Crystal Wise
No compilation of hat shapes is complete without Fort Worth crossing the mind. And it stands to reason that with Fort Worth’s place in Western culture, it should have a hat shape.
It does: The Fort Worth Crease, widely popular in the current day.
The shape is generally seen on a 3 1/2 -inch brim with a “cow kick” in the front and another in the back.
Another hat synonymous with Fort Worth was Amon Carter’s Shady Oak.
“That whole style of short-brimmed, silver-belly-colored dress hat was invented by Peters Bros. in 1920 at the request of Amon Carter,” says Roger Chieffalo, proprietor of Chieffalo Americana. “The hat became so popular in the ’20s that all the other hatmakers followed suit and made a hat like that.
“By the 1930s it was the most popular hat in America.”
Stetson, with its broader audience, made an exact replica and called it the Open Road, which Lyndon Johnson popularized. Resistol called it the San Antonio.
Carter had been wearing a Tom Mix-style, 7-inch crown and 5-inch brim. Chieffalo recalls the story of when Carter went to New York with that hat he was mistaken for a vaudeville cowboy, and that insulted him.
When he returned to Fort Worth, he sat down with Tom Peters to discuss a hat that would fit in among Eastern fedoras but was Western in style.
Mr. Peters said to Amon, ‘How do you want to shape this hat?’” Chieffalo says. “He said he wanted it to be distinctively ‘Fort Worth, Texas.’”
Carter’s Shady Oak and the replicas that followed were, Chieffalo says, synonymous with the Cattleman but silver bellied in color and with a shorter crown and brim of 2 2/3 inches, according Amon, the authorized biography written by Jerry Flemmons.
“He made that hat style so popular that cowboys started wearing their hats that way,” Chieffalo says.
Every celebrity who came to Carter’s Shady Oak Farm received a hat. According to Flemmons, Amon gave away thousands of his hats to visitors. He bought them in such numbers that Hat Life, an industry publication, declared him the “world’s greatest retail hat customer.”
For three decades many of America’s best-known personalities wore nothing but Amon Carter’s Shady Oak hats. Flemmons notes lunch in Los Angeles with a cohort of Patrick Hurley, FDR’s first secretary of defense, Will Rogers, Bernard Baruch, and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.
Each wore a Shady Oak hat.
Borsalino, the Italian hat company that made hats for European heads of state, supplied the hat bodies. They shipped to Peters Bros., who finished the hat and shaped it. Chieffalo says Amon bought so many hats that he became the No. 1 consumer of Borsalino hats in the world.
This fact led to an interesting footnote in history.
When Amon Carter Jr. was taken prisoner in 1943 during WWII in North Africa, he was initially held in Italy.
Amon sent a note to the head of Borsalino, who knew Mussolini, that asked him to intervene on his son’s behalf and assist with his release.
The head of Borsalino refused the request.
That led to a volcanic Amon, who threw his Borsalinos in the closest dumpster and demanded that Peters Bros. do the same.
“‘I don’t ever want any of my hats made by Borsalino again. I don’t ever want to see a Borsalino in your shop again. Any hats you have for me, get rid of them,’” Chieffalo recalls the story, paraphrasing Amon’s demands.
Chieffalo adds that Amon succeeded in shutting down Borsalino’s operation in Texas.
In 1943, Amon switched to Stetson from that point forward.
Stetson’s hat was a 5-inch crown and 2 3/4-inch brim.
But that was OK with Amon.
