Two Men in Green Wooden Runabout, American River or Lake, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Two Men in Green Wooden Runabout, American River or Lake, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Men in Green Wooden Runabout, American River or Lake, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-0B00AE

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Two men idle across a broad, brown-watered river or reservoir in a green lapstrake wooden runabout, the kind of small craft that in the 1950s represented the exact midpoint between serious boating and a Sunday afternoon with nowhere particular to be. The man at the stern works what is almost certainly a small outboard, because the postwar decade had decided that rowing was for people who hadn't yet heard about motors, and the man in the bow sits with the relaxed posture of someone who has agreed to come along without being asked to do anything useful. A white boat idles at the right edge of the frame, hinting at the mild traffic of a public waterway where everyone was out doing the same nothing in slightly different vessels. The flat, cottonwood-lined far bank and the small white structure visible through the trees suggest the interior American Midwest or Great Plains — a region that had by the 1950s fully committed to the proposition that a man's leisure was his own business and required a motor to be properly enjoyed.

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