What’s in a hat?

We’re in the final stretch of this election season, thank God. It’s a hallowed and important part of life in a republic like ours. I think you can make the argument that it’s even more important in a thinly populated state like ours. That said, it ain’t always pretty. Sometimes it is, as my old friend Jack Streeter used to say, “uglier than nine miles of muddy road.” 

Since Democrats are somewhat scarce in the Cowboy State, the Republican primary election is a big deal here. And if the spending of the candidates and their supporters is any indication, it’s also an expensive deal. But I’ll leave that to the political pundits and focus instead on something that caught my attention: hats.

Somewhere along the line, advisors to the trust fund babies and political refugees seeking public office in Wyoming got the idea that if you sent an AI-generated image of the candidate wearing a western hat to the voters, they would reciprocate with a vote on Aug. 18. If you sent the voters one of those every day for a month, that vote would be a sure thing. It was a strategy born inside the Beltway and destined to fail. 

Nothing looks worse than some pilgrim running for office in an ill-fitting hat. It reeks of artifice at best, cheap manipulation at worst. What’s next? Rodeo buckles? Bull cutter knives?  Woolly chaps? But at least for now, it’s hats. Always a hat. And that started me thinking. 

As near as I can tell, the men in my family have always been men with hats. Part of it, no doubt, comes from being caught between a genetic rock and a climatic hard spot. We are outdoor men in a sunny climate who still bear the fair skin of our German and English ancestors. Consequently, in order to avoid being burned to a cinder from the top down, we wear hats. Let me illustrate:

Above is my grandfather Walt Gasson, born in Iowa in 1875 and transplanted to Wyoming as a little tyke. He was a ‘stockman” who summered his sheep in the Wyoming Range near Commissary Ridge and wintered them in the high desert country south of Rock Springs. It called for a lot of time in the saddle, riding from camp to camp, bringing supplies to the herders. He wore a hat that was the real article — weather-beaten and battered, with a low crown and a wide brim to shelter him from the sun and ever-present wind. 

If you look very closely, you can see that he’s also wearing a neckerchief to protect his neck and gloves to protect his hands. No skin cancer for old Walt Gasson. Like all the stockmen of the time, he covered every square inch of skin with something. It was a pity all that protective gear couldn’t shield him from the influenza epidemic of 1918 that killed him. 

My dad is in the picture below, fishing in the Wind Rivers in 1960. Gus, the son of Walt Gasson the sheep rancher, was never very far from his stockman’s roots. And he was never very far from his hat. This one was his favorite. It was a Resistol with a flat crown and a tightly curled brim, in the style of the day. He wore it for years, and like all favorite hats, it grew battered and sweat-stained. My mother tried to get him to buy a new one, but he loved that hat. Like his father, he died young. A heart attack killed him seven years after this photo was taken. I remember coming home once to find my mom sitting in the big chair by the bay window. She was holding that hat and silently crying. 

And the third picture is me this past summer. And sure enough, I’m wearing a hat. Being a Gasson male, I never go out without one.  That one is a twelve-year-old Stetson straw with a wide brim and a Gus crease in the crown. Like me, it’s got a lot of miles on it. And I think it’s legit. Like the previous generations, there’s no artifice, no agenda — the hat is simply a part of who I am. 

If you look at the photos of my grandfather, my father and me, you’ll notice something much more important than the hats we wear. All three photos are taken in the outdoors, in the mountains and deserts of Wyoming that we call home. We’re Wyoming guys — guys who hunt and fish and ride and feel best when we’re with family and friends in the great wide open, and sometimes when we’re all alone. 

Whenever I open the mailbox and see one of those campaign mailers that features some Wyoming wannabe in an ill-fitting lid that looks like it was purchased under the grandstands at Frontier Park, I mentally delete them as a serious candidate. In this era of artificial intelligence and media influence, your hat says a lot about you. If it’s an expression of who you are, then that comes through clearly. Think Mike Sullivan, JD Williams or Jim Byrd. If it’s just playing dress-up, that comes through clearly as well.  To borrow a line from The Lion King, “You must never go there, Simba.”

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