Skimmers and baseball

[randersonabq]

My father, born 1906, was a great Dodgers baseball fan. He said it was the custom amongst ball fans to buy their summer skimmer for the first game of the season. They wore it to all the games they attended that summer. At the end of the last game of the season they all "skimmed" their hats onto the ball field!

He lived in Brooklyn and worked until WWII as the Assistant Engineer in charge of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Engineer of the bridge was a political appointee who left the day to day running of the bridge to my father. He also related playing poker with Jimmy Walker!

 

[tonyb]

My father, born 1906, was a great Dodgers baseball fan. He said it was the custom amongst ball fans to buy their summer skimmer for the first game of the season. They wore it to all the games they attended that summer. At the end of the last game of the season they all "skimmed" their hats onto the ball field!

A common practice from coast to coast back then, or so I've heard. I once interviewed the proprietor of a bakery in what was once a predominately Italian neighborhood. The bakery, something a local institution, has long been located quite near where Sick's Seattle Stadium once stood. Sick's was a longtime minor league park and, for one season (1969), the home of the Seattle Pilots of the American League, who the following year were the Milwaukee Brewers. The baker fellow parked cars in the stadium's lot when he was a youngster. He related a very similar story.

 

[J.B.]

Ty Cobb reportedly told the press that he always took the hats home for the mules on his Georgia farm to wear...?!