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BILLINGS, Mont.--It turns out there are more
potato heads among us than we might have guessed.
For instance, me.
This discovery occurred because, like
scores of people each year, I made an excuse to travel to eastern
Montana and to insert my head into a "conformeur"- a
spindly, 150-year-old machine with levers and springs that looks
something like a circular harpsichord the size of a half-melon.
The levers and springs are connected to
pins. When the conformeur comes to rest on your head, 11/2 inches
above your eyes, the machine's operator presses a 3-by-5 piece of paper
onto the pins. Perforations
provide a miniature template of one's skull in cross-section.
Forget the symmetrical ovals from those
how-to-draw art books. My own head appeared before me as a misshapen
ellipse that had been dropped and not so gently kicked.
Or, yes, like a potato sliced in half lengthwise.
No wonder I cannot find a good hat that
fits.
Which is precisely why one ventures to
the industrial side of Billings, to a gaily painted two-story building
with country music playing in the background and clouds of steam rising
inside. Here, with money and patience, you can get a hat that rides on
your head the way your bottom might rest on the driver's saddle of a
Rolls-Royce.
Ritch Rand is one of the great custom
cowboy hat makers of the American West-and probably the best known. Here
at Rand's Custom Hats, he and six hatters work against a 12-week backlog
to supply cowboys, cowgirls, Hollywood actors, guides, adventurers, fly
fishermen, park rangers and city strollers with fur felt hats of
extraordinary quality: Hats molded to the curves, dents and lumps of our
heads; hats shaped with steam and century-old hot-irons. Hats of
beaver-felt that are scraped with whalebone, sanded velvet smooth and
embossed with 8X and 10X and 40X marks of quality.
“Most people aren't normal," says the 50-year-old Rand, by way of
explaining the fit of a hat.
A cynic might observe the same
about the Western hat itself and those who wear one.
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The cowboy hat started as a joke, after all.
According to the story as recounted by Rand in the 1995 volume he
co-authored, "The Cowboy Hat Book," Philadelphia hatter John
B. Stetson came West on a hunting trip. He showed his companions he
could make cloth out of fur without weaving-that is, by felting. Then,
for a laugh, he shaped the felt into a hat with a colossal brim. Right
away, a person could tell that such a hat would put up a fight against
sun and rain, and Stetson sold it to a horseman. That was in 1865.
American cowhands, like nomadic peoples all over the
world, traditionally invested their wealth in things they could use and
carry with them-boots and saddles, ropes and buckles-and, more recently,
pickups. A good Stetson became the essential finishing touch to every
wrangler's get-up.
Today, of course, the cowboy hat is known
throughout the world as distinctly American, except in America, where it
is provincially Western.
For the last 25 years, Rand has been
making a living from the knowledge that, entirely apart from periodic
fashion fads, cowpunchers are willing to spend a week's pay or more for
a good hat. That might be $300, which is the average price today for a
Rand hat in 75 or so catalog styles, or whatever other shape a customer
chooses.
There are mountainous Tom Mix packer
hats, Western derbies, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" safari hats,
Belle Starr models with an, attached earring, full-brimmed gamblers or,
my own choice, a pre-Stetson era "San Fran" fedora.
For $40 more, a hat can be
"distressed" so it looks like six months of sweat and dusty
trail-a feature more popular in urban California than among
Montana buyers.
As Rand likes to explain, a factory can
produce, a hat by machine in 10 minutes. It takes him almost that long
to stamp the customer's name in gold on the sweatband. In fact, it can
take a single hatter a full day to make the best of Rand's hats.
Although he produces hats in standard sizes for sale in
Western stores and via mail order, Rand's reputation is
built on bespoke work. And for that, the secret is the miniature paper
template.
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It is trimmed with scissors and inserted
into the conformeur's elegant pot-shaped companion, the "fomateur"-19th
century machines made in France and still unbeatable for fitting hats.
Small wooden legs are adjusted around the miniature template to
produce a mold in the exact size and potato shape of the customer's
head at the hat line.
Around that, the crown of the hat is
steamed to size from a floppy cone of factory-made felt. Grades
of felt are tricky business. Many hatters use their own version of the
"X" scale. An 8X Rand signifies 80% beaver and 20% rabbit
fur. A 10X is pure beaver. A 4OX is prime belly fur.
The brim is ironed flat. The felt is
sanded. Using curved irons, heated on a hot plate, the brim is rolled.
Perhaps a ribbon is sewn over the edge. Creases in the crown are
sculpted by hand and steam. A liner is glued in and a sweatband and
exterior band are hand stitched. The hat is given a once-over
with a barber’s horsehair brush. Then that moment when the finished
work glides onto your head and locks into place.
There is an old cowboy putdown about
someone being all hat and no cattle. But having the proper hat, at
least, is a start.
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