Junk Peddlers Friendly Club Picnic, 1950s

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Junk Peddlers Friendly Club Picnic, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Junk Peddlers Friendly Club Picnic, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-72F2E6

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A man in a straw hat holds a hand-lettered sign advertising a Junk Peddlers Friendly Club Picnic, standing on a lawn with his other hand raised in greeting or triumph, a beer in his grip. The sign is the kind a man makes himself the morning of an event, the lettering frank and uneven, which is to say honest. Behind him other figures are visible in the middle distance, suggesting this gathering of junk dealers—men who bought and sold scrap and salvage for a living—was real enough to warrant a picnic, possibly annual. The 1950s were still an era when working men organized themselves into fraternal clubs around their trades, and this particular guild of the marginal and entrepreneurial decided that what they needed, like the Rotarians and Shriners, was a picnic on public grass. He holds the sign as if he has been assigned this duty: the face of the Junk Peddlers, the man who showed up early to mark the spot.

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