DETROIT — This has been an unexpectedly busy summer for Paul Wasserman, owner of Henry the Hatter, the nation's oldest hat retailer, who announced four weeks ago that his iconic business will soon close its Detroit store after losing its downtown lease. Sales have been surging.

"We've been unbelievably slammed," Wasserman, 70, said last week.

The rush of visitors to the downtown location has included Chris Frank, 58, of Macomb Township, who eyed the dozens of hats on display in the store's front window on a recent afternoon before heading inside. He said he already had seven hats at home. But considering the recent news, perhaps it was time for No. 8?

"This is the only hat shop I shop at,"  Frank said.

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For those who might view the traditional hat business as hopelessly anachronistic, in the same  category as pager stores or typewriter shops, the buzz these past weeks inside Henry the Hatter would be a mind-blower.

Even after the store closes on Aug. 5, the fact that metro Detroit will still have three men's hat shops — and a smattering of others that make hats for women — is a testament to customer loyalty, entrepreneurial persistence and the benefits that come to the last ones standing in niche businesses that others have given up on.

Henry the Hatter, which opened for business in 1893, will still have a Southfield location after the Detroit store closes next month. The Detroit store dates to 1952.

The other two hat businesses — both smaller in size — are City Hatter in Southfield, whose roots date to Detroit's bygone Black Bottom neighborhood, and Hats Galore & More on Detroit's east side, which is the last storefront in an otherwise demolished block.

One of the biggest names ever to shop at Hats Galore was tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who bought a cream-colored, Dobbs-brand El Dorado hat there that he would later wear to his December 2003 wedding.

The Italian superstar visited the store while in Detroit for a Three Tenors concert, said Hats Galore's owner Bob Yeargin. A subsequent newspaper clipping with Pavarotti wearing the hat is on display by the cash register.

"He came to the 'hood and got his hat that he got married in," Yeargin said. "What would be the odds of that?"

Millineries

Metro Detroit also is home to a handful of women's hat shops, called millineries.

Perhaps the best known is Mr. Song Millinery in Southfield — once located in Detroit's New Center — where designer Luke Song made the bow-tied and jewel-studded hat that Aretha Franklin wore to Barack Obama's 2009 presidential inauguration. Song, who didn't respond to interview requests, has since closed his storefront, but still sells his hats online.

Four Sisters Fashion Millinery, tucked away in Oak Park's Lincoln Shopping Center, belongs to Remona Benjamin, 64, who designs and makes all her women's hats by hand in the back of the store. She learned the millinery trade from her mother, the late Everlena Allen.

Many of her store's customers are church-going women and those who dress up to attend tea parties (the social kind, not the political).

"I usually have 200 hats in here, and all of them are different. None of the styles are the same," said Benjamin, who is mother to the four sisters in the store's name. "I make all of them."

It's a truism in the hat business that male customers and female customers arrive with very different expectations concerning store inventory. For instance, men are OK with walking in and finding stacks of hats in the same style and color.

For female buyers, however, that's a big turnoff.

"The ladies are a lot more particular," said Yeargin. "They don't want to see a whole stack of hats. They don't want to see but one."

At Four Sisters, Benjamin will alert a prospective customer if she has already sold a hat similar to the one that caught the person's eye.

"I let my customer know, 'OK, I sold this to this lady and she lives in Ypsilanti. You may not see her, you may see her. But she has one like that,'" Benjamin said.

JFK to blame?

It's been well over half a century since hats were all but socially required for many men when leaving the house.

There are several reasons and theories for why traditional hats lost their de rigeur status, according to historical accounts and local hat shop owners:

• Many World War II veterans associated bad memories with wearing helmets, and returned home with no interest in donning anything on their head.

• President John F. Kennedy, a good dresser with nice hair, didn't wear a hat.

• Hats lost practical value as more people commuted in cars, rather than waiting outside to catch public transit.

Of course, fads later did touch down in Detroit, such as the colorful wide-brimmed hats that completed the Super Fly look of the early 1970s, Wasserman said. But hat fads generally don't last much beyond three years, sometimes less. And chasing them can be dangerous for small business owners.

Wasserman said that when Henry the Hatter dove into the Western hat fads of the mid to late 1970s, it barely managed to resurface. Hat factories nationwide had been cranking out Stetsons to meet the sudden demand. Even London Fog, a retailer better known for raincoats, began selling cowboy hats.

So he and his father, Seymour Wasserman, went all in, ordering a large inventory of Westerns for the shop. But the fad faded as fast as it had appeared.

"So we were stuck with money that we owed the bank and a store full of Western hats that we couldn't convert into anything else," Wasserman said. "At one point my father and I looked at each other and said 'We have $77 in the bank — we're screwed.'

"That was definitely the scariest time," he added.

Sometimes, however, a trend in hats will stay popular in certain niches for years and years.

"There are customers to this day coming in and looking for what was fashionable in the late '70s," Wasserman said. "Some of them, sadly, have been in prison, and time kind of keeps them transfixed where they were. But there are other people who just have fond memories of what was happening back then."

Henry's roots

Henry the Hatter was started in 1893 and originally owned by Detroit native Henry Komrofsky.

