Free Republic

... So what happened? Why did guys stop wearing headgear in midcentury America? The turning point, most people say, was John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Before Kennedy, all presidents wore top hats on their first day at work. Kennedy brought one, but hardly ever put it on. Fashionistas say Kennedy, one of our most charismatic presidents, made hats un-happen. And, chronologically speaking, after JFK, guys everywhere, even balding ones like astronaut John Glenn, went topless. But I am the son of a hat designer. And my father, Allen S. Krulwich, had a different explanation. The president who de-hatted America, he thought,...

Author Stetson Kennedy, whose infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan helped expose its workings in the 1940s, has died. He was 94. Historian and friend Peggy Bulger said he died Saturday. He had been in hospice care at a hospital near St. Augustine, Florida. In the 1940s, Kennedy helped write "Superman" radio show episodes that exposed and ridiculed the Klan's rituals. In the 1950s he wrote "I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan," which was later renamed "The Klan Unmasked," and "The Jim Crow Guide." He passed along information about the Klan to the FBI, the IRS and other authorities....

Stetson hat to be new Army standard headgear In a tip-of-the-brim nod to its American frontier history, the Army is likely to change hats again - returning to the days of the wild west and adopting a dark blue Stetson as the official head cover... Read More