February 29 is one of those dates, like November 11, or Friday the 13th, or the summer solstice, that seems more freighted with possibilities, both good and bad, than other days of the year. And because the 29th day of the second month only comes around every four years—an attempt by humans to make up for the fact that a year is not, strictly speaking, comprised of 365 days, but 365 and a quarter days (it’s math, look it up)—Leap Day can sometimes feel like a gift. An extra day added to the calendar. A full 24 hours that we didn’t have last year and that we won’t have next year, in which we might do … anything.
Here, then, in celebration of Leap Day, and of the wonderful act of simply leaping about, LIFE.com respectfully offers a gallery of pictures that feel full of possibilities: images that, for the most part, try to approximate what Wordsworth might have been driving at when he wrote, more than 200 years ago, “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.”
Or, as House of Pain put it more succinctly, if less poetically in 1992: Jump around!
Happy Leap Day, everybody.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Fred Astaire executes a seemingly effortless leap in the 1946 film, Blue Skies.
Bob Landry Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy leaps from his car in 1960.
Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Artist Jane Eakin sits on the shoulders of rope-skipping champion Gordon Hathaway in 1947.
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Starlet June Preisser jumping in a pool, 1940
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, 1956
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Crewmen simulating escape from a plane jump, in their flight suits, into a swimming pool during training at McClellan Air Force base in California in 1954.
George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Acrobat and actor Russ Tamblyn does a flip on the sidewalk while walking with Venetia Stevenson in 1955.
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Actress Christine Norden and jumping dog in 1948
Nat Farbman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A horse and rider sail gracefully toward a water tank in Atlantic City in 1953.
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A multiple exposure shot of a gymnast jumping on a trampoline in 1960.
J.R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alice Marble, No. 1 American women’s tennis player, leaps over the net in 1939.
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Walter Davis leads a dance class, 1952
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Architect and designer Frank Gehry jumps on a desk—part of his line of cardboard furniture—in 1972.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rudy the Dachshund shows off his bed-jumping form in 1946.
Frank Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A man jumps on a trampoline in California in 1960.
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An SMU cheerleader takes to the air at a University of Texas football game in 1950.
Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Leon James and Willa Mae Ricker demonstrate how the Lindy Hop is meant to be danced in 1943
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tamara Toumanova executes a grand jeté for actor, singer, dancer and comedian Danny Kaye in 1945.
In late 1956, over the course of several months, LIFE published what the magazine described as “a series of major articles on the background of the crisis brought about by the school segregation decision [Brown v. Board of Education] of the Supreme Court. . . . Although the ground that is to be covered in the series is not wholly new to Americans, it is unfamiliar as a subject of moderate and unprejudiced consideration.”
The series, titled The Background of Segregation, explored that emotionally and politically charged issue. For one riveting segment of the monumental five-part series, “Voices of the White South,” LIFE dispatched the great photographer Margaret Bourke-White to Greenville, South Carolina, where she documented citizens from varying walks of life who unapologetically supported the legacy and the practice of open, legal segregation.
Here, in striking color photographs that, at times, convey an unsettling intimacy, Bourke-White’s work opens a window on an era that, for better and for worse, helped define 20th-century America. The “Voices of the White South” article, which won praise and awards when published, was extraordinary for, among other things, the utterly non-sensational methodology and tone of its reportage. While much of the national debate over desegregation was dominated in the mid-1950s by often (and often understandable) heated language and actions “Voices” was a measured take on the issue. Far from emphasizing its own pro-integrationist sensibility, LIFE allowed Southerners to discuss their own pro-segregationist views in their own words, at length and created a portrait of the South far more nuanced than the depiction usually found in the liberal “Yankee” press.
The article was not, in the end, an anti-segregationist screed, but instead an honest glimpse into the heart of a culture frightened of what the future might hold.
“Outside the South,” LIFE wrote, “the white Southerner who believes in segregation is sometimes pictured as a latter-day Simon Legree who now does with law what used to be done with a whip. If he no longer runs around wearing a bed sheet and setting fire to crosses, he doubtless belongs to a ‘Citizens Council,’ which Hodding Carter [then a prominent newspaper editor from Mississippi] has described as ‘the uptown Ku Klux Klan.’ There are Southerners who fit this picture, but there are many more who are thoughtful, pious gentlefolk and who are still in favor of segregation.”
