Hat Trick
BY JOHN CLAUSEN l PHOTO BY RIMAS ZAILSKAS
It all started with her dad.
“When I decided to get involved in acting,” says Anne-Marie Welty, “my father wasn’t very happy. Then he went to see me in a show and he was okay with it.”
To show his support, Tim Welty gave his daughter a hat, something she could use as a prop in her performance. He had no idea what he was unleashing within his daughter.
She still works in the theater when something appealing comes along, but it’s the hat that made the truly lasting impression. In fact, it was the starting point of a collection that’s grown to more than 200 various head coverings…mostly women’s, but some men’s as well.
“I don’t really know exactly how many I have,” she says, sitting among her treasures in her Hendersonville home. “I haven’t really kept track of how may I’ve bought since we moved here. And I receive some as gifts, too.”
Her father, who deals in antiques, still finds her some interesting headwear from time to time. “He’s been collecting them for me since I was about 16,” she says. “The best hats I have come from my dad. I can’t wait at Christmas to see what he’s gotten me. Whenever I go for a visit, I come home with a new hat. It’s something that brings us together.”
Unlike a lot of collectors who know exactly what their collections are worth, Anne-Marie doesn’t really attach a money value to her flock of hats. “I got my first one when I was in high school,” she remembers. “Back then they cost about two dollars. Now I pay anywhere up to $20. But that’s my cutoff point. I don’t pay any more than that.”
Ironically, she doesn’t wear the hats herself. Sure, she’ll try them on for you and show them off around her home, but none of the hats leave the house, she says. It’s partly the way she tries to preserved them and partly out of respect for the previous owners.
Naturally, she has a favorite.
“The first hat I ever bought with my own money is probably my favorite. It’s a 1940s era hat that was inspired by the old sailor’s hat.”
She finds a lot of her treasures at Smiley’s flea market in Fletcher. “Some come from there and some from Pennsylvania when I go home for a visit. Or I find them at garage sales and antique stores.”
When she lived in the Chicago area, she displayed the hats on a wall. These days the collection is stored in various locations throughout her house. Her husband, Jim Ostholthoff, is okay with his wife’s extraordinary collection. In fact, the couple’s house also is the gathering place for a collection of antique cameras and a galaxy of globes…including one representing the moon (which she picked up for pennies at a flea market).
Of course, not everybody has what it takes to share a room with more than 200 hats. The collection, she says, has “helped me weed out a lot of boyfriends over the years. One guy said he felt like a whole roomful of women were staring at him. I guess he had some issues…anyway, he was out of there.”
American ladies don’t wear hats the way they used to, she says. “Back in the old days, a woman wouldn’t even leave the house without a hat. Now, you see hats mostly in more formal settings. You’ll still find them in African-American churches and if you go to a wedding in England there will be women wearing hats.”
No matter how interesting they are or how much or how little she spent on each one, the individual hats all mean something special to her. “To me, the hats represent each woman who ever wore them,” she says. “I feel like I’m honoring something that was important to the past owner…something that she scrimped and saved for.
“I like the notion that I’m saving something important.”
