Hard Hat in the Information Age
Originally posted March 2020; reposting as the link seems to have broken. I’m in my late 50s and in the last four years have lost both my parents. Sorting through their personal artifacts, there are some I keep for the stories they tell. One is a hard hat from Vulcan Materials Company that belonged to my father. It’s white with a ridge down the top center like the spine of a reptile or the midsagittal crest of a great ape. It has short brim at the front with a sticker above reading Vulcan Materials Company with the tag line underneath, "Think Safety" underneath. The sticker is in the company’s colors navy and deep gold with a logo that looks like two chevron-like shapes, one inverted above the other. At the end of his life, my father kept the hard hat in the trunk of his car, a gray Ford Crown Victoria. He would have last worn it in a work capacity in the mid-1980s before the company sold off its metals division where he worked for as the Business Director. Thi...