Boy Scout Jamboree, Public Park, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Boy Scout Jamboree, Public Park, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Boy Scout Jamboree, Public Park, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1959

AA-2026-E0C0C9

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A Boy Scout sits on a metal trash can at what is plainly a troop open day, his olive uniform and neckerchief announcing that this is an official occasion rather than actual camping. The pup tents pitched behind him are the Army-surplus canvas kind that every troop in America used in the 1950s, dark with age and not entirely convincing as wilderness shelter on a mowed municipal lawn. Two girls have wandered into the frame in their Sunday dresses, because a Scout open day in this era was a family event staged for parents and siblings, and the girls were brought along as an audience for the seriousness of it all. The boy on the trash can does not look like he is performing seriousness; he looks like someone who has been sitting there for a while waiting for something to happen. The whole enterprise rested on the belief, held with complete confidence in the postwar decade, that putting boys in uniform on a patch of grass and showing them to their families was sufficient proof that civilization was being reproduced.

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