Journal 3: Taylor Bahan

My reading is going smoother than I expected. The fact that this book has multiple stories or profiles within it makes it more appealing to me. One of the strength, in my opinion, is how Isay uses different writing perspective throughout the book. It makes it easier to interpret than if he would have chosen one style to stick with to the end. Another strength, when it comes to a distracted reader like myself, is how the short profiles make the reading seem shorter. I like reading about someone's experiences but to an extent. Having the short profiles allows me to keep interest because I'm reading about multiple topics in one sitting. A weakness might be the relevance of some of the profiles. I enjoy many of them, but not all were able to keep my attention as well as others.

The profile that intrigued me the most was Harold Cotten's story. By reading his profile, I found Cotten to be a kind-hearted and hardworking man, pursuing his passion in the hat industry. Something that struck me was when Cotten mentioned how he saved the hats that hadn't been picked up yet just in case the owner were to randomly come in and want it back. A research question that came to mind was, what was the real reasoning behind the end of the hat-wearing era? After some research, many people, including Cotten, attribute the decrease of hat-wearers to Kennedy. I did find one article that believed that this was a result of President Eisenhower and not Kennedy. His argument was that since Eisenhower made public transportation less popular with the highways and cars, the average person no longer had the head space to wear their hats everywhere. He included pictures to show the few feet of headroom available of busses and trains and compared it to the inches on had in their car and blames this difference in space to people starting to take off their hats. This lack of head space made the hat inconvenient so people stopped wearing them. 

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/05/04/152011840/who-killed-mens-hats-think-of-a-three-letter-word-beginning-with-i