LIFE’s Dick Stolley, who would go on to become the magazine’s managing editor and the founding Managing Editor of People, among many other roles, worked on the Background of Segregation series as an Atlanta-based correspondent for the magazine. He told LIFE.com that, considering how despised the magazine was across the South for its solidly pro-integration editorial stance, he was “astonished at the time, and I remain astonished today, that I was able to find five Southern whites who were willing to talk to LIFE about their reasons for so adamantly opposing integration.”
While the “Voices” article was striking not only for its powerful color photographs and the (largely) subdued tenor of its language—especially in light of the politically and emotionally explosive nature of the topic at hand—a few of the observations made in the piece, encountered six decades later, are beyond jarring. Some of them, in fact even when read with an awareness of the era in which they were written are nothing less than shocking to contemporary ears.
LIFE reminded its readers that ex-Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia was only one of countless prominent Southerners “who feel that segregation must be preserved.” Talmadge, LIFE wrote, believed that “to destroy segregation would be to destroy the South. . . .”
[His] viewpoint is traditional and has, in the eyes of many white Southerners, the honor that attaches to a great past. “God advocates segregation,” Governor Talmadge maintains. “There are five different races and God created them all different. He did not intend them to be mixed or He would not have separated or segregated them. Certainly history shows that nations composed of a mongrel race lose their strength and become weak, lazy and indifferent. They become easy prey to outside nations. And isn’t that just exactly what the Communists want to happen to the United States?” This is a viewpoint that has been expressed by generations of southern political leaders and remains widely accepted in the rural South today.
In the “Voices” article, a 38-year-old white sharecropper in North Carolina summed up his support of segregation and his views on his black neighbors and fellow farmers this way:
“We’re working to own our farm. We want to hurry up and get someplace. But they just don’t work. They just don’t care. All they’re looking for is the end of the week when the landlord will shoot ’em a little money. [T]hey take a bath once a month, and their fields don’t look like they’s hardly tending them.” At the same time, according to LIFE, the sharecropper’s approval of segregation was “based as much, or more, on personal pride than notions of color. He would rather have a Negro living next door than he would a white ‘redneck’ or ‘peckerwood.’ In his view, ‘there’s nothing sorrier than a sorry white man.'”
The white sharecropper’s wife, LIFE wrote, “also approves of segregation and will not let her 9-year-old daughter play with an 8-year-old Negro neighbor. This is the reason she gives: ‘If our landlord came down here and saw her playing with a colored boy, he wouldn’t respect us. Only poor class whites do that. We’re trying to keep our self-respect and keep the highest level socially we can. We’re willing to work with the Negroes, but that’s as far as we’ll go.”
Another quote from the article that shares the sentiment and even the vocabulary of pronouncements that for decades have sent chills through men and women involved in the struggle for justice and equal rights came from Greenville’s white mayor, Kenneth Cass. “There is no race trouble here,” he told LIFE, “and there won’t be, unless an agitator comes in and stirs it up.”
One man quoted at some length in the “Voices” article was Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. “‘There are those who insist that segregation protects the ‘integrity’ of both races,” McGill said. “There are others who believe, with deep sincerity, that Negroes are ‘better off’ under it. Conceivably this might be argued with some logic. It does not matter. The world . . . has moved on. Segregation by law no longer fits today’s world…. Segregation is on its way out, and he who tries to tell the people otherwise does them a great disservice. The problem of the future is how to live with the change.'” _________________________________________________________________________
—Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
An African-American maid prepared a white family’s supper in Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Children played in a segregated neighborhood, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young girls listened attentively in a sewing class, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Home inspection in a black neighborhood, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Generations passed the time on a porch in Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mayor Kenneth Cass conversed with a Greenville resident, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Greenville, South Carolina’s mayor Kenneth Cass (in tie) visited a car wash, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Outside a roadhouse, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Two black men were arrested for disorderly conduct in Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Three women stood before a magistrate after a disturbance at a juke joint, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A work crew comprised of inmates, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Inmates dug a drainage ditch in Greenville. The girl in the foreground lived nearby and came out to watch when she saw the gang start to work.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Greenville mayor Kenneth Cass reviewed a map of proposed roads in an upper-income housing development, 1956. The development was privately built by African Americans, and the city fully cooperated with their plans.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Segregated playground, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Segregated playground, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Segregated playground, Greenville, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A night out at a juke joint in Greenville, South Carolina.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A night out at a Greenville juke joint.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dancing in Greenville.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A night out at a Greenville juke joint.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
For his groundbreaking 1948 LIFE magazine photo essay, “Country Doctor” — seen here, in its entirety, followed by several unpublished photographs from the shoot — photographer W. Eugene Smith spent 23 days in Kremmling, Colo., chronicling the day-to-day challenges faced by an indefatigable general practitioner named Dr. Ernest Ceriani.
