Photo by Rueben Greene, courtesy northbennington.org
It’s amazing how much you can take away from a single photo. Take, for instance, the car in this shot from the Rueben Greene collection, which shows the everyday occurrence of a man filling it up with gasoline. From just the hub cap, fender line and roof shape, we can not only tell that this is a 1949 Chevrolet Styleline two-door sedan, but we can also see that it’s a DeLuxe, making it one of nearly 150,000 such cars built that year. Petroliana enthusiasts should also be able to tell us when Gulf stations dispensed No-Nox gasoline out of pumps such as those we see in the background. Also, as with Greene’s shot from the parking lot of the Catskill Game Farm, we see more proof that whitewalls were not the norm, at least not up here in the Northeast. What else can you take away from the photo?