Hats I Have Worn

in my life.

This is one of the best winter hats I ever had. It was leather with nice warm earflaps for the really cold days. It was doubly fab-looking when the flaps were up.

The car, by the way, is a 1947 Dodge. It had a "Fluid Drive" transmission, so-called "suicide doors", and a 6-volt electrical system. It was a "nice ride" and I eventually sold it for some reason (that I can no longer recall).

I lost this hat shortly after this picture was taken (by, I sort of recall, Col. Dave Schmidt) -- I think by leaving it behind in a bar. I'm not sure. I really miss this hat.

In this picture, I'm wearing an orange Soo Line hardhat with a silver "property of IBM" sticker on it. That's me up the pole.

Rick "Little Polie" Zagrzebski and my dear friend Rich "Ferg" Ferguson are also shown in this picture -- Rick is on the ground with an orange hardhat, Ferg is on the ground next to him, his head is at shoulder level to Rick, and he's facing leftwards, towards me. Col. Dave Schmidt took this picture, too. I've still got that hard hat.

This was a great hat (I think my little brother Kevin took this photo). It was like a floppy Dutch boy design, made out of an old pair of blue jeans. Sly Stone wore something like it at Woodstock. This hat served me well through several years, although eventually it fell into threads.

The car? Well, pretty obviously, it's the Batmobile. There are untold tales connected with this car - it deserves a page of its own. It was, I think, a 1972 Ford Fairlane 500. I sold it to a kid who was going to use it as a hunting shack.

I don't think this hat is still around, although I intended to save it as a pattern to have another one made. It might be kicking around in a box somewhere in the basement. It was a cool hat, I think.

This is one of those little paper-like welder's hats, given to me by a pal named Doug (not pictured). I'm standing next to my friend Kit Meyer, who helped pack and decorate the old station wagon (you can see silhouettes in the windows, representing my friends in La Crosse -- I'm pretty sure Terry Halvorson made those for me).

I was leaving that day for Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I was about to start graduate school. You can see the car is sagging with the weight of all that stuff.

I didn't know it at the time, but about six months later I would get married in the house you see in the background.

I wore that hat all the way to New Mexico, and I've still got it, but I don't wear it much any more ... I don't know how to weld.

They call this kind of hat a mortar-board, and there's nothing sillier on a windy day. You get one of these after you go to school for a long time.

I've still got this hat. It hangs in my office, and I use it about once a year. It looks pretty much the same, even though my wife once ran over it with the car.

I started wearing Batman hats some time in the early 1990s, I think. This picture was taken because I was working at a research institute in Evanston, IL, and we were trying to put something online about an educational simulation we were developing.

This is one of those hats you use to stay warm in North Dakota. We get snow here sometimes, and the temperature gets cold once in a while. This picture was taken during the winter of 1996-1997 (that's our house in the background). We had our record-setting flood the following Spring, in 1997. Maybe you read about it.

This was our first winter and I didn't have a snow blower. All the snow you see was shoveled by hand, by me. I've got a snow blower now.

More to come. Looking back, it turns out I've worn a fair number of hats in my life.

If I had any heroes (using the term loosely, to include anybody I like much), their pictures might appear if you: