hat blocks

What, you ask, is a hat block?

Or maybe you don't ask because you already know what it is because you're an antiques dealer or a milliner or...

Well, anyway, it's a thingummy for making hats.  See, you shape the hat you're making over the block.  They come in all kinds of shapes for all kinds of hats.  

This one's kinda plain vanilla, I think.  You could make all kinds of hats with this one.

It's a mystery to me what kind of hat this one makes.  A complete mystery.

I'll bet this one makes a jaunty personality-intensive hat.

True fact: My great-grandfather, Harris Levine, was a hatter.  Other than that fact, I know very little about him and have never seen a photo.  

Here's the sum of my knowledge:

He met my great-grandmother on the boat to the US.  His brother Abe was also interested in her, but she chose Harris.

Harris taught himself to read and write English, and when going through my parents' leavings after they died, I found a letter Harris wrote to my grandfather, inviting him over to play cards.  The letter was written in the early 1930s, when few people had telephones, and it was not unheard of to communicate via letter to someone who lived in the same town as you, or even as close as a few blocks away.  My grandfather would have had to have taken a couple trolleys to get to Harris's house.