My father bought his first Stetson in 1973 when he left his Wall Street job and moved our family west to Colorado. I suppose he figured that if he were going to live in the mountains, he might as well dress the part. So, he traded in his three-piece suits for blue jeans, boots, and what was likely a grey Monterey Stetson, or its 1970s equivalent, with a simple leather band. At six-five, my father was already difficult to miss. With his Stetson atop his head, it was nearly impossible.
That first hat became part of his daily uniform—rain, hail, snow, or shine. Every morning he drove his 1973 AMC Jeep to open his hardware store, the Jeep’s soft top flapping in the wind and battering the crown of the hat. No big-box stores back then. He worked the floor, handled the books at night, and even opened the store for the inevitable Christmas-morning emergency when someone needed to repair a frozen water pipe. He never missed payroll. And he wore his Stetson.
It was a curious transformation. My father was never a cowboy and never pretended to be. He could neither rope nor ride, and when the subject of his new look came up, he took a fair amount of good-natured ribbing from old friends. But the real challenge came from his mother (my Nana), who could never quite understand why her only son had hung up his three-piece suits for a denim shirt, a hardware store, and a mustache. Until the day she died, she held out hope that one day, my dad would shave, hang up the hat, and make her the talk of the coffee cake circuit by finally becoming a doctor or a lawyer. Sorry, Nana. No such luck.
A few years after we moved to Colorado, our family was invited to a barbecue. Of course, my father wore his hat. We were standing on the back deck of a friend’s house when our host, Dave, handed my dad a beer. He looked at my father with a furrowed brow, as though he were sizing him up.
“Something’s not right,” Dave muttered, cocking his head.
Without missing a beat, Dave grabbed the Stetson from my dad’s head and ran to the railing, produced a .32-caliber pistol from his belt, and fired a single shot through the crown of the hat and into the hillside behind the house.
Dave slapped the hat back onto my father’s head and grinned.
"Now you look like a cowboy,” he said.
We all just stood there for a beat as the shock wore off. Then the entire party erupted with laughter. It was one of those moments laced with absurdity—Dave with his pistol, my dad with his bullet-riddled hat.
As far as I know, Dave never made good on his promise to replace the hat, but my father wore it for another ten years before finally buying a new one. The stories of the bullet holes grew with each telling, each recounting more exaggerated than the last.
When my father died in 2018, I found that old Stetson tucked in a box in his closet, bullet holes and all. Of the myriad of decisions we had to make during those weeks, the one I regret the most is not keeping that hat. It wasn’t just the bullet holes that made it special; it was the way it marked his journey, the way it became part of his identity, and the way it kept him tied to both his past and his future.
The hat, in its tattered, well-worn state, was a symbol of everything my father had become—a man who had embraced the unknown, who had walked away from one life to start another, all while holding on to his family and the little bits of his past that meant the most.
It took me a few decades to find the right Stetson, which I wear every day. And like my father, I’m no cowboy and don’t pretend to be. But every now and then, when I set my Stetson on my head, I think of the man who lived a life well lived—my father, not a cowboy, but someone who carved out a direction all his own.