Mary L Kelly

It’s 1934. My father is wearing a cream colored fedora, cigar in hand, holding my oldest sister, with his first wife looking over adoringly. Fedora and cigar. Always. He wore his fedora to work (the good one), to church every Sunday, to wakes and funerals.

In the Forties through the early Sixties, he wore a gray Chicago fedora. On the farm he also wore a ratty old broken down brown fedora. It was oil stained, usually covered in dust and stray bits of hay. His farmer work hat. The only farmer I ever knew who wore a fedora driving a 1930’s red Massey-Ferguson tractor.

Sifting through a stack of old black and white family photos recently, I found a photo of my grandfather (1950) standing with his grandchildren. He was wearing an old fedora. He died in 1952, so my father likely wore the old broken down fedora to remember. 

 My father passed away thirty years later. Shortly after the wake and funeral and the neighbor’s and friend's casserole dishes had been emptied, washed and returned, I dug around my father’s closet looking for the hat box. I wanted to put on that fedora to remember. 

“Where’s Dad’s fedora?” I asked my mother. She thought for a moment. “I have no idea.” But of course she did. I’m certain one of my older brothers was given it. And he deserved it. He had worked side by side with my father since he was a boy. The day Dad died, my brother sat bereft, “I’ve lost my best friend.” And he had. He left us two years ago too. And the hat? No idea.

So, a few months back I bought this one, a Fifties Chicago fedora, on eBay. To remember.