David M. Shribman

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

MONTREAL — Time for a holiday-season break from the divisions of the day. Surely you can read about war, protests, economic strains, cultural disputes, AI, cryptocurrency, the White House ballroom and Donald Trump elsewhere.

Even here in Canada, it’s time to put aside the tensions between French speakers and English speakers, the trade war with the United States, and the worries about Chinese and Russian initiatives in the Arctic.

But one question lingers here in quiet old Canada, proof that America’s northern neighbor never really has been a true oasis of consensus: the dispute over the origin of the hockey hat trick.

Gloves off, even as the temperatures plunge in that special Canada way.

Here in Montreal, the conviction is that the hat-trick phenomenon began when a local establishment with the enigmatic name Henri Henri began presenting a free hat to any player who scored three goals in a single NHL hockey game at the old Montreal Forum. To the west, in Toronto, there is quiet confidence that it really began when a local businessman did the same at Maple Leaf Gardens.

Never mind that back in 1858, a “bowler” (not the hat, but cricket’s equivalent of a baseball pitcher) taking three consecutive wickets (kind of like three strikeouts in one inning) was given a hat as a reward. Never mind that Guelph, Ontario, 57 miles west of Toronto with a population of 143,740, has a claim, too, growing out of a minor-league hockey team called, of course, the Mad Hatters. There, fedoras were given to three-goal players.

This remains a purely Toronto-Montreal dispute, the way that the Maple Leafs and Canadiens have tangled since 1917, with the Montreal entry having more than a 100-victory margin in their more than 850 confrontations.

Here’s the Montreal story: The proprietor of Henri Henri would present a gift certificate in the sacred confines of the Forum to any player who notched three goals. The recipients include a murderer’s row of Canadiens stars. (Sorry for the 1927 New York Yankees baseball metaphor here, but legend says that Babe Ruth was partial to a camel-hair hat.) These luminaries include Maurice “Rocket” Richard and Hector “Toe” Blake. It’s not for nothing that the Montreal team sometimes is called Les Glorieux.

Now to the Toronto story: A Chicago Black Hawks star, Alex Kaleta, wandered into Sammy Taft’s hat store and took a liking to a fedora on the shelves. However, he didn’t have the money to buy it. Taft told him he could have the hat if he scored three goals that night. He did. Actually, he scored four.

Who knows the answer? Who cares? And anyway — to cadge a line from the Stephen Sondheim song that inserted the phrase “the ladies who lunch” into the English language — does anyone still wear a hat?

Abraham Lincoln doesn’t count. Nor does Theodore Roosevelt, who alternatively wore a Rough Rider hat and an Ecuadorian-made tequila hat. Nor Woodrow Wilson, who donned a silk top hat and a straw boater. Franklin Roosevelt wore a black beaver-fur top hat at his 1933 inauguration.

And no one knows for sure — urban legend — that American men stopped wearing hats when John F. Kennedy appeared at his 1961 inauguration without a hat despite 22-degree temperatures. Kennedy actually was partial to fedoras, and any notion that the Kennedy administration was anti-hat should be dismissed with a picture of Jacqueline Kennedy in a pillbox.

Lyndon B. Johnson often wore a Western hat. Decades later, George W. Bush wore a baseball cap. So, you need not be reminded, does Trump. His are red.

Actually, put aside the truth that here in Canada you truly do need a hat in these environs; the preferred ones here in Montreal are a knitted ski cap commonly called a tuque. Then there’s Tom McGough, the estimable Pittsburgh attorney who bought his fedora online for a simple reason. He was waiting for a bus one day and his head was cold. “I figured that there must be hats that were made to go with a suit,” he told me, “and I only wear them in season, and this is pretty much the season.”

A Jewish composer wrote a song that began “In your Easter bonnet.” John Cheever rooted many of his stories in what he called, in his 1978 anthology, “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light.” He was speaking of a time “when almost everybody wore a hat.”

All those crowding into theaters this autumn to see “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” surely noticed that the male characters were wearing hats. When Georges Pompidou became president of France in 1969, Yvonne de Gaulle, the wife of his predecessor, offered only three words of advice: Wear a hat.

Canada is the only country built by a hat: The 17th-century popularity of the fur hat spurred the westward travel of the early trappers. The modern American heyday of the hat probably came with the 1936 opening of the Worth & Worth store in New York. The company occupied all five floors of its store at 603 Fifth Avenue, its hats designed to match the character, head size and shape of its customers — in short, “to essentially capture the client’s essences.” When Beyonce, Sean Connery and Elvis Costello began wearing its headgear, the store’s hats started appearing in Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue. Rolling Stone named Worth & Worth “The Rock and Roll Haberdasher.”

In every college classroom, students wear baseball hats, though these scholars mostly have them on backward. When the Toronto Blue Jays trailed in the American League Championship final, their fans turned their hats inside out and backward, a ritual fashion statement known as the “rally cap” — a tradition dating to the 1970s and the San Francisco Giants. (The Blue Jays won.) Your dermatologist will tell you to wear a hat to prevent skin cancer.

So hats endure. “They’ve never gone out of fashion,” said Janet Kelly, the Pittsburgh-based fashion influencer. “Women especially are always going to wear hats. They’re kind of immune from fashion trends.”

As for hockey and the hat trick: In 1979, the NHL required all players to wear helmets.

A tip of the hat to all of you at this splendid season. We’ll get back to Donald Trump next week. No doubt he’ll be wearing a hat then.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.