‘Hatman Jack’ Kellogg is honored as tops in his industry nationally

In 1973, a 15-year-old Jack Kellogg bought “a light blue beautiful fedora” at Aunt Eleanor’s, which he describes as a somewhat seedy Main Street junk shop that didn’t even have a sign out front, and eventually parlayed the inauspicious beginning into Hatman Jack’s Wichita Hat Works.

Now, he’s won what basically is an Oscar for the hat industry. The Headwear Association honored him as the 2022 retailer of the year at its 112th annual dinner April 28 at the Boathouse in New York’s Central Park.

Kellogg was supposed to receive the honor in 2020, but the dinner was delayed due to the pandemic.

Though he helpfully suggested, “Why don’t you just give it to me for two years in a row?” the association did not take him up on the offer.

A number of stores sell hats nationally, but there are few — Kellogg guesstimates less than 10 — that fit hats, make hats and add trim as he does.

Kellogg first learned about hats after he bought his fedora, which he named Eustace, and went to see “Ole Vern” Kenneaster at his Minisa Cleaners shop across from North High School to repair it.

“If you want that fixed, why don’t you do it yourself?” Kenneaster said.

“It was really curious to me,” said Kellogg, who has always had a love of history, vintage clothing and hats.

“I loved Bogart and Roy Rogers and these people with great hats.”

Kenneaster’s store had a small section for repairing hats in one corner with “wonderful blocks and tools that had patina and told a million stories.”

“It was like sculpture to me and still is in the sense that you steam it, which softens it, you shape it, and it memorizes it.”

At 17, Kellogg bought all of Kenneaster’s hat-related tools for “$50 a month for what seemed like the rest of my life.”

At 18, however, he and Kenneaster went into business together with the Hat Works across from the Nomar Theater on North Market.

“It was crazy fun,” Kellogg said.

Eventually, he went out on his own and moved his renamed store to Delano where the rent was cheap.

Kellogg said it’s been a career that has allowed him to meet an endless cast of characters from Wichita and beyond.

“To wear a hat, you have to be a little more courageous than most others,” Kellogg said.

He remembers Steve Marks, the national “King of the Gypsies,” as he called himself.

“It was always . . . these underworld types that seemed to be really interesting.”

Famous musicians also have visited the store, which is in its third Delano location at 601 W. Douglas.

“Pavarotti was a fun one,” Kellogg said.

Country singer Marty Stuart stopped in, too.

Kellogg once knocked on Merle Haggard’s bus door when he came through Wichita and offered to make him a hat.

“He taught me so much about hats on stage that he just intrinsically knew,” Kellogg said. “He wore a hat that was really too tall when you faced him in person . . . and I told him so. And he said, ‘Wellll, a little guy needs all the help he can get.’ ”

Kellogg went to see Haggard perform at the Orpheum, “And that hat that face to face was wearing him was absolutely majestic and perfect from that distance.”

Who to blame

The most common comment Kellogg hears is that people say they don’t look good in hats.

“It’s just rare that you can’t find one that works.”

Sometimes, though, when trying to, say, make a nose appear smaller, it at the same time makes a diminutive chin look smaller, too.

“Sometimes, the technique contradicts itself, if you will,” Kellogg said.

Some blame President Kennedy for helping end the hat-wearing era in America, but Kellogg said the industry’s “stingy brim phase” hurt, too.

Brims got to be so small, he said, they made people’s heads look like basketballs.

Kellogg said there’s never been a time since he’s been in business that he’s seen hats be so popular, and he thinks it’s because they help portray people’s individuality.

Due to politics pigeonholing people, he said, “There’s never been a time when individuality has been more in danger or at stake. Plus, there’s ‘Yellowstone.’ ”

Also, he said, with our “strange human bodies that we have with tiny heads on top of broad shoulders . . . they are crying for a hat to balance . . . the entire figure.”

At the awards dinner, Kellogg said everyone wore a hat.

“It’s the first time in my life I’ve been able to wear a hat at a dinner table.”

Suppliers nominated him for the award, and other factors went into the decision, such as customer reviews.

“You know, awards these days are thrown about with such abandon and oftentimes for no real reason,” Kellogg said.

He said this is “not a fluff award,” though.

“It’s really one I’m very proud of.”

If there was any doubt he deserved it, Kellogg shared some stories in his acceptance speech that probably proved the right guy won.

“So I’m that guy who wrote a letter to the National Restaurant Association when he was 15 years old telling them they need to have hat racks tableside,” he told the crowd.

He also wrote Buick advising that its cars needed more head room to accommodate hats.

“I was a freak, I tell ya.”

Kellogg took the opportunity to make some pitches to people in his industry while there, too.

“I think that the Hatman Jack’s name has great licensing potential, and I pitched that and got some good response.”

The association funds scholarships for hat makers at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and Kellogg spoke with a representative from there and said he’d like to lecture at the institute. He said the person was receptive.

“I’m getting to be like an elder statesman,” Kellogg said.

He’s not bragging. He said he simply knows so much about the industry.

Though he’s slowing down some now that he’s 63, Kellogg wants to be clear about what this award does and does not mean:

“It’s not my swan song by any means.”

This story was originally published May 9, 2022 at 12:34 PM.