This Is One Guy Who’s Proud to Be Talking Through His Hat

Bob Foulke of San Clemente thinks of himself as a risk-taker, and no wonder. He likes to sky dive, and his favorite adventure is night surfing.

“It’s a thrill getting out there at 3 a.m. under a full moon and clear skies,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Perhaps as unbelievable is the business he runs. It’s called the Stupid Hat Co., and it offers 50 types of, well, outlandish-looking headgear in the form of, say, a beady-eyed bright red lobster or a saw-tooth killer shark or a yellow, orange and purple chicken.

“Bob is really an imaginative and inventive person,” said Piper Foulke, his wife of 10 years. “He definitely is not the norm. He’s really a dreamer.”

A hat sporting a pair of rabbit ears that he created out of a foam material for Piper, then his girlfriend, provided the impetus for his venture into millinery in Honolulu.

After “bunches of people liked it and wanted one for their kids,” Foulke started making the creations at home and selling them there and at swap meets.

“It was kind of overwhelming how quickly the hats took off,” Foulke said. Thinking that the market for the hats would be better in Laguna Beach, Foulke moved his business, then called Space Face, there.

Unfortunately, “we made some errors in marketing that sent us into a spiral from which we couldn’t pull out, and we went bankrupt” after three years, he said.

But Foulke calls that setback just another part of his life. “I’m the kind of guy that likes to take chances, but my whole goal in life is to have fun,” he said. “Why go through life in misery?”

Some time later, Packaging Industries in Massachusetts resurrected his bankrupt company and hired him to head its Stupid Hat division to market the hats nationwide.

“I think everyone has good ideas all day long, but they don’t know things to do with them,” he said, reflecting on his own attempt to market the hats. “I think everyone is creative, but it’s knowing what to do with it.”

And that includes naming the business.

“Some people think the Stupid Hat name is the greatest, and some think it is inappropriate.

“But everyone remembers it,” he said.

Kayla Mull breeds miniature pot-belly pigs.

“They’re easy-going, gentle, clean and the smartest domestic animals around,” says Mull, who should know. She has nine of the creatures at her home in Norco.

Hogwash, you say?

Well, according to Orange veterinarian Dr. Lorrie Blackburn, “Pigs make unique, enjoyable pets that can be housebroken easily and can learn all sorts of tricks very easily.”

Adds Mull: “If you raise pigs with pigs, that’s how they’ll act. But if you raise them like dogs, you’ll get a pet.”

A full-grown miniature pot-belly will weigh from 50 to 150 pounds and live from 10 to 20 years.

Mull and Blackburn are showing a miniature pot-belly sow and two 5-week-old piglets in the livestock building at the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa.

Debora Luken thought her “Summer Dreams, Some Are Nightmares” workshop would interest a lot of people.

Luken, a Huntington Beach marriage and family counselor, says that once people look at their dreams, they become intrigued. Yet, she said, “a lot of times people even question dreaming to the extent some say they don’t dream. But that’s not true. Everyone dreams.

With some knowledge about dreams, she says, people begin to understand what is going on in their subconscious minds.

“The subconscious can bring up material that shows conflict, but most dreams are positive and helpful,” she said. “If people understand their dreams, they can also learn to understand other things.”

A dream about water, for example, could represent a journey or a vacation where the person goes swimming, she said.

The class had to be canceled, though, because too few people signed up.

“The summer months may be bad timing for this type of workshop,” she said.