It takes a certain moxie to wear a hat. I'm not talking about something to keep your ears warm in winter or the sun off your face at the beach. I'm talking about a grand chapeau. A hat with plumage that could turn a peacock green with envy or bloomage that would make a rosebush wilt in shame. The kind of hat that whispers mystery, sparkles with glamour or lifts a mighty voice to God in church.
I'm talking about a Jack McConnell hat.
"I love opening his boxes," says Betty Masar, who sells Jack McConnell hats at Woodies Hat Box at 655 Central Ave. in downtown St. Pete. The store has been there for 80 years, though Betty has owned it for only 25.
McConnell, whose extraordinary millinery concoctions have turned heads around the world for decades, is semi-retired now, but he still designs a few hats a year. He has a boutique line that's cheaper, says Betty, generally around $50, but she carries plenty of the high-price line, with hats costing up to $700.
"A woman comes in here wearing an $800 suit, you can't show her a $50 hat." says Betty. "She'd be offended."
Betty takes down a stunning red deco hat with a wide, stiff brim ringed in gold and set at a jaunty angle to the dome-shaped crown. It resembles the planet Saturn or a flying saucer. She flips it over and demonstrates how to identify a premium McConnell hat: a 23-karat gold thread running through the headband with a small red feather tucked inside.
"Would you like to try one?" she asks. It doesn't sound like a dare, but for some reason it feels like someone is dangling the keys to a fuel dragster in front of my nose and inviting me to take a spin around the track.
I love hats, but I've never quite mastered the art of wearing them. Here's how my hat-wearing adventure generally goes: I spend an hour in front of a mirror, trying to arrange one on my head just so. Then I get in the car, look in the rearview mirror, decide I look stupid and take it off. And that's just a modest beret. I can't imagine trying to carry off headgear of this magnitude.
I decline Betty's offer, saying that I don't look good in hats.
She sees right through me.
"Everyone looks good in hats," she says, scanning the shelves. "You've just gotta have some attitude." She takes down a rimless variation on a pillbox that bears a slight resemblance to a three-story building.
"You can't be afraid of the hat." She sizes up my smallish head and stuffs some tissue into the crown to make it fit better and lifts it onto my head. "You've got to say, 'I'm the best-looking woman in here' and believe it."
Right.
Betty doesn't wear hats herself; her neatly styled red 'do is statement enough for her head. Jewelry is her true passion, and she sells a lot of that, too, at Woodies Hat Box: a bit of gold and a lot of silver; some copper; red coral; amber; even a bracelet with trilobytes.
She takes out a tray of hand-painted Russian pins. The people who make them are so poor, she says, that they use safety pins on the backs.
"Here's something I'll bet you haven't seen before," she says, and holds up a moldavite bracelet. Moldavite is a stone formed when a meteor hit earth millions of years ago near what is now the Moldau River in the Czech Republic. It looks like a chunk of dull black nubby glass or even plastic, but if you hold it up to the light, it reveals a green translucent glow.
Betty has always loved jewelry. "When my aunts and uncles would give us a nickel for ice cream, I'd go to the dime store and buy jewelry." She entered the jewelry business 56 years ago, at age 14. She wanted to buy a piano that cost $150 and was trying to figure out how to make that kind of money. "There was a lady who dyed tiny seashells to make jewelry," she says. So Betty got an idea.
"I packaged shells in teeny tiny plastic bags and stapled 'em shut." She sold the bags for a penny apiece and made $75 selling them. Her mother matched the money, and Betty got her piano.
Since then, she has always collected and sold jewelry. "I used to sell it right out of my pocketbook." Now, she's more careful, keeping her personal collection in a safe. "I ordered it from Miami. It's the kind drug dealers use; you can't lift it or pick it.
Betty comes from a family of merchants, the Woodruffs, most of whom have sold their wares within a few blocks of where Woodies Hat Box is now. Her family had the first discount department store in St. Pete. "It was called Woodies Family Store. We sold clothes, shoes, radios, wigs; we used to get these big Afro wigs stuffed in little bags. I'd spend all afternoon picking them out."
She had an orthopedic shoe store for a while. "I was a professional fitter," she says. But after a few years she got tired of it. The woman who owned the hat shop was ready to sell. "She said, 'Betty, when you're a hundred, you can't be bending over fitting shoes. But you can sell hats.'"
She and her mother bought the store. And here she is at 70, still selling hats.
Here's hoping she's still doing it at 100. Maybe by then, I'll have what it takes to wear one.
Contact Contributing Editor Susan F. Edwards at [email protected].
