Hats Off

They're good-luck charms, special keepsakes, and handy on bad-hair days. Here's proof that, around the Farm, old hats die hard.

by Kevin Cool

Photography by Glenn Matsumura

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A short history of the baseball cap

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, my wife and I were staying at a lakeside cabin in Maine, splitting time between the chaise on the dock and the hammock in the pine grove a few feet from the water’s edge. One day a hat floated by.

I put down my Nelson DeMille novel, leaned over the edge of the dock and fished out a beige baseball cap with “JAGS” stenciled on the front in red. It had been in the water for a while, had collected the odd leaf and streak of grime, but seemed salvageable. I washed it, dried it and wore it for four years.

I have no idea what “JAGS” referred to, but the hat became my favorite anyway. It was the one always hanging on the nail next to the door, the one I grabbed on my way out wherever I was going and the one that appears in practically every photo of me during those years. Most of all, it reminded me of that special summer, which concluded with the birth of my son.

When I came west to work at Stanford in 1999, I drove coast-to-coast with that hat on, sunroof open, feeling new. I took it off at a rest stop outside of Bakersfield on my last day of the trip and drove off without it, not realizing. When I returned a few minutes later to find it, it was gone.

I had plenty of other hats. But losing it made me sad, even wistful. I wish I still had it.

Headwear has always been an important cultural symbol and a distinguishing feature that can connote personality, lifestyle or group identity. These days, baseball caps have become a standard part of the uniform for construction workers, military personnel, New York mayors and, especially, college students. At Stanford, it seems, the caps per capita ratio is as high as anywhere. They are worn all places at all times, forward, backward, sideways, inside out.

And, occasionally, the cap that begins as an accessory—to keep the sun off or to signify one’s allegiance—becomes something more. With enough mileage, it takes on Meaning.

On the next couple of pages are some caps whose owners offer unapologetic devotion, in some cases evident by the patchwork of repairs administered over the years. Their stories say a lot about the power of association, the importance of memory and the peculiarities of habit.

Not to mention staples and duct tape.

LOOK CLOSELY AT SIMONA CHIN’S CAP and you can see the sweat of four years of effort. Four years of pulling, pushing, coaxing and cajoling. Four years in occasionally rough waters, striving for the finish.

When Chin arrived at Stanford, she wasn’t even sure what crew was all about. A Houston native, she recalls walking on to the team only knowing that the sport “involved rowing.” But by the time she graduated in June, she knew crew had been a seminal part of her Stanford experience—“crew defined me,” she says. And she has this hat to remind her.

“We all got hats our freshman year, late in the season,” recalls Chin, who has worn hers in every practice and every race since. The coxswain for the men’s varsity, she also coxed for the New York Athletic Club last year while completing an internship at Goldman Sachs, where she now works. When the team went to the U.S. nationals, Chin’s Stanford crew hat went with her.

“After a while, it became sort of a comfort blanket,” she says. “I didn’t feel right if I wasn’t wearing it. It was part of my pre-race ritual—arranging my hair in a ponytail and fitting the hat on just right. I wouldn’t go into a race without it, no way. It’s not so much superstition as paranoia.”

Now the hat is a talisman. “We have this tradition in our dorm where the seniors give something to the younger girls. A couple of them are also on the crew team. So I told my roommate maybe I would give them my crew gear, and she just laughed at me. She said, ‘There’s no way you’re giving up that stuff.’ She was right.

“It may end up in a box in my attic or in a display case somewhere in the foyer, but this hat will always be with me.”

WHEN MICHAEL LAUB’S academic adviser, developmental biology professor Lucy Shapiro, jokingly placed this New York Mets cap on her head at Laub’s thesis defense last winter, it was something akin to an act of courage.

“It’s, uh, pretty gross,” says Laub, PhD ’01.

Which is not surprising, since it’s the only hat Laub has worn for the last 10 years—and since it has never been washed. “I vowed not to wash it and not to wear another hat until the Mets win another World Series,” he says.

