Fireboat Salute, Harbor Celebration, 1950s

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Fireboat Salute, Harbor Celebration, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Fireboat Salute, Harbor Celebration, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-794560

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Somewhere in a busy American harbor in the 1950s, a fireboat is doing the thing fireboats were called upon to do whenever something important arrived or departed by water: shooting ceremonial arcs of water into the air with the full seriousness of a civic duty, on the theory that a ship worth welcoming was a ship worth drenching the surrounding bay for. A blimp hangs in the distance overhead, because the 1950s had not yet decided that blimps were optional at large public occasions. The tugboats standing off at a respectful distance are there partly as escorts and partly because tugboat captains understood that being near a celebration was better than not being near one. Whatever vessel is being honored — a naval ship returning, a new ocean liner making its inaugural call, a dignitary crossing on something large and important — is almost certainly just out of frame, which is where the actual subject of a ceremonial photograph so often ends up. The fireboat, unbothered, keeps firing its water cannons into the clear air, fulfilling its role in a ritual that assumed the arrival of things by sea still mattered enormously.

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