I hope it isn’t too early to begin predictions for the new millennium, because I have a small, modest, even parochial one to make, and here it is: Before the first decade of our third millennium, a Jewish high holiday service will be led by a rabbi — I do not say an Orthodox rabbi — wearing a baseball cap. Whether that cap will be worn backwards, I cannot predict. It will, though, be one-size-fits-all.
This vision came to me roughly a month ago when I saw a man — in his middle sixties, I would guess — come out of a nearby synagogue in a dark suit. In his hand was the small velvet bag in which Jews keep their prayer shawl, prayer book, and sometimes phylacteries, and atop his head sat the black cap with white lettering of the Chicago White Sox. In his look I noted not the least glint of humor, playfulness, irony. It was evidently his standard headgear, part of his regular get-up.
I own a few baseball caps myself — one a replica of the old Gas House Gang St. Louis Cardinals of the 1930s, another with Stanford written across the top, a third with the name of the town of Stonington, Connecticut — but I tend not to wear them on religious holidays, at funerals, to circumcisions, or while lecturing at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. I wear them, in fact, infrequently and mostly to keep off the sun, for I find that they do not increase my natural beauty.
I do not know exactly when baseball caps went ubiquitous, as they now are, but I do recall my first memory of one being worn indoors. I was teaching a course in a seminar room in the library at Northwestern University when a student entered wearing the black cap with orange logo of the San Francisco Giants. “Mr. O’Brien,” I said, “that hat, are you perchance wearing it for religious reasons?” When he allowed that he wasn’t, I gently suggested he remove it, which he did, without argument or obvious resentment. Not long after, when I suggested another student remove his baseball cap, he did so, displaying a fierce bramble of hair, and told me that he was wearing it because he hadn’t a chance to shampoo that morning and was having what we should now call, in our nicely nuanced psychological age, “a bad hair day.”
I continued to ask male students to remove their baseball caps in my classrooms. But when female students began wearing them, with their ponytails sticking out the back, I knew the game was up. All that is left for me now is occasional sniping. When recently teaching a class on irony, I said that the ironic method entails saying one thing and meaning another, and offered as an example that “I find nothing so invigorating as teaching about the meaning of evil in the novels of Joseph Conrad to a group of students wearing their baseball caps backwards.” No baseball caps showed up in that class for another three weeks.
A salesman at Brooks Brothers once told me, with great chagrin, that he had a 26-year-old grandson who didn’t know how to tie a necktie. Many more people, much older than 26, apparently are unaware that men aren’t supposed to wear hats indoors, let alone that they used to be doffed or at least tipped outdoors in the presence of women. Anyone who does remember such things can only have exulted at that scene in The Sopranos, the splendid HBO soap opera, when Tony Soprano, dining in a respectable Italian restaurant, goes up to a youngish man wearing a baseball cap and suggests that, if he doesn’t remove it, he will at the very least maim him. I myself could, as we say, “identify.”
The spread of the baseball cap is part of the large trend toward the informalization of American clothing. A friend who has a men’s shop tells me that nowadays his only customers for suits are lawyers. I myself buy fewer suits. I still teach in a necktie, for I like the distance it puts between the students and me. I also prefer to fly wearing a necktie, perhaps because, should the plane go down, I wouldn’t want to meet my Maker underdressed. Yet, great stiffo that I am, I nonetheless find myself more and more lapsing into the informal. Not long ago I proposed to a friend, quite as formal as I in these matters, that, at dinner that evening with our wives, we forgo wearing neckties. A longish pause ensued. “Audacious,” he said.
Joe DiMaggio was perhaps the only man of intrinsic elegance whose looks were not diminished by a baseball cap. Impossible to imagine Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, or Noel Coward in one. Coward it was who once discovered himself, in a business suit, at a party in which every other man in the room was in white tie and tails. “Please,” he said, “I don’t want anyone to apologize for overdressing.” I don’t believe he could have quite brought that off had he been wearing the cap of the Arizona Diamond-backs.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
