Weekend Boat Outing with Captain's Cap, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Weekend Boat Outing with Captain's Cap, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Weekend Boat Outing with Captain's Cap, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-73DBDF

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Somewhere on a lake in the 1950s, a man has put on a captain's cap for a boat trip that will not take him more than a mile from the dock. The hat did real work in that decade: it told the passengers, and possibly the man himself, that piloting a runabout with a temperamental outboard motor was a form of command rather than a hobby purchased on installment credit.

The two women have dressed for wind rather than water, hair pinned under scarves in the style thought necessary before a car or boat ride could be survived with a hairstyle intact. Both wear identical white cat-eye sunglasses, the era's standard-issue eyewear, purchased not because they were flattering to everyone but because they were what the drugstore had.

Behind them the wake fans out white and the motor sits exposed on its transom bracket, the kind of engine a man was expected to understand the workings of, whether or not he actually did. Everyone faces the camera with the calm of people who have been told to hold still, on a boat that is, for the moment, entirely under control.

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