy hats but began to alter the brims and wrap odd bands around the hats. I favored torn and twisted lengths of deer hide and snake skins, which I had skilled American Indian friends bead for me.

Hippie Hat

 By high school, I started to enjoy the look of the fur fedora, and the thrift shops were loaded with them back then.

 After high school, I hitch-hiked around the USA and Mexico extensively and brought the cowboy hat back. In the mid 70s, it was easier to get a ride in a cowboy hat than a fedora, so I adapted.

 Unfortunately for me, I had a big head and the standard sizes in the thrift stores were usually too small. This led me to a legendary clothier in Kansas City, Mr. Harold Pener. Any hat that was worth owning, Mr. Pener had it in his store. the prices were always 25% -50% off of retail (nowhere else in town to compare them to), and they always had your size. Because this store was a full line men's store, my relationship with Harold Pener's Menswear evolved to the point where in the 1980s, I would go into the store, locate one of the beautiful sales ladies, and be fitted for suit, shoes, socks, shirt, belt, tie, and finally, a hat. All of this would be altered to your exact specs, and you were out the door in 45 minutes after the fitting. I've repeated this very scenario many times

Harold Pener
Man Of Fashion

 By the time the 80s rolled around, my friends were well aware that I wore hats and had given me some unique versions to add to my collection of over 40 hats, including a Panama hat that a friend in the U.S. Navy had traded for with a Cuban soldier through a fence in Gitmo, and an antique boater hat that was hard to find the right time to wear.

Boater Hat

 In 1982, my loft, which was in a series of four buildings that a partner and myself controlled, burned to the ground along with the various businesses that had leased space from us. Everything was lost. I lost all of my clothes, hats,  guitars and amps, my home, and my job.

For the next 7-8 years, I would buy stock Stetson fedoras (they were manufactured just up the road in St. Joseph, MO) and have them altered by a milliner, Mrs. McClendon,  who only built lady's hats. Her son Time (an apprentice milliner), had become my friend and had taken me to the factory and convinced his mother to customize my hats to my specs. I was also buying fur "blanks" from the Stetson factory warehouse for $1.00 each. These were top quality cowboy hats to be, but something went wrong in the process, usually a torn edge, and the fur was replaced with a new blank to make the hat. They were unshaped and resembled hillbilly hats. I didn't do anything with them. I just bought them because they were a dollar.

McClenDon's Hats

 By 1993, I was living in Chicago and wearing the same fedoras that Mrs. McClendon had customized for me in the mid eighties, which were spot on for style then. Much like Kansas City, Chicago is a hat wearing town.

  

 In 1994, I sold almost every worldly possession and moved to 

Venice Beach, CA, where I soon met and became dear friends with an old cowboy and character actor in his late 70s named Tommy Farrell. Tommy knew everybody in Hollywood, and as soon as he discovered our mutual fascination with fine hats, he introduced me to Eddie Baron in Burbank. Eddie was the man that had made some of the most iconic hats in Movie history.

 After meeting Mr. Baron, I decided that this was the time to break out the Stetson factory fur hat blanks. I gave several to Mr. Baron and made pencil drawings of what I wanted as a hat from each blank. He marveled at the high quality of the fur and produced several excellent hats for me during the next two years. I gave half of these away in later years as I have a couple of close friends with the same head size as mine.

A partial list of the movies and TV series that Eddie Baron made hats for are “Indiana Jones”, “Secretariat”, “Seabiscuit”, “The Expendables”, “Crocodile Dundee”,  “Rocky”,  “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”,  “3:10 to Yuma”, ”Public Enemies”, “The Lone Ranger”, “The Mask”, “Dick Tracy”, “Wild Bill”, “Justified”, “Gunsmoke”, “The Rifleman”,  “Deadwood” and “True Grit” 

 You get the picture. He makes great hats. Besides making hats for Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, John Wayne and Tom Mix, Mr. Baron made several custom hats for me from 1994-2000, which I still wear.

Baron Hats "Hollywood's Hat Maker"® 

1619 West Burbank Boulevard
Burbank, CA 91506

 Even after all of this, I was never quite satisfied with the style quotient of my sizable collection of hats. If I could find the hat I wanted, I wouldn't buy so many in search of perfection. Some hats in magazines just seemed to have a smarter look, or a more unique design than anything that I had been able to find. This included trying several high end Borsalinos, which are arguably some of the finest hats produced in the world. I had many very nice hats at this point and was satisfied with the collection.

 Many years later, while docked during a river boating trip in Germany, I had purchased a couple of men's fashion magazines. These were the very thick quarterly magazines that aren't too common in the USA. One was in French, and the other in Italian. In the Italian magazine, a major designer, I can't remember which one, showed all of his styles on the various pages with the models wearing hats. Each and every hat stood out as something that I had never quite seen before. I was excited at the possibility of discovering a new hat manufacturer that might just satisfy my tastes.

 When I looked through the index to learn the name of the hat manufacturer, I found that the hats were all made by a designer that I had never heard of, Rod Keenan. I assumed him to be European.

 For the next couple of years, I searched different sources for Rod Keenan hats and eventually, his company posted a website. Very excited about finding a link to Mr. Keenan's hats, I perused his collections and immediately found out that his hats cost as much as a car payment, up to, and over, a house payment. 

 Rod oversees his atelier within an spectacular old multi-story building in Harlem, NY which he calls "the castle". He creates only a few custom designs each season, and the hats are painstakingly made by hand, per order.

The Castle

Rod Keenan New York

 I happened to be in NYC for the US Open two years ago and was able to reach Rod on the phone and secure an appointment to be measured. We traveled to his place from our hotel in Manhattan and when we stepped into his workshop, I knew that I was in the right place. Hats of every description in every direction. Rod was busy preparing for a large dinner party just a few hours away, yet still took the time to meet and consult with me on my first order. It turns out that this master hatter, trained in Paris and NYC, was a native of my home state Kansas. Incredible!

With Rod Keenan

 The stellar list of devoted custom clients includes: Jay Kay of Jamiroquai, Alicia Keys, Elvis Costello, Brad Pitt, Justin Timberlake, Bill Murray, Prince, Sir Elton John, Dennis Rodman, John Leguizamo, Vince Vaughn, Lisa Marie Presley, Maxwell, Cedric the Entertainer, Robin Williams, Danny DeVito and Samuel L. Jackson.

 For the last two years I've been selling most of my collection of hats to reinvest the money in new Rod Keenan hats. the design and manufacturing quality are just that good! I'll keep one McClendon customized hat, and three hats that Eddie Baron made for me, but all of the other hats have already made it to eBay, where they fetched as much, or more, than I paid for them years ago. Turns out...great hats are great investments!

              Rod Keenan Hats  

                                              Raquel Welch                          Steven Tyler

        

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