The Junk Peddler Friendly Club Picnic, 1950s

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The Junk Peddler Friendly Club Picnic, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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The Junk Peddler Friendly Club Picnic, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-978AC0

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A shirtless man in dress slacks stands beside a hand-lettered sign announcing The Junk Peddler Friendly Club Picnic, which tells you everything you need to know about how American small business organized its leisure time in the 1950s: you formed a club, you named it after your trade, you added the word 'friendly' to reassure everyone, and then you held a picnic in a public park with folding tables and whatever lumber was lying around for the sign. The junk trade — salvage, scrap, secondhand goods — was unglamorous work, and the men who did it understood that, which is probably why the club needed the word 'friendly' in the first place. He rests one hand on the sign with the easy proprietary air of a man who made the sign himself and is not embarrassed by it. Behind him, a dozen people occupy picnic tables in the shade without any apparent awareness that they are members of anything. The 1950s produced a remarkable number of associations like this one, built on the democratic premise that any occupation, no matter how humble, deserved its own annual picnic — and that premise, at least, was correct.

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