Talk:Coonskin cap

Worn by Crocket?

I'm a noob still, but for citing the source that Crocket didn't wear the coonskin hat, I'd have to point first at the Crocket article itself, and then at whatever sources they used. On a less credible note, that new Alamo movie. Highlandlord 05:55, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I think you would be correct. I remember hearing of an account by one of the women who survived the Alamo being able to recognise Davy Crockett's corpse by the odd-looking hat he was wearing.74.36.192.6 08:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Krush Groove?

can someone notate that in the movie "Krush Groove" the fat boys are seen sporting coonskin hats — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.117.204.1 (talk) 01:13, 6 March 2007

• That's Krush Groove, 1985, and The Fat Boys, disbanded 1991. No mention in either of those articles; our strongest hint of it is that the director apparently went out of his way to name the club-owner "Crocket" just to justify the headgear.
  --Jerzy•t 00:55, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
  

Animal rights?

• I'm not a radical PETA person, but I think the declining popularity of coonskin caps in the '70s was because animal rights and welfare issues came to the forefront around that time (therefore it would be considered cruel to kill an animal for fashion). Anyone agree? WizardDuck 01:06, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like something that would need a citation to be included. -- Karen | Talk | contribs 02:45, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

• "Came to the forefront" about a decade or so before PETA went beyond "5 people in a basement"? Third 'graph of fur farming says

  Demand fell in the late 1980s and 1990s because of a number of factors, including the failure of designers to come up with exciting new lines, and also the efforts of animal rights campaigners. Since the turn of the millennium, however, sales worldwide have soared to record highs...

Extraordinary claims require extraordinarily reliable refs, not professions being a moderate radical.
--Jerzy•t 00:55, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Removal

I was about to reword

and the price of a pound (about 0.45 kg) of raccoon fur rose from 25 cents to $8

as

and the price of raccoon fur increased, from 25 cents a pound (55 cents/kg), by a factor of 32

but removed it (despite the provision of a source), bcz

1. a pop news article is not a reliable source when it is written over 45 years after the event and offers no sources
2. in any case, there is no reason to believe that the raw fact is relevant:

"Raccoon fur" (as opposed to pelts) is probably not useful except for making exotic yarn or maybe spirit gummed theatrical facial-hair effects, which is a reason for the earlier assertion of "fake fur" to be treated as the credible one. You're not likely to sew or glue shorn fur onto whatever Disney used as a foundation for the caps. You'd use synthetic furry strands that will fuse onto the body of flexible plastic, or synthetic woven fabric, that gives the cap its shape.
If there is any relevance of the craze to the prices in a real-raccoon-product market, it was probably due to specialty leather-goods makers making them up, from authentic pelts (like the frontier originals), on a custom basis for rich brats whose parents wanted to satisfy the kids w/o letting mass-market kitsch crap into the house, lest they get the idea that what the masses buy is adequate for them; such purchases are a piss-poor tangential hint about the magnitude of a craze.
In any case, such a change in price is in itself pretty irrelevant to the magnitude of the craze. A 32-fold change in price could follow Disney's middleman quietly and cheaply buying options on a Friday afternoon, spread among the largest wholesalers who together account for 20% or 50% of the market; that market may normally sell, dirt cheap, the scraps of pelts (big enuf for kid-sized hats) left from making raccoon coats (not a dead market, despite decline from the 1920s collegiate craze), to feed mink and sable (or even raccoons), for fertilizer, or for whatever else scrap leather is used for. It could even result in those with scrap still on hand holding it as a speculation, in case Disney eventually ran out before the craze did: you could think the odds were 30 to 1 against being able to ever sell it to Disney, and holding it would still be your best move.
--Jerzy•t 01:51, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

5000/day: Oh, yeah? & So what?

Tho i left the 5k/day figure in place, it is implausible that it reflects what it insinuates: the peak of nationwide retail sales, which were in those days infeasible to measure. These are presumably daily wholesale sales rates, or even more likely, weekly or monthly ones, daily-ized by divided by the number of shopping days in the period. And those wholesale figures more likely reflect retailers' guesses about future retail sales, than actual retail sales. Different caps bought from wholesalers on the peak wholesale-volume day would be to be sold later -- and likely on different days, so that the wholesale peak could be broader and lower than the retail one (or conceivably narrower and higher). Further, total retail sales don't directly measure much about the craze: they count as equal items eventually sold at fire-sale levels after the craze's inevitable collapse; bear in mind that the retailers who were most optimistic would place the biggest orders, and their sales at the eventual bargain prices would probably be disproportionately large. The actual magnitude of the craze would be better reflected by info on how long retail sales stayed above, say 10,000 or 20,000 a week, or -- availability of that info being far-fetched -- the total wholesale orders, discounted by some guesswork (in light the pattern of their dropping off) to estimate the volume of the later sales on which the retailers likely took a loss.
--Jerzy•t 01:51, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

• Cool story, bro!Ezra c v mildew desire Jr (talk) 00:02, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

worn in every campaign

Old Estes quit wearing them after Davy Crockett became popular on TV. His son told him that they were just for kids now, and he should give it up. However I believe he was convinced to don one briefly at his '56 campaign announcementEzra c v mildew desire Jr (talk) 00:02, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Interesting, but we can't put it in an article unless there are reliable sources for it. --Orlady (talk) 00:18, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Spurious

"An account of actor Noah Ludlow introducing the popular song "The Hunters of Kentucky" while wearing a coonskin cap is shown to be spurious in Ludlow's autobiography."

I just can't help but think...do most people know what spurious means? Is this kind of language really needed in an encyclopedia? It's not a vocabulary contest. I mean, I could tell what it means just by reading the sentence but I don't think most people know this word. It's an encyclopedia, not an academic journal. The knowledge contained within should be accessible. Just my opinion Kronos o (talk) 13:45, 4 February 2018 (UTC)