by Sam Holden, Charles Cohen

Clay Von Jones leaves his wife at the hairdresser's -- "I don't know why she's getting her hair done. She's already beautiful" -- and heads down Eutaw Street to Hippodrome Hatters. His mission: Get a new straw hat.

Jones walks into the downtown store wearing a trench coat, a rose-colored stone earring, and a beaver-skin porkpie hat. He smiles with childlike joy as he removes the hat to show off the inscription inside the brim. "Self-conforming," it reads, meaning the hat retains its shape. "I let it get wet, you can sit on it, you can do anything you want to it," he boasts.

As attached as Jones is to his porkpie, though, fashion, tradition, and the weather dictate that it be retired for the season in favor of a straw replacement.

There was a time when, come spring, men all over town would be doing the same thing. A man wouldn't be caught dead wearing a felt hat -- or, for that matter, a beaver-skin -- on Straw Hat Day.

Time was, Straw Hat Day -- May 15 -- was a national observance, usually celebrated at the ballpark, where men in the stands would punch holes in their old hats and sail them out onto the field. Anyone wearing a felt hat would get his cover snatched and flung out too. And nowhere was this holiday more strictly observed than in Baltimore, the straw-hat capital of the world.

Check out any pre-World War II photograph taken between May 15 and Sept. 15 -- the straw season. The men in such pictures are invariably sporting their boaters, their sailors, their skimmers. In the first half of the 20th century, three Baltimore companies -- M.S. Levy, Brigham-Hopkins, and Townsend-Grace -- sent straw hats (and straw-hat salespeople) nationwide. Old catalogues hawk fancifully named toppers such as the Zephyr, the Lombardy, the Kancka, and the Banku, and boast of the way they helped wearers keep a cool head in the hot summer. Those with really big bucks might procure an authentic handmade Panama, or a Montecristi, made from straw so fine you'd think it was linen.

Standing outside Hippodrome Hatters, or the Ecuador Hat Co. on Fayette Street around the corner, there's not much sign that Straw Hat Day is approaching. But Easter still brings customers to the two west-side shops in search of church-suitable headgear, and the store does a steady trade in baseball caps and Kangols.

Ecuador Hat owner John "Michael" Macas leans on a car outside his store, feeding cheese puffs to the pigeons, until he spies a man walking toward him, wearing a straw hat that's split open on top. The man, Larry Blount heads inside the shop, scanning Macas' cases for a replacement Panama.

Blount is 57; Straw Hat Day was already fading when he was born, and he doesn't know anything about it. But he's been coming to Ecuador Hat since he was a teenager. He's got four straws at home, one of which was made by Macas' father.

Macas' father, mother, and uncle came to the United States in the 1920s from the South American country that gives the store its name. They'd been hired by M.S. Levy, which was having trouble making Panamas without ripping the straw. (Ecuadorans, the store owner explains, were the true originators of the style, which got its name from tourists visiting the Panama Canal who saw locals wearing the brimmed, banded hats.) Macas' ancestors rectified Levy's manufacturing woes, then started their own operation in 1934, making the Ecuador Hat Co.'s merchandise by hand. The store now sells all kinds of hats, but to this day Macas and his younger cousin can make straws by hand.

"My first Panama was made right there," Blount says, pointing to the counter. As teens in the early '60s, he says, he and his buddies would buck the prevailing, more casual fashion trends by buying straw hats and then going around the corner to buy knit shirts from 3-Gs, an old west-side clothing store. "It's a tradition and I love it," he says of his headgear. "It don't go away."

Blount isn't quite right -- hats did go away, nearly. The old straw boaters fell out of favor in the 1930s. "The day of the high patent-leather shoe, the blue serge suit, and the stiff, hard straw hat has gone forever," a 1937 trade-publication article bemoans. The article goes on to cheer manufacturers to push the newer, lighter porkpies, but the industry continued to suffer fashion blows. Macas and Hippodrome Hatters owner Lou Boulmetis both point to the postwar years, when returning GIs, tired of wearing military helmets and dress hats, preferred to go bareheaded. Then came the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960; Kennedy, perhaps in keeping with the New Frontier image, was the first president since Grover Cleveland to regularly appear in public sans hat.

Local hatters hung on due to the patronage of African-Americans, among whom hats remained popular long after white Baltimoreans had largely abandoned them, Macas says. "If it wasn't for the black people, the hat industry would have been out of business a long time ago," he says. But much of that market dried up in the late '60s and '70s with the popularity of the bushy Afro. ("There's no way [someone was] going to buy a hat that big" to fit over a 'fro, Macas recalls. "He'd look like a clown.")

Having survived the '70s, thanks to a resilient base of old-timers, Macas now finds himself in the era of the baseball cap, and he goes with the flow. But maybe there's hope yet for the fashion trends of yore. Just before closing time, a man comes in and inquires with a certain urgency about a black-and-white straw hat he's ordered. Macas says it's not in yet; the man grouses -- he's been looking forward to wearing it to church, with his Armani suit. "Everybody seems to notice my looks, and they try to imitate," the customer says. "I think I am more or less a pacesetter."