Whether they wore hats or caps was sort of dependent on their economic status. The so-called working men—men who worked with their hands, such as laborers, mechanics and so forth—wore caps. Those considered professionals—lawyers, doctors and businessmen—wore hats, which were snap brim hats.

For some reason newspaper reporters, who in those days were mostly male, always wore hats, not caps. They even wore them inside sitting at their desks.

One of the most famous hat wearers, for example, was Walter Winchell (although there are those who would argue that he never really was a newsman, just a gossip columnist.)

Winchell thought of himself as a newspaperman, however, and wore a snap brim hat, even when he was broadcasting over the radio.

Then there were straw hats. Straw hats definitely have gone the way of the dinosaurs. In the early part of this century men wore them in the summer and went back to felt hats in the fall and winter. Ferry commuters on San Francisco Bay, so I have been told, used to mark the passing of the seasons by tossing their straw hats in the bay.

Hats in those days revealed much about those who wore them.

I had an uncle who was a farmer but who always wore a hat in the summer and winter, indoors and out. He also wore a pipe, which he seldom smoked, stuck in the corner of his mouth, but that's another story.

Hats were a general part of male attire, but as a part of everyday wear they seem to have gone out of style with my uncle's generation. Even the Boy Scouts of America dropped hats as a part of their uniform during the 1940s and replaced them with what some called overseas caps.

These days hats are pretty uncommon, and men, whether they're professionals, businessmen or laborers, don't wear caps, either. Indeed, the cap—except for golfers, a few male tennis players and some armed forces personnel—is seldom seen either. I'm not sure why this is or exactly how it happened, but somewhere about the beginning of World War II the hat and the cap seem to have disappeared, presumably never to return.

Somewhat the same fate has overtaken the necktie. But neckties are still around. A man in a suit somehow just doesn't look right without a shirt and a necktie, but they aren't universal.

And in Silicon Valley the three-piece suit seems reserved for bankers, some executives and people of that ilk. Software engineers and a majority of electronics industry men seem to have made jeans, shirts without neckties and jackets the costume of the day. Three-piece suits show up now and then, but they are a rarity.

Again, I'm not sure why this happened or why it happened in electronics. Certainly in the days when the aerospace business was this valley's principal employer, engineers wore coats and ties to work, and so did newspapermen.

I can remember the managing editor of the newspaper where I once worked insisting that we wear coats and ties to work— and we did. Today, I don't find the coat and tie widespread among newspeople, although it's by no means as dead as the dodo.

All this, I guess, is male style and even more lasting than the changes in women's dress, which in my lifetime have gone from skirts that almost dragged on the ground to the tiniest of miniskirts. But then, unlike women, men in America change their dress very slowly.

Still they do change the way they dress. In George Washington's day men of substance wore wigs and knee britches—unless, of course, they were frontiersmen. Then they tended to wear buckskin, long pants and coonskin caps, or so it would appear from paintings of the time.

Just when knee britches and wigs went out of style also is uncertain, but they were succeeded by coats and ties somewhere around the time of the Civil War and have never come back. The string tie, the bow tie and the bolo tie have made minor comebacks in the world of male attire during the years since, but the classic four-in-hand remains the staple in neckwear. It's a kind of rite of passage in the United States to learn how to tie a four-in-hand, but it is a ritual I'd just as soon forget. And so, apparently, would a lot of men younger than I.

All this leads me to wonder what the next change in male fashion is going to be. Maybe the warm-up suit, a soft set of pants and a pullover or zip-up jacket will be the costume of the future for males. It's sometimes seemed to me that that's the way things are going in Europe.

But because male fashion tends to change at a glacial rate compared to female attire, it looks like it's going to be a long time before we see another big change in the way American men dress.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com.