I think most of you are aware of the famous "Time Traveling Hipster" photograph that caught the internet's attention for quite a while in the early 2010s.

The story

In 1941, a crowd of people gathered in Gold Bridge BC, Canada. They were awaiting the reopening of the South Fork Bridge which had been damaged in a flood in November 1940. A photograph of the scene was uploaded to the website of the Bralorne Pioneer Museum in 2010. Soon, people started noticing a strange individual: A man with unusual sunglasses, a modern-looking camera and a type of shirt that seems out of place among the suits of the other spectators.

Naturally, theories suggesting that the man was a time traveler emerged. But soon, some clarity came. The sunglasses and the camera might look unusual but in fact, both types of either object actually existed during the time. The "hipster's" shirt was probably a sports shirt of some kind, the logo likely being that of the Montreal Maroons ice hockey team. Suggestions that the photograph was fake altogether were debunked by the museum, which claimed it had been in its possession long before programs like Photoshop existed.

This whole story was very fascinating to me when I discovered it some years after the hype around the photograph had already died down. But one question remained unanswered to me: Who was the man and why did he look like this?

His possible identity

I remember old blog posts speculating about the hipster's identity but I can't find them anymore (they're probably gone). From my memory, one user suggested the man might have been George Thomson, an assayer in the Bralorne mines whose picture was featured in the same exhibit and that the hipster's sunglasses were in fact a work-related piece of clothing. Others thought that the sunglasses hinted at an aviation background. Now this is where it gets interesting:

When I browsed the Find-A-Grave memorials of people buried in Gold Bridge, I came across a cenotaph on the Bridge River Valley Cemetery commemorating the men from the region who were KIA in World War II. Among them was a Pilot Officer William Lawrence Doran who, in my opinion, looks very similar to the man in the hipster photograph. According to his service book found in the image section of the FG page, Mr. Doran joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in May 1941, the same year the photo was taken. He was 26 years old at the time, which matches the age of the hipster and would also explain his relatively youthful appearance and fashion decision. The special type of sunglasses could have been issued by the military.

Below one of his pictures, it says that Mr. Doran had a great interest in journalism and "was well thought of within his local community". So it would be unsurprising if he owned a camera and went to the bridge reopening to document it, since it was probably an event covered by local news that many people followed (as suggested by the size of the crowd). Sadly, Pilot Officer Doran was killed in action on 15 March 1944, serving as a wireless operator/air gunner on a mission to Stuttgart, Germany. He is not buried in Canada but in Hilsenheim, France.

What do you think? Is he the famous hipster in the photograph? While I know that it's ultimately not important who the hipster was exactly, I hope that my ideas can shed some light on why he stood out from the crowd in this famous picture and solve the mystery just a little bit more.