How many straw hats can we expect to see in the Bootheel this summer?
None. Clark Gable took off his shirt in the 1939 Academy Award winning movie, “It Happened One Night.” When this revealed that he was wearing no undershirt, it supposedly spelled doom for the undershirt industry. Hat manufacturers say that a major decline in their industry started when John F. Kennedy came bareheaded to his presidential inauguration. This is a falsehood, because there are many pictures of Kennedy and his inauguration entourage wearing high silk hats. If the hat people want to blame John F. Kennedy for declining sales, a more true observation is that he normally did appear in public bareheaded. Kennedy had a magnificent head of hair — and enough of it to cover a medium size sofa. Perhaps a more significant factor was the return of soldiers and sailors from World War II. For years they had been under command to have some sort of head gear, and they had had enough of it. Whatever the reason — somewhere along the line men stopped wearing hats. There is an old film, still
