I’m sure you’ve seen him: the elderly man wearing a baseball cap with the band adjusted almost as small as it will go, and the hat simply perched on the crown of his head.
If you look at the way a baseball cap is “supposed to” to be worn — as it is worn by, say, baseball players — the band should be just above the ears. The shell of the cap should be close to the scalp. It’s how the cap is designed.
I’ve noticed that older men who wear baseball caps to work in — farmers, orchardists, etc. — wear their caps “properly”, i.e. the band around the head just above their ears, so that it doesn’t fall or blow off. That leads me to believe that the old men who “perch” their caps were perhaps more white-collar workers who came up during the days when men always wore fedora-style hats with their suits. The former group wears the cap for practical reasons, while the latter wears it for appearance or out of habit, and perhaps due to wearing fedoras they aren’t accustomed to feeling the hat touching the top of the head.
Heck, I’ve seen these same old men wear stocking caps the same way during cold winter months - in a crumpled heap perched on top of their heads, rather than pulled down to their ears.
Any other ideas about why the old men wear baseball caps in this manner?
[sub]And before you start: no, it doesn’t look any sillier than young men wearing their caps backwards, sideways, or inside-out.[/sub]
My uncle would occasionally do that. He said that a “real” baseball cap would come in sizes, not with the adjustable strap. Since he grew up wearing sized caps and hats, then got used to never wearing a hat, he often simply forgot or ignored the strap on modern caps. Too new for him I guess. He wore a cap to keep the rain off the eyeglasses or the sun out of his eyes, and could care less what he looked like.
Well, if you look at gimme caps like you get from seed corn companies and tractor companies, they’ve got a mesh back and sides. Some (older) men may prefer a little room between head and hat so they can catch a cooling breeze and let air circulate.
Y’all have probably figured out by now I’m either married to a Dekalb or John Deere rep, or I grew in up in the Great Plains.
Before I opened this thread, I imagined being in a time warp and opening this same thread forty years in the future, to see the young whippersnappers asking why the old men wear their baseball caps backwards.
It’ll happen, just you wait.
It means they’re in a gang. You’ll also notice how high their pants are! And if you walk by their porch wearing the wrong color suspenders, they’ll stab you!
I know why my father does, because that’s the way hats were worn. When I was young, my father told me that I was wearing my baseball cap “wrong”. It was pulled down, with my head filling the cloth part of the cap. I was told the “proper” way to wear the cap was with the band holding it up on your head where your head would not be touching the top cart of the cap.
Now, the reason for this or where my father was taught this… I don’t know. I could be that he was taught this in the military or it was hat wearing etiquette of the time.
As for the stocking cap thing, my step father said he got it from the Navy.
When you have a baseball cap on correctly it interferes with your peripheral vision a little bit…or it does on me, anyway. They annoy the crap out of me. Maybe that’s it?
Not all old men do that. And then there’s the crowd that thinks there is a benefit to putting a curve into the bill, defeating its intended function of keeping the sun out of the eyes. Ah, peer conformity.
Off to Great Debates?
