I guess another way of asking this question is “when did those Veteran baseball hats become common?”
Most Americans are surely familiar with the various Veteran baseball hats. They’re typically black, with “World War II Veteran”, “Korea Veteran”, “Vietnam Veteran”, as well as more recent wars, written in gold letters, and the service ribbon associated with the war emblazoned in the middle of the hat (beneath the name of the war and the word Veteran."
I was idly wondering if these hats were ever made for World War I veterans. I feel like I’ve been seeing these hats for my entire life (I’m 33). The last American veteran of that war is reported to have died in 2011. His name was Frank Buckles and he died at the age of 110.
Did the generation of men to serve in WWI simply not overlap with baseball caps?
Well they certainly overlapped with baseball caps which were worn before the turn of the 19-20th century, but I never saw one. Wearing a baseball cap (other than while playing baseball) wasn’t common I don’t think until kids in the 50s
Baseball caps were strictly for baseball or other sports. For a formal occasion like Armistice Day or Decoration Day, you’d wear a hat like a fedora or the like – definitely something with a full brim.
The predecessor of the baseball cap for military reunions and VFW events was the side cap; basically an envelope you wear on your head. The Baby Boomers were the first generation to wear ball caps off the field; first as children in the 50s and 60s. I don’t think it was common to see adults wearing them until at least the 70s.
Looking back at old photos of Bob Hope entertaining the troops, I see soldiers in Korea and Vietnam wearing baseball-style caps with their fatigues. I wonder if vets from those wears started wearing them, and the WW2 vets copied from them.
Those are fatigue caps; made famous by Castro…who also played baseball. But the design is slightly different.
The logo’s, embroidery, even screen printing, didn’t become cheap and common until later.
The only WWI vet I knew spent most of his subsequent life in Korea, where (at the time) they thought all western-style hats and caps looked vaguely or outrageously ridiculous. He didn’t wear caps much in later life. His American Legion photos show him in the garrison cap.
Well, yeah, in 1934. But the question is about recently, when you cannot deny MANY veterans of other wars sported baseball caps specifying what they were a veteran of. There’s zillions of them, even though veteran baseball caps didn’t exist until long after those other wars. WWII veterans often wore such caps even though an adult wearing baseball caps was not something they grew up with or would have seen until long after the war.
That said, I cannot find evidence any existed specifically for WWI. The remaining WWI veterans started to really die off in droves in the 80s, and these ballcaps did not become common until the 90s so I guess there was just never enough of a market.
What I found when Googling was that there were “garrison caps” embroidered for WWI veterans. (If you look on eBay, you can find ones for sale.) And even earlier, there were other hat styles for members of the Grand Army of the Republic (veterans on the Union side in the Civil War).