The Orioles are busy in TV ads promoting their straw hat giveaway on June 15 at Camden Yards, but the real Straw Hat Day for the sartorially-clued in know that the official Straw Hat Day is actually May 15.
They religiously observe that day when felt hats, fedoras and tweed caps are tossed into the dark recesses of a hall closet for a summer slumber, and are only extracted on a rainy day.
And Straw Hat Day arrives just in time for the Preakness, which should be a sea of straw hats worn by both men and women, who’ll be gathering at Old Hilltop for one of Maryland’s premier sporting events this Saturday.
There was a time when Straw Hat Day was earlier and celebrated on May 6, but when the switch was made to May 15 and why is anyone’s guess.
“Forever thereafter May 6 would be known throughout the length and breadth of Baltimore and the adjacent territory called the United States as ‘Straw Hat Day,’ and it has been ever so,” according to a May 7, 1916 Sun article
“It is not to be gainsaid that some men were bold enough to wear a straw hat before the dawn of yesterday, and they wore them in safety and retained the respect of their fellow-men. But the felt and the derby faded away into moth balls or into the hands of the Salvation Army.
“When the asphalt begins to soften in the sun the felt hat has to go, even though it is far more comfortable to a freshly sunburned man than an eight-ounce stiff straw.”
When it was requested in 1924 that Baltimore Mayor Howard W. Jackson issue a Straw Hat Day proclamation, he balked.
“Nothing doing in that line,” Jackson said. “Let people get out their straw hats now if they like or at any other time the strawhat will feel comfortable. I am going to get my straw hat whenever I see fit.”
During a blizzard several years ago, this reporter recalled seeing a man in Towson busily shoveling his sidewalk wearing a straw hat and earmuffs.
Shale D. Stiller, 90, a semi-retired lawyer and partner in DLA Piper LLP, a regular Roland Avenue boulevardier and an inveterate hat-wearer, can’t recall a time when the calendar turned May 15 that he didn’t consign his winter felt hats to a closet in favor of a straw replacement.
“I don’t care if it’s even raining, I’ll be wearing a straw hat Thursday,” Stiller said. “I’ll be on a train for New York at 9:15, where I’ll be for a week on business, but I expect to see a lot of straw hats in the city.”
Stiller, who owns three Panamas and rotates them for daily usage, said he wasn’t sure which one he’d select.
“My father was in the clothing business and Straw Hat Day was like New Year’s Day for him. He owned and wore six straws — not all at once,” he said, with a laugh.
In a different era, hats worn year round were de rigueur and no one ever considered going abroad showing off a hatless cranium and to do so, was committing sartorial suicide, condemnation and ridicule from the mob.
Straw Hat Day also signaled the switch to Palm Beach, linen and seersucker summer suits to help ward off the infernal hat found in these latitudes.
But there was also a particularly sensible and practical side to wearing a straw hat that helped ward off a bit the dreadful consequences of searing sun, heat and humidity, that Baltimore can readily generate this time of the year.
“Every American man who observes Straw Hat Day on May 15 by putting his felt away with mothballs and reaching for a Panama, sailor or other straw is unconsciously paying tribute to a Baltimore industry that has been flourishing since the closing days of the Civil War,” observed the old Sunday Sun Magazine in a 1953 article.
In Baltimore’s former Garment District that was defined by Lombard, Paca, Sharp and Redwood streets, three firms came to dominate local straw hat manufacturing.
Brigham-Hopkins Co, was established in 1875 at the corner of Redwood and Paca, and M.S. Levy was founded at Sharp and Lombard streets, and later moved to a new building at Paca and Lombard streets.
The third of the city’s “Big Three” was the Townsend-Grace Co., established by S.C. Townsend and John W. Grace also settled in the neighborhood.
In those post Civil War years, the straw-hat business boomed and by 1890, 1,100 were employed in hat-making, and that number rose substantially to 2,300 workers by the mid-1920s, when they produced three million straw annually.
It was M.S. Levy who introduced the optimo Panama hat with its center crease and slim black band at the foot of its crown to Baltimoreans in the 1890s.
The hat earned its name from the straw-hat bodies that traveled from the Pacific to the Atlantic by way of the Isthmus of Panama to the Levy factory where they were trimmed, blocked and shipped.
“In those glorious days, a man’s head covering was as necessary for him as a pair of pants. There were no bare heads, except on a few fanatics,” Lester Levy, grandson of M.S. Levy, explained in a 1975 Baltimore Sun interview.
“Straw hats made in Baltimore have been worn by every American president since Grover Cleveland and by governors of all the states,” according to the 1953 Sunday Sun Magazine story.
“They have been worn by the Prince of Wales, the King of Siam, Maurice Chevalier, Jack Dempsey, Max Baer, Gene Tunney, Eddie Cantor, al Jolson and George Jessel, and have been in the wardrobes of Broadway musical comedies from ‘The Jazz Singer’ in 1926 to ‘South Pacific.'”
A series of mergers by the 1960s between Brigham-Hopkins and M.S. Levy with Men’s Hats Inc. marked the end for Baltimore’s straw hat factories plus changing public taste and fashion.
It was Levy’s theory that the trend for men to go hatless began after World War II when they were forced to wear hats all the time, plus it didn’t help that President John F. Kennedy was the first hatless president.
While not rebounding to prewar levels, for health reasons today it is suggested by the medical community that hats be worn especially in the summer months to ward off the effects of the sun’s rays.
As the light of summer begins to fade and the shadows grow long in August, the straw hats days are numbered.
A 1922 Sun headline said it all: “Caliph Custom Today Sound Death Knell Of Old Straw Lid. Fifteenth Of September Marks Time When Cherished Summer Head Gear Is Laid Away For Next Season And Forgotten.”
The Evening Sun offered another solution.
“One {method} is to stealthily approach a fast moving streetcar and, after hurling the out-of-season object under the grinding wheels, depart hurriedly from the scene and leave the rest to the street cleaning department.”
