Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Stetson: American Icon, a beautiful and heavy (nearly six-pound) coffee table book that’s out now. Through archival and modern photographs and personal odes, the book celebrates the iconic Garland, Texas, hatmaker.
Growing up in the ’60s, I watched all the great Westerns, and I always wanted to be a cowboy. I wore a cowboy hat from when I was little onward. It was an inexpensive, black felt hat. Grown-ups referred to it as my Stetson.
I’ll own a real Stetson one day, I thought to myself.
The oldest real Stetson I still wear, I bought in 1990 from longtime Houston hatter Gary Cohen of Gary’s Hats and, later, The Hat Store. It’s a silverbelly 20X, 4½-inch cattleman’s crease in the crown with a 3½-inch, mild-set brim, the kind of traditional shape my cattlemen uncles wore, the shape all the old cattlemen at auction sales wore, the shape that says Texas…