My Hat

This week an old friend who lives on the other side of the continent dropped back into my life. We were classmates and sorority sisters during our college days at Transylvania, but we haven’t seen each other in over forty years.

Reunions are as sweet as ripe fall pears when you’ve reached our stage of life. We’ve talked non-stop about the old days, the new days, and many of the ones in between.

But we haven’t talked about the wide-brimmed felt hat I wore to the Freshman Tea. Because I can’t, even now, do so without blushing.

The early sixties were a confusing time to come of age especially in Kentucky. (Mark Twain, you may recall, said he wanted to die in Kentucky because everything happens ten years later here than in the rest of the country.) Time magazine was running cover stories about the sexual revolution on America’s college campuses, psychedelic drug use, and student sit-ins for civil rights in the south.

My college handbook, on the other hand, told me in no uncertain terms that I was expected to wear a skirt, never slacks, to class, and that all Transylvania students were expected to “dress for dinner” each evening in the college dining hall. That meant high heels and a nice dress for coeds, jackets and ties for males.

The handbook was mailed to my home weeks before classes began, and I crammed so that I wouldn’t break any of the many rules. Freshmen were to be in their rooms studying from eight until ten each weeknight. Lights were to be turned out at eleven. A co-ed had to sign out and state her destination whenever she left the dorm after six p.m. Of course there was a strict curfew, nine during the week and midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. And if a boy were ever caught in a co-ed’s dorm room – well, the handbook didn’t spell out the punishment but I inferred she would be drawn and quartered by the Dean of Women on the lawn of Old Morrison Chapel.

We freshmen arrived on campus on a hot September Sunday, and our first official event was a late afternoon tea at the college President’s home. Growing up on a tobacco farm at Natlee, I’d always taken my tea with ice in a tall glass usually slouched on the front porch glider. But I understood that “a tea” was not about what we’d be drinking. I’d been in a small tizzy over what to wear.

Mother, however, assured me she knew what one wore to a tea at the President’s house. She’d attended college in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and knew about such things. A nice day dress would be appropriate, but of course, I’d have to co-ordinate a matching hat. “One always wears a hat to a tea,” she said. Having seen all those photographs of Queen Elizabeth in Life magazine, I knew she was right.

So off we went to purchase my debut college outfit at the best store we could think of, Wolf Wiles Department Store down in Lexington. Stores like Wolf Wiles don’t exist in the suburban shopping mall world that most Americans know today. It was a little like the better Manhattan stores I’ve ambled through in later years, quiet and elegant, except the clerks weren’t arrogant. It might be better compared to a contemporary boutique except it was huge, rambling over multiple, long, wide floors plus a mezzanine. The faint scent of expensive perfume permeated its every nook.

I settled on a fitted, navy sheath dress with discreet red piping in just the right places. I have to say that in my memory it was one of the more flattering dresses I ever owned. Then it was time to select the hat.

I felt like Cinderella dressing for the ball when I sat down in one of the satin chairs in front of a long bank of mirrors in the hat department. The kind saleswoman brought one headpiece after another for me try. Finally, she and Mother and even several passers-by agreed that the simple, unembellished – but large-- navy felt hat was perfect for my height (tall) and for my dress (straight and narrow.) With its wide brim dipping asymmetrically to the top of one eyebrow, the hat was sophisticated and chic. I never felt as glamorous, before or since, as I did the moment I decided to buy that hat.

You have guessed how this story ends. I was the only girl at the Freshman Tea who wore a hat. Standing at least 5’10” or more in my heels and dramatic headgear, I was not even able to fade into the shadows.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating my faux pas, let me share that decades later classmates at reunions would make remarks about their first impression of me, saying they had thought I was a professor or someone’s young stepmother “in my hat.” Apparently, everyone who was at the tea remembers my hat. And not in a good way, though I think I probably did look good. I was out of step when blending in was the assignment we’d been given that afternoon.

I wish I could say that I laughed off the incident, that I was indifferent to being different. But I was mortified, perhaps as much for Mother as for myself. I’d never known her to be dead-wrong before. Despite her intelligence and wisdom, I had arrived in this new cosmopolitan world I was entering looking like a country bumpkin who was trying too hard.

I never again was the self-assured girl I’d been in my small high school. I’ve often regretted the confident edge I lost that afternoon, and wondered if my life would have turned out ever so slightly altered if I hadn’t worn a hat to the Freshman Tea.

Yet it may have been good to learn at the outset how very much I had to learn. After forty years, I’ve concluded that grasping the scope of one’s ignorance is about what a college education amounts to.