Quote Originally Posted by Pete View Post
With that having been said, what I want to know is whether Ken wore his Ridgeway cap with the brim stiffened or natural and wrinkled.
It wasn't really a Ridgeway cap and few in the Army called it that, it was a Lousville Spring Up (LINK) (well ,the good ones were, anyway). In the linked page, the two MPs in the top picture have Spring Ups; the one with the silver leaf is a Spring Up while the guys loading the truck in the bottom pic have stiffened field Caps.

Lot of people made fun of it but it was about the only headgear ever worn by the US Army that wasn't copied from someone else. It was a pain to wear and carry regardless of the web page's contention it was popular; that was sort of a mixed bag...

The original field cap which Ridgeway and the whole Army wore was worn 'natural and wrinkled' -- sort of; people applied their own mutations which is why Ridgeway wanted something done to improve uniformity and appearance (proving even the really good Generals can get wild hairs about inconsequential stuff...). The first fix was a flattened and folded newspaper or manila folder; the second was a plastic stiffener which cost $.35. Then came the Spring Ups. Of course, in Airborne units, even that wasn't enough so you had a plastic stiffener in your Spring Up and then shrunk the fabric so it was perfectly straight and unwrinkled...

The sacrifices one makes for ones country...