Komrofsky's subsequent tenure as boxing commissioner for Michigan made his shop popular with local and visiting pugilists, several of whom signed black-and-white photographs and publicity stills that remain on display inside in the store.

Seymour Wasserman bought the business in 1948 from Komrofsky's old business partner.

Paul Wasserman recalled that Joe Louis continued to visit Henry the Hatter after the ownership change and how his father, sensing a marketing opportunity, gave the boxing champion free hats to wear around.

"What would happen is that in two or three days' time, people would start coming in and say, 'I saw the champ the other day and he was wearing this, that, or the other (hat). Do you got that?'" Paul Wasserman said. "It became celebrity endorsement before there was celebrity endorsement."

Winner by attrition

If the 1970s for hats was about casual-wear fads, the 1960s was the decade when everyday hat-wearing for men fell out of fashion.

When the 1960s began, traditional hats were still sold at all the downtown Detroit department stores and haberdasheries, including Hughes & Hatcher and Capper & Capper. There also was enough hat business to support several dedicated shops such as Henry's and the since-closed Louis the Hatter.

Henry the Henry managed to stay afloat once fashions changed and the hat business sank by picking up customers whenever a department store cut back on hats or a competitor closed shop.

"We used to have to fight for our share because everybody had a hat department. All of the sudden, nobody had a hat department," Wasserman said. "What business there was remaining kind of became ours by attrition."

Today, Wasserman said his business generally has two customer bases: those who buy variations of 1950s hat styles — "people who want to look like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney" — and those preferring more contemporary styles made popular by music artists and entertainers.

He said the most popular style right now is the stingy-brim fedora. This hat, which features a shorter brim than standard fedoras, was commonly worn in the early and mid-1960s, although today's customers have more styles and colors to chose from.

Customer loyalty

Important for any hat shop's longevity is its base of loyal customers, such as Wayne County Circuit Judge Craig Strong.

Strong has been visiting Henry the Hatter for more than four decades. He owns about 50 hats, including 30 at home that he keeps in his designated hat room.

He said he favors wide-brim dress hats; his favorite brand is Italy-based Borsalino.

“I love the Kentucky Derby because it gives me a chance to wear my hats," the judge said. "And every time I go, I stop into Henry the Hatter to make sure my hat looks right.”

Former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young also was a regular hat-wearer and devout Henry the Hatter customer. The Free Press' archives are filled with photos of the late mayor at events and news conferences with his head elegantly covered.

"He was an aficionado of good hats and a regular customer of Henry the Hatter,” recalled Bob Berg, Young's longtime press secretary. "The mayor would be out, and I can remember on any number of occasions, he’d stop in and see if there was anything he might want to add to his collection."

Busy sales floor

On a recent afternoon, a crowd of customers moved up and down Henry the Hatter's sales floor, checking out the hundreds of hats on the shelves and behind display glass. They weren't looking for ball caps or the functional winter headgear that most people buy, but Mad Men-esque felt fedoras, dark Godfather-like homburgs, dome-shaped derbys in gray and black, and flat leather driving caps.

The prices generally range from $65 to $85 for casual hats, $80 on up for entry-level dress hats and start at about $130 for quality dress hats.

Thanks to this farewell crowd, the store has been seeing its strongest sales numbers in decades, including a record 175 hat sales on the first Saturday after the June 30 closing announcement.

Wasserman said he is considering options for relocating his store somewhere else in Detroit, perhaps in Eastern Market or Corktown, although no plans have been made. Numerous calls by the Free Press to the current store's building owner, the Sterling Group, which reportedly terminated Henry the Hatter's lease, were not returned.

Wasserman said that even before the sales boom prompted by his closing announcement, the store had been profitable and business was on an upward trend thanks to recent increases in downtown foot traffic.

Henry the Hatter still sells its own hats under three brand names: Tilden, Giorgio Cellini and Henry the Hatter. Wasserman said these product lines represent roughly 10% of his overall business.

Uncertain business

Arthur McDaniel, 55, has owned City Hatter since 1987, after having worked there part time cleaning hats. Now situated in a Southfield shopping center, City Hatter has gone through numerous locations and storefronts, including a shop on Gratiot in Detroit and one inside the now-closed Northland Center mall.

 McDaniel said that unlike Henry the Hatter, which draws downtown foot traffic and visitors, City Hatter's Gratiot store depended mostly on neighborhood residents. Still, the shop did well in the 1990s until the mid-2000s, when it could no longer overcome the exodus of Detroiters leaving the surrounding neighborhood.

City Hatter's Northland location, at its peak around 2006, needed nine employees to handle all the customers. That was before the mall itself skidded downhill. By the time City Hatter left Northland in 2015, it was just McDaniel at the register.

Lately it has gotten harder for McDaniel to make a living in the hat business. He said he anticipated a difficult first year in his new location at the shopping center as customers needed time to find him. But so far his second year has been even rougher than the first.

"If it doesn't work between now and the time that the lease is about to be up, that will be it for me," he said. "That's my mindset now. I've done this for 30 years. If I can't make it, there's no point to keep going on."