Laub bought the cap in 1988 and began wearing it regularly during high school tennis matches. But it didn’t achieve true skankiness until college. “I wore it during every game of ultimate Frisbee I played for five years, first as an undergrad at UC-San Diego and then three years at Stanford. So you can imagine what it’s been through, the sweating, et cetera.”

He wore the hat a lot at his Stanford lab, which prompted Shapiro’s playful parody. The hat wouldn’t be a bad science experiment itself. “I’m pretty sure you could culture something from the rim,” he says.

Laub knows what you’re thinking: “ewwww.” But the cap’s grunginess is part of its charm, he says. Now at Harvard, where he started his own bacterial genetics lab last spring, Laub continues to wear the hat regularly and insists he won’t switch to a new one until his Mets are world champs. “They made it to the Series in 2000 [versus the Yankees], and my family and especially my girlfriend were rooting pretty hard for the Mets. They wanted to see the hat go.”

Unhappily for them, the Mets lost the Series and have gotten progressively worse since. “My family is pretty worried,” says Laub. “I may be wearing this for a while.”

IN THE FALL OF 1996, Brian Eule was a senior in high school, and his father was dying of cancer. Julian Eule, a law professor at UCLA, had lost his hair as a result of chemotherapy and decided to wear a ball cap to hide his baldness. This is the one he chose.

When Julian died in January 1997, Brian claimed the hat as a remembrance, and he took it with him when he left for the Farm a few months later. He has worn it to Stanford in Washington, to internships in Colorado and Arkansas, on a pilgrimage to Israel and, most recently, to Boston, where he spent his first year after graduating in 2001. After all those miles, Eule says, “I think of the hat as mine, but in a way it will always be my dad’s.”

He has stories. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, JD ’52, visited UCLA during his father’s illness. Eule’s family still has a photograph of the two of them together, his father sporting the No Fear cap and a smile.

The best evidence of his affection for the hat, says Eule, is that he has worn it in spite of the corny dictum printed inside by the manufacturer: “Don’t let fear stand in the way of your dreams.” Eule rolls his eyes as he reads it. “You have to really like a hat to wear one with that written on it.”

THE LAST DAY Morgan Marshall did not wear this ball cap (what’s left of it), Bill Clinton was in his first term, Yahoo! was just getting started and Tiger Woods was a freshman at Stanford. That was 1995. Seven years later, the hat’s consecutive-days streak stands somewhere around 2,500. “It’s not so much a lucky hat as ‘only hat,’” Marshall says, perhaps unnecessarily.

He was in eighth grade when he got the hat, a giveaway at a Seattle Mariners game. By his sophomore year of high school, Marshall says, friends began pointing out that they never saw him without the hat on. When he came to Stanford, the hat took on a life of its own. “Now people recognize the hat more than me. The hat is how people know me. If I take it off, I’m anonymous.”

Whether his hat really qualifies as a hat at this point is debatable, admits Marshall, ’03, who nevertheless mounts a defense. “It’s still in the shape of a hat and still provides shade. People are always asking me, ‘How long do you think it will last?’ I was answering ‘six months’ four years ago. So who knows?”

A couple of times, friends have attempted to steal the hat, Marshall says, “just to see what would happen,” but most people’s interest in it falls somewhere between astonishment and revulsion. “Some people won’t even touch it. Some want to try it on,” he says. “I have a picture on the wall of my room of Mister Rogers wearing it. My friend and I drove from Seattle to Pittsburgh to meet him, and he tried it on in the studio. He wanted the whole story about it.”

Marshall knows he is not quite in control now of whether he wears the hat or not. The hat is just there, like an extra appendage—expendable, perhaps, but curiously important. “If I woke up tomorrow and the hat was gone, I would definitely need some time to adjust. You know how you have a vision of yourself, of how you look? Well, when I see myself, I see the hat.”