AA-2026-F81AE9
On the image
A man in a short-sleeved shirt and flat cap steers a varnished mahogany cruiser across open water in the 1950s, the kind of boat that required its owner to spend roughly as many weekends maintaining it as actually using it, a fact the ownership literature never mentioned. The steering wheel, the lacquered woodwork, and the canvas-and-chrome folding chair behind him all belong to the postwar American leisure class, for whom a wooden inboard was proof that the Depression was genuinely over and that a man who worked hard deserved something that needed constant caulking. He glances back at the camera with the measured calm of someone who has decided that driving a boat slowly across a lake while wearing sunglasses is exactly the right way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and he is not wrong. The distant shoreline suggests a broad inland lake or wide river somewhere in the American Midwest or Great Lakes region, where this particular species of weekend prosperity was most densely concentrated. The whole scene captures the brief golden era of the wooden pleasure boat, roughly ten years before fiberglass made the same leisure available to people who didn't own a belt sander.
Visually related — by likeness
Man at the Helm of a Wooden Cruiser, American Lake or River, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-F81AE9. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-at-the-helm-of-a-wooden-cruiser-american-lake-or-river-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026F81AE9,
title = {Man at the Helm of a Wooden Cruiser, American Lake or River, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-F81AE9},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-at-the-helm-of-a-wooden-cruiser-american-lake-or-river-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Man at the Helm of a Wooden Cruiser, American Lake or River, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-F81AE9 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-at-the-helm-of-a-wooden-cruiser-american-lake-or-river-1950s ER -
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