A US Marine Corps officer’s green service cap, the wicker frame pattern adopted in 1937 and carried through the war and into the 1950s. Made by Hilborn-Hamburger of New York. Forest green wool over a corded khaki band, gold quatrefoil across the crown, black leather visor and chin strap, black finished Eagle, Globe and Anchor. A leather patch sewn inside over the maker’s stamp is inked MAJOR R.F. NIKETH, 1424 Forest Ave, Highland Park, Illinois, HP2-4268.

He can be identified. Rudolph F. Niketh was born on 11 April 1915, enlisted in the Marine Corps on 9 December 1942, and was discharged on 4 November 1945. He died on 27 August 2005, aged ninety.

He went in two days after the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, at twenty seven. That made him nearly a decade older than the recruits filling Parris Island and San Diego that winter, and older men of that sort were what the Corps drew on when it needed officers. The routes were the Platoon Leaders Class, Officer Candidates Class at Quantico, and from July 1943 the Navy V-12 program. He came out nine weeks after the Japanese surrender, in the general demobilization.

The cap and the record appear to contradict each other, and sorting that out is most of what makes this piece interesting. Nobody goes from enlisting in December 1942 to major by November 1945. So the rank on that label was written later, and three separate things in the cap say the same.

The visor is plain. Marine field grade officers, major and up, wore gold oak leaf embroidery on the peak, and there is none here. This cap was bought and fitted out for a lieutenant or a captain.

Then the telephone number. HP2-4268 is two letters and five digits, HIghland Park 2. That format became the standard across North America in the late 1940s and through the 1950s. The Bell System started replacing it with all number calling in 1958 and had mostly finished by the middle 1960s. Whoever inked this label was doing it well after the war.

And the address puts him in the right place for it. Highland Park is on Chicago’s North Shore, twenty miles from Naval Air Station Glenview, which became headquarters of the Naval Air Reserve Training Command in 1946 and housed Marine Corps Reserve units. Glenview squadrons and personnel were recalled to active duty for Korea. A Chicago area Marine who kept his commission after 1945 had an active reserve establishment on his doorstep.

So the shape of it is a man who enlisted in the winter of 1942, was commissioned during the war, wore this cap as a company grade officer, held onto his commission afterward, made major in the reserve, and sometime in the 1950s wrote his name, his new rank and his phone number inside it so it would find its way home if he left it somewhere. The cap covers both halves of that.

Said plainly, because it matters: the enlistment record is documentary. The commission and the promotion to major are attested by the cap, not by any service record we have seen. A buyer who wants that last piece should apply to the National Personnel Records Center.

For scale, the Corps went from around 18,000 officers and men in the mid 1930s to roughly 475,000 by 1945, and officers were a thin slice of that. They bought their own uniforms rather than drawing them from stores, which is why this one carries a New York outfitter’s mark. Hilborn-Hamburger supplied insignia, medals, ribbons and cap devices along with the caps, and registered a trademark for uniform cap straps in March 1945.

The quatrefoil is the officer’s mark and the oldest thing on the cap. The story everyone knows, that officers laid rope across their covers so Marine sharpshooters in the rigging would not shoot them from above, does not hold up. The National Museum of the Marine Corps takes it apart: the officer’s hat of the age of sail had no flat crown to lay rope on, a man sixty feet up in powder smoke could not have made out an emblem that small, and firing from the tops stopped during boarding, which is when it would have mattered. It came into Marine uniform regulations in the late 1850s as ornament, out of a French fashion, and has stayed there.

Construction is standard for the pattern. A woven cane frame under the wool cover, green eyelets at the sides for air, black leather visor and strap with two eagle and anchor buttons and a keeper. The sweatband is bright tan vegetable tanned leather stamped 2, and the Hilborn-Hamburger eagle and star mark sits in the crown lining under the owner’s name patch. The Eagle, Globe and Anchor has been the emblem of the Corps since 1868, here in the black finish, worn through to copper on the eagle’s wings and the high points of the globe.

CONDITION AND DETAILS

Interior opening measures approximately 180 mm (7 1/8 in) front to back and 165 mm (6 1/2 in) across, inside the sweatband, working out to roughly a US hat size 6 3/4 to 6 7/8, a small fit by modern standards
Forest green wool cover sound, even color, light nap wear with faint scattered shading to the crown, no significant moth damage
Gold quatrefoil complete, secure and bright
Corded khaki band sound
Black leather visor with light scuffing and edge wear to the outer surface, no cracking or delamination
Chin strap present and supple, both eagle and anchor buttons present, keeper intact
Black finished Eagle, Globe and Anchor secure, with wear to copper on the high points
Green ventilation eyelets present and clear
Leather sweatband complete and supple, stamped 2, with light age staining
Hilborn-Hamburger maker’s stamp present, partially rubbed but legible
Owner’s leather name patch present, ink clear and fully legible: MAJOR R.F. NIKETH, 1424 Forest Ave, Highland Park, Illinois, HP2-4268
Cap holds its shape

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