Story of the Great Hat Mystery (Morison-Guthrie Snafu)

By BRADLEY L. MORISON

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

October 25, 1958

   MY EDITORIAL page colleagues have commissioned me to tell the poignant story of Charles M. (Chick) Guthrie and his lost hat, and so I shall do so with simplicity and restraint.  That is the way Guthrie would want it because, as readers of his Saturday column know, he is basically a simple, corned-beef-and-cabbage fellow who would not like fustian and furbelows even if he could spell them.

   The staff first heard the bad news shortly after the start of the morning editorial conference--at 9:36 a.m., Oct. 10 to be exact.  We were just getting into the Quemoy and Matsu situation when Guthrie, who is a master of the irrelevant, blurted it out: "Say, fellows, that reminds me, I lost my hat."

   WE WERE politely attentive.  Over the years Guthrie had lost, stumbled over, mislaid, broken and forgotten more things than any three men in the department combined.  We could recall, for example, when he backed his car over the suitcase of a house guest whom he was about to drive to the airport and when he slipped his football tickets into the inner pocket of someone else's coat.

   But the missing hat routine was new.  It was a sort of beat-up Stetson, Guthrie explained, size 7 5/8, modest but classy.  The staff's best guess was that Chick, being a sort of Baltimore Lunch bon vivant, had probably left his hat in some nearby beanery where good fellows get together to hoist a genial ham-on-rye.

   At 10:32 a.m. the same day Sandy Fincham, one of the department's secretaries, began the first of a long series of inquiring telephone calls which was ultimately to embrace three quick-lunches, a bar, a drug store, a pool hall and a garage.  On the following day, she placed two calls to Forest Lake where Guthrie had twice dined within the week.  No hat.  The long distance calls cost Guthrie 35 cents apiece, an outlay which to some of us, remembering the hat in vivid detail, seemed unjustifiably lavish.

   BY THE third day, Chick's customary joie de vivre was missing.  Despite the fact that we opened each morning conference with sympathetic references to the missing hat, Guthrie sank ever deeper into a morass of self-pity.  He even snarled at printers, abandoning his usual winsome manner, and once became so immersed in gloomy contemplation of his lost chapeau that he forgot to join us in the morning coffee break.

   Chick and I ride together in a car pool.  As the days wore on, he brooded more and more about his hat.  The cooler the weather, the more he seemed to resent my hatted presence in the car.

   "Don't you ever lose your hats?" he snapped one morning.  I told him I never did.  "With a hat like yours," he growled, looking disdainfully my way, "it really wouldn't matter."

THE STAFF was beginning to talk about getting up a hat raffle for Chick when the gladsome news broke.  Chick had found his hat--or at least what looked like his hat--over at Lee's Broiler on Sixth street.  He came into the office one noon, his face wreathed with the old familiar grin.  "If it isn't mine," he crowed, "it's an even better one.  Look, Brad..."

   So now the hat drama moves to its astounding climax.  The hat
that Guthrie recovered, as he shoved it jubilantly beneath my nose, sent little impulses of fond recognition down my spine.

   It was my hat.

   All through those days of Guthrie's unhatted tribulation, I had been wearing Guthrie's hat.

   The hat that he had alternately sneered at and envied on our rides to and from work was his hat.

   In retrospect it was all so simple.  At Lee's Broiler, 10 days before, I had picked up his hat.  Guthrie had walked out hatless, leaving mine to languish on a rack at Lee's.

   Well, the switch has been made.  I am now wearing my own natty 7 5/8 Stetson and Chick is smiling again beneath what passes, at least on dark nights, for a gentleman's headpiece.

   MEANWHILE, the staff is waiting anxiously for Chick's next misadventure.

   Will he fall down a manhole on his way downtown?  Will he burn a dollar-sized hole in his new topcoat?  Will he have four flat tires all in one day?

   Whatever it is, the staff will be warmly sympathetic and full of sage advice.  As certain as tomorrow's sunrise, Guthrie can depend on that.   

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