AA-2026-687EB5
On the image
Somewhere under all that snow is a driveway, and the man with the shovel is operating on the era's firm belief that any amount of snow could be defeated by one man, one shovel, and enough stubbornness. The Volkswagen Microbus parked behind him was the vehicle of choice for people who thought of themselves as adaptable, but its rear-engine, no-four-wheel-drive layout was about as suited to a real snowstorm as its owner's optimism.
Nobody in this scene has heard of a snowblower yet, not because the technology didn't exist somewhere, but because in most driveways in the 1960s it hadn't arrived, and clearing snow was still classified as a character-building activity rather than a chore to be automated. The man bends into it with the flat, unhurried posture of someone who expects to be at this for another hour and has made peace with that.
The whole frame is soaked in the blue-green cast that old slide film settles into with age, which nobody at the time could have anticipated and which now makes the whole scene look colder than it probably was.
The historian's note
The vehicle shown is a Volkswagen Type 2, commonly called the Microbus, produced from the 1950s through the following decades and widely used in North America and Europe during the 1960s as an affordable, versatile family and utility vehicle. Its air-cooled, rear-mounted engine gave it modest traction advantages over front-engine cars in light snow, but it lacked the weight and drivetrain needed for serious winter conditions, a limitation well known to owners who drove it through northern winters.
Manual snow removal by shovel was the standard method for residential driveways and walkways throughout the 1960s in most of North America and northern Europe; home snow-clearing equipment remained uncommon and municipal plowing was inconsistent in rural and suburban areas. The scene reflects an ordinary domestic task of the period rather than an unusual event, but it documents daily winter life and personal vehicle ownership patterns typical of the decade.
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Man Shoveling Snow Beside a VW Microbus, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-687EB5. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-shoveling-snow-beside-a-vw-microbus-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026687EB5,
title = {Man Shoveling Snow Beside a VW Microbus, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-687EB5},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-shoveling-snow-beside-a-vw-microbus-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Man Shoveling Snow Beside a VW Microbus, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-687EB5 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-shoveling-snow-beside-a-vw-microbus-1960s ER -
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