Born on a sheep ranch in Wyoming, Dr. Ceriani attended Chicago’s Loyola School of Medicine but opted not to pursue a medical career in the big city. In 1946, after a stint in the Navy, he was recruited by the hospital in Kremmling, and he and wife Bernetha, who was born in Colorado, settled into the rural town. Dr. Ceriani was the sole physician for an area of about 400 square miles, inhabited by some 2,000 people.
Eugene Smith’s at-times almost unsettlingly intimate pictures illustrate in poignant detail the challenges faced by a modest, tireless rural physician—and gradually reveal the inner workings and the outer trappings of what is clearly a uniquely rewarding life.
“Country Doctor” was an instant classic when published, establishing Smith as a master of the commanding young art form of the photo essay, and solidifying his stature as one of the most passionate and influential photojournalists of the 20th century. In 1979, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund was founded to support those working in the profoundly humanistic style of photography to which Smith dedicated his life and his art.
Dr. Ernest Ceriani made a house call on foot, Kremmling, Colo., 1948. The generalist was the lone physician serving a Rocky Mountain enclave that covered 400 square miles.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ralph Pickering held his 5-week-old baby while waiting to be Dr. Ceriani’s first patient of the day. Pickering, a horseback guide to tourists coming to see the majestic Rocky Mountains, traveled from an outlying ranch to reach the doctor’s office.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani sat at the bedside of a patient as he assessed flu symptoms during a house call. When Smith began “Country Doctor,” he shot for a period of time with no film in his camera, to help Ceriani get used to his presence without wasting precious film.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In the backseat of a car, Dr. Ceriani administered a shot of morphine to a 60-year-old tourist from Chicago, seen here with her grandson, who was suffering from a mild heart disturbance.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani examined a feverish 4-year-old girl suffering from tonsillitis. Although most of his patients were children, Ceriani was initially inexperienced in pediatrics when he started his practice, and studied up on it whenever he had the chance.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Though he had no vacations and few days off, Dr. Ceriani did have use of a small hospital, which was equipped with an X-ray machine, an autoclave and an oxygen tent, among other medical necessities. Here, he explained an X-ray — he developed the film himself — to one of his rancher patients.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The doctor taped a patient who broke some ribs after a horse rolled over him. “His income for covering a dozen fields is less than a city doctor makes by specializing in just one,” LIFE’s editors noted, “but Ceriani is compensated by the affection of his patients and neighbors, by the high place he has earned in his community and by the fact that he is his own boss. For him, this is enough.”
