The bald fact

"What's your story?  When did you get to the US?"

At the end of a day of listening to presentations by budding and mature scholars, we were at dinner.  At my table, I was one of the three---at that table of six--who has made a home in America. Of course, I was only one who looked like I might have come from somewhere else--the other two are Scotland and Israel.

"Interesting you should ask me that," I said.  "I often review my life and look at the photographs.  What shocks me the most is how young I look in those photos when I was fresh off the boat."

And then I laid out my worst problem in life.  "I had lots of hair back then.  And black."

We laughed.

I am now a bald professor with a grey beard.  I have now become the cliché.  I suppose I can make a complete caricature of myself if I wore a tweed jacket with elbow-patches and smoked a pipe as well ;)

Of course, it is all because of the male pattern baldness.  It is not my fault; shit happens!

Here is W.B. Yeats beginning a poem with "bald heads" as if I need any reminder!

The Scholars
By W.B. Yeats

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

In a few minutes, this bald head will find out what the young women and men bring to the class.  And later I will edit their lines.  Maybe a bald head is an asset that makes me seem more learned than I really am. ;)

What is common to the economy and my head? :)

Beards, bald-heads, presidents, and me

Yes, this is me. I wanted to find out how I would look without facial hair--it has been a number of years since I last did this. Not bad, eh!

One of the most admired presidents--Lincoln--had a beard. Teddy Roosevelt had a big fat mustache. But, think about this: we no more have presidents with facial hair. And, at the same time, we no longer have male presidential candidates who are bald. With female presidents, we will not have beards and baldies--well, it will be rather strange to have a bald and bearded female president. Heh heh!

The last president who had a shiny dome? "I Like Ike". Ike was also the last president to almost alays ever wear a hat while out in the public.

JFK, photographed often on beaches and on sea, eliminated hat-wearing, and also set the trend that baldies are ineligible for the Oval Office.

As Time put it, it was the simple sartorial gestures of John F. Kennedy that really shaped 20th century American style. The images are iconic now—a rolled-up sleeve, an untucked shirt, a shaggy head of hair—like something out of a J.Crew catalog or a Ralph Lauren advertisement. But in 1961, Kennedy's confident, carefree style was a radical departure from the copycat boxy gray suits and felt hats that had defined men's fashion for previous generations.
Among other things, Kennedy banished hats for men, even disposing of the top hat for his inauguration speech.

I like wearing a wide-rimmed summer hat. My favorite was a hat I had purchased when we visited the Amish countryside in Pennsylvania many years ago. I wore it a lot when we lived in the hot and dry Bakersfield. Until my daughter sat on it and crushed it one day :-(