Happy International Picnic Day!

I’m willing to bet you didn’t know that June eighteenth is International Picnic Day. At least according to web sources. Frankly it has the feeling of a fabricated holiday. All I found on the web were circular references; sites pointing to one another without ever referencing an "official source". Still, it was an opportunity to dig through Shorpy to come up with a great old photograph of a picnic, and there’s a lot to look at in this one!

This particular photo comes from 1941 and even though it was taken in October it seemed suitable for picnic day. Looking at its details I get a little nostalgic. My grandmother used to wear a turban like the one worn by the woman in the foreground. Hers were made of polyester and came in a variety of pastel colors. In fact, I hardly remember seeing my grandmother’s hair at all, for what I know she might have been bald or had a battleship tattooed on her scalp.

It’s also remarkable that the gentleman giving the camera the hairy eye is wearing a nice tie, tie-tack, and striped dress shirt. It’s a pretty remarkable time when a man would dress to sit at a picnic table eating baked beans. I say baked beans because that’s what the label on one of the cans on the ground seems to say. It’s also amazing to see the tableware, real coffee cups, plates, bowls, silverware, and glasses. Plastics were a thing of the 50’s which necessitated hauling a kitchen’s worth of plates and utensils out into the wild in a wicker hamper. My parents had a 50’s version of the picnic hamper complete with melmac plates and aluminum cups in assorted sizes and colors.

The Harvard Brewery was founding in 1898 and survived prohibition, a government takeover, and financial troubles before shuttering its doors in December of 1956. My grandparents beers of choice were Blatz and Old Milwaukee, but I remember the horrid days of the 70’s when they switched to generic beer with its ugly gray and white striped cans.

Ah, things are different now. I’m not a fan of eating in the wild, I hew to the theory even cavemen ate in a cave and we (hopefully) have evolved since then. I have to admit when I see this picture I get a soft spot for packing a hamper on a cool fall afternoon and heading out into nature’s embrace…of course then I think about the yellow jackets, flies, sunburn, and poison ivy and the spell passes.