Looks like a brand new '39 Mercury behind the man. This was the year Mercury began production in Fords mid-priced range.

The gent painting his auto top reminded me of my uncle Frank Tucker. About the end of WWII, a company sold automobile paint and advertised that you could paint your own car. Uncle Frank bought one of the kits which included a special mitten for applying the paint. He did a fairly nice job of it too, but ran out of paint before he could cover the metal roof. Possibly he could have done the entire car had he worked faster so he could have gotten through before he ran out of paint.

Surface-coated fabrics were used for lower priced soft tops and for covering the center deck of closed body tops. The latter application vanished with the advent of all-steel tops in the mid-1930s. For traditional black top-decking, a rubber-faced 4 ply fabric was specified by many car makers. If the top deck was to be painted (matching the car body), pyroxylin was used. Ford, and perhaps a few other makers, offered deck material featuring a print pattern on pyroxylin.