My wife and I visit a fairly nice restaurant close to us. You can eat at the bar, or at a low or high top table. Or outside.
Clientele is 30-70 years old.
You can wear a hat outside, not inside.
There is a sign when you walk in that clearly states “No Hats”. I suspect they do not want MAGA BS in there. That’s an easy way to do it.
Though I have not seen any MAGA BS in the new town/county we moved to. Not. A . Thing.
No hats?
They’d have lost my business.
In the 1970s, I got kicked out of a bar because I was wearing a hat (my old black cowboy hat). They had never expressed any problem with hats before that so I think that they had had a problem with someone in a hat a few days earlier. It didn’t matter, though. I never went in that bar again.
For what it’s worth, I take off my hat in restaurants as long as I have a place to set it. If I don’t have a place to set it, I wear it.
Our local church actually has a place to put our hats when we walk in.
Are you @billy-jack talking about the movie?
Out of curiosity, do you live in Texas, New Mexico, or an otherwise country/cowboy-intensive area? In my experience, hats (esp. cowboy-style hats) seem to be a lot more commonly worn by men on an everyday basis in those area, and I would suspect that “no hats” rules are less common in bars and restaurants – even “nice”/“fancy” ones – there.
My concern is that an irascible tavern owner or restauranteur – caught on the exactly wrong day – might just “take this right foot, and I’m gonna whop you on that side of your face … and you wanna know something? There’s not a damn thing you’re gonna be able to do about it.”
That’s my only real concern.
I’m thinking you know what I’m talking about.
Where I live, with more horses and cattle than people, most people have switched from hats to baseball caps, but there are still a number of us who wear hats.
In the vicinity of my town, there is one large ranch that was, at its peak, I think it exceeded 100 square miles. It is now more like about 80 or 90 square miles. There are a number of smaller ranches.
When I was younger, I wore a hat all the time. In college, I usually wore my hat while eating simply because there was no place to put it. After graduating from college about 50 years ago and going to work, I stopped wearing it, but I still have it.
Then, about ten years ago, I was working on the roof at the office one day and got a pretty severe sunburn of my eyes. Then a month later, I got another sunburn of my eyes while on top of the city hall building. A while later, I felt my eyes starting to sunburn again and went and bought a western straw hat for the summer.
I now wear two hats – a straw hat in the summer and an old, but really nice, silverbelly beaver 7X Resistol in the winter . The big city dermatologist told me that I should always wear wide brimmed hats like that to help reduce the potential for skin cancers to my head, neck, and years.
Hats used to be pretty normal wear for men. I remember seeing an older photo of a large drug store lunch counter in a big city with lots of men eating or drinking coffee. Every one of them was wearing a hat. No western hats at all – just fedoras and other hats.
I couldn’t find the photo, but I did find this one in which nearly all of the men are wearing hats:
That definitely looks more like an urban area (in my area, that lunch counter would be about three times larger than necessary) than around here and nobody seems bothered by men wearing their hats.
Nobody has ever expressed an opinion of me wearing a hat while I ate. One night at a Chinese restaurant, I was reading the Economist while waiting for my order of pressed duck and some heathen busybody with a northern accent made loud snide comments about people reading in restaurants. I ignored his ignorant remarks.
It turns out that the picture above was taken in the 1920’s at the Exchange Buffet in New York City.
Daniel Amos even did a song about it:
@billy-jack My understanding of the etiquette around hat-wearing for men is that men are (or, at least, were, back when men wore hats) expected to remove them in the following situations, most of them indoors:
And, yes, this would mean that the men in the photograph you found were violating etiquette (they are eating, and they are at an indoor restaurant).
But, these days, most men don’t wear hats regularly, and a lot of the etiquette rules above are unknown, or ignored, by those who do wear hats, as well as by those establishments where hats were usually not worn, back in the day. And, thus, a restaurant or building which have a “no hats” sign or rule comes across as odd to some people, because it’s not seen much anymore in the U.S.
And they used to wear onions on their belts.
I wear a hat just about any time I go out because I’m very self-conscious about the ugly-looking patches of seborrheic keratosis on my temples and around my ears. I offer my apologies to anyone who feels I’m violating any rules of etiquette.
When eating at a formal dining table, remove your hat. The more informal the venue, the more relaxed the “rule” is. A lunch counter in a drugstore is about as informal as indoor dining gets.
I suspect that Mrs. Post didn’t eat at lunch counters very often.
One thing she missed was removing your hat in class. I always took my hat off when taking class and when teaching class.
I had a lot of fun in one class. I would take notes with my right hand while spinning my hat on m left index finger. It drove the prof crazy. Sometimes, he would completely lose track of what he was saying. In spite of that, he never asked me to stop spinning my hat.
Schools are mentioned in the list.
Yeah, but the way it is stated seems to imply adults visiting the schools of minors.
Depending on the college or university, hats can be pretty common. Especially caps.
At the extreme would be military schools such as West Point where hats are mandatory:
Perhaps she should have written “classrooms” rather than “schools”.
Note: that is, of course, outdoors; nearly all of the etiquette rules about men and hats are about taking them off while indoors.
The U.S. military (and West Point cadets are members of the military) generally requires service members in uniform to remove their covers (hats) indoors, with some specific exceptions, and one is if they are directed to keep covered while participating in an indoor ceremony. (The big exception is if they are “under arms” – carrying a weapon as part of their duty.)
But, again, everyday hat-wearing by men (and actual hats, not just baseball caps) in the U.S. became passe by the 1960s and 1970s; as I noted previously, those who care about etiquette and hats (outside of the military, where it’s not just etiquette, but a rule) are fairly rare now.
Even though I never served in the military, I am a ‘social’ member of the local American Legion post. That’s where us old farts gather on Friday evening to quaff a few cold ones and try to solve the problems of the world. Or talk about sports.
This particular Legion post has a STRICT rule regarding headwear: Unless you’re in uniform, you cannot a wear a cap or hat. @billy-jack would not be welcome, unless he agreed to remove his cap. Every now and then somebody will raise a stink about it, but it’s usually resolved pretty quickly. Or they leave in a huff, and nobody is sorry to see them go.
I have no idea if that’s the rule in other Legion establishments.
Quite the millineresque bent this Fox thread’s taken.
Going back and looking at the “rules” again, it does says “in public buildings such as schools …”
West Point was just one example of a military academy. There are other such as VMI and the Citadel.
As for etiquette, my understanding is that baseball caps are considered to be a form of hats and that the etiquette is the same or even more strict.
From an etiquette standpoint, yes. I singled out non-cap hats just to note when everyday wearing of such declined; that time period also coincides with when US society became more casual, and such etiquette rules declined in use.
I also know that people who are concerned about style and fashion generally look down their noses at baseball caps as headwear, and consider those to not be “proper hats,” especially for adult men who are not actively playing baseball at that moment.
I think that an etiquette rule that everyone violates is no rule at all. Maybe a lunch counter was considered sufficiently informal that the rule wasn’t needed, or maybe the rule had changed by that time or in that place.
