On a flight from St. Louis to Phoenix last week, a most remarkable thing happened. A  man boarded the plane wearing…a hat. It wasn’t a cowboy hat or the ubiquitous ball cap or a doo rag.

It was a fedora.

It felt like I had been transported to an episode of the new ABC show, Pan  Am, about the golden age of air travel in the 1960s.

Back in those days, a hat was simply part of the uniform of business. It added an air of seriousness and it implied competence. But as the 1956 film,The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, revealed, sometimes that uniform was a matter of style over substance, as reflected in this exchange:

Tom Rath (Gregory Peck): I don’t know anything about public relations.

Bill Hawthorne: Who does? You’ve got a clean shirt and you bathe everyday. That’s all there is to it.

That, and a fedora with a crisp brim.

And wearing a hat came with a code of etiquette, as evidenced by the drawings from a 1950s civility manual which provide guidance on how to handle a hat.

I caught a glimpse of this in an episode of Mad Men, an AMC show about the Madison Avenue advertising world in the 1960s. Ad exec Don Draper rides an elevator with two younger colleagues, one wearing a hat, who continue a risqué conversation when a woman gets onto the elevator. Disgusted, Draper levels his gaze at the offender and says, “Take your hat off.” When he doesn’t, in an act of chivalry, Draper roughly removes it for him.

Fedoras, trilbies, derbies, homburgs, bowlers, cloth caps, busbies, gatsbies, top hats, boaters, panamas…

They also seemed to have disappeared at, well, at the drop of a hat.

Although “throwing your hat in the ring” and “passing the hat” remain in our vernacular, what caused this “de-cap-itation?”

The demise of the hat is often attributed to John F. Kennedy was said to have broken with tradition by not wearing a hat at his inauguration. Kennedy actually did wear the traditional black silk top hat during most of the 1961 inaugural proceedings (and there are lots of photos to prove it), but he was hatless in that defining shot as he took the inaugural oath. That’s the image preserved in memory.

It was actually a bareheaded Lyndon Johnson who completely broke tradition at his inauguration in 1965. Although there are plenty of images of LBJ in a cowboy hat throughout his presidency.

If all this discussion has you pondering whether you need to a hat, here’s a useful website that takes the guesswork out of the kind of hat you should wear, based on the shape of your face — although they all look a little like gangsters from the Dick Tracy comic strip.

Still on the fence? Let me leave you listening to this tune from Peter Mayer’s latest CD, Heaven Below. His tribute to the hat-wearing man called, The Hat Song, is an encouragement to bring back the hat.

She will adore ya in a Fedora

You’ll be the right guy in a Pork Pie

You’ll make her heart stir in a Homburg

So don’t ever be a hatless man.