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani used a syringe to irrigate wax from an elderly man’s ear to improve his hearing.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani examined the stitches in the lacerated hand of a young patient.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two friends transported Dr. Ceriani to Gore Canyon so he could enjoy a few hours of recreational fishing, a rare treat for the hard-working physician.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani fly-fished on the Colorado River.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Thirty minutes into his fishing excursion, Dr. Ceriani was called to an emergency: A young girl hasd been kicked in the head by a horse and was badly injured.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The child’s worried parents looked on as Dr. Ceriani, surrounded by nurses, examined their two-year-old daughter.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani had stitched the girl’s wound to minimize scarring, but he then had to find a way to tell the parents that her eye could not be saved and they needed to take her a specialist in Denver to have it removed.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The doctor helped a rancher carry his son into the hospital. The inebriated young man dislocated his elbow when he was thrown from a bronco at a rodeo.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The injured elbow required a painful reset.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Don’t tell my mother,” said the young man. Still under the effects of ether, he didn’t realize she’d been holding his hand during the procedure.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani checked the blood pressure of 85-year-old Thomas Mitchell, who came to the hospital with a gangrenous leg. Knowing that Mitchell might not be strong enough to endure the necessary amputation, Ceriani had been postponing surgery.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
When Mitchell finally rallied, the doctor gently carried him from the basement ward up to the operating room of the hospital, which had no elevator.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani gave the 85-year-old man spinal anesthesia before amputating his gangrenous left leg.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani responded to a late-night call when an 82-year-old man suffered a heart attack at a boarding house. Town marshal Chancy Van Pelt and one of the man’s fellow tenants stood by.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Knowing the man who suffered the heart attack at the boarding house will not make it through the night, Dr. Ceriani called for a priest from the kitchen.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani helped the town marshal carry the heart attack victim to the ambulance. There, the country doctor would see that his patient was as comfortable as possible, knowing there was nothing he can do to save him.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The treeless ranching community of Kremmling, Colo., stood on a 7,000-ft. plateau beneath the towering Rocky Mountains.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani held 11-month-old son Gary as his wife, Bernetha, steadied 3-year-old Phillip on a fence while watching a parade. Though they’d been married for four years at the time Smith was profiling the doctor, Mrs. Ceriani still struggled with the unpredictability of her husband’s schedule.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A fund-raising committee in Kremmling was able to raise $35,000 in 1947 to purchase the home of the town’s retiring physician and turn it into a 14-bed hospital. The funds were used to stock the tiny hospital with as much equipment — some of it war surplus — as could be afforded. Middle Park Hospital had only three wards that could accommodate 14 patients. With a new hospital in place, the town then put out a call for a new general practitioner — a call answered by Dr. Ceriani.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
After finishing a surgery that lasted until 2 AM, Dr. Ceriani stood exhausted in the hospital kitchen with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. “The nurses,” LIFE noted, “constantly admonish him to relax and rest, but because they are well aware that he cannot, they keep a potful of fresh coffee simmering for him at all hours.”
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ernest Ceriani in the small Kremmling, Colo., hospital.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Doctor Ceriani checked 4-year-old Jimmy Free’s foot, cut when the boy stepped on broken glass.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ceriani examined his handiwork after the partial amputation of a patient’s leg, Kremmling, Colo., August 1948. The patient, Thomas Mitchell, was suffering from a gangrenous infection.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. An operating room in Kremmling, Colo.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ceriani with a patient.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ernest Ceriani delivered a baby.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Maternity ward, Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. An incubator in Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. The contents of a country doctor’s bag, Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Doctor Ceriani and town marshal Chancey Van Pelt carried a patient from a cabin in the hills near Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ernest Ceriani on his way to a house call in foul weather, Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
Even in the rarefied world of fine art, clichés often hold true.
For instance, the notion of the painter or sculptor in his or her studio, feverishly working, shaping, carving, drawing, with a model striking a specific pose cliché or no cliché, that very scenario is still one of the realities of making art. The human body, after all, has long been the principal, singular form from which so many artists draw inspiration.
From the very first, LIFE magazine celebrated not only artists and their creations, but their process: drawing, sketching, sculpting, painting and all the other ways that the truly creative among us develop and bring into being their vision of what is, or perhaps what should be. Here, then, a gallery of photographs that pay tribute to the artist at work, and the simple, beautiful, living human form that so often serves as the artist’s most enduringly reliable muse.
Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008)
Wallace Kirkland Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Farnsworth Art School
Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Thomas Hart Benton (1889 – 1975)
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Thomas Hart Benton: Painter, Writer
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Skowhegan School of Art
Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jean Negulesco (1900 – 1993)
Jerry Cooke Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Moses Soyer (1899 – 1974)
Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
David Fredenthal (1914 – 1958)
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fabius von Gugel (1910 – 2000)
Jack Birns Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Nude With Cigarette, Ox-Bow, Michigan
Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Nude Model, Iowa
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Chaim Gross in His Studio
Eliot Elisofon Time Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Big Sur, 1959
J. R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Arthritis Patient Paints a Nude Model
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
![Another Bourke-White photograph of this scene -- of inmates digging a drainage ditch in Greenville, SC -- appeared in the Sept. 17, 1956 issue of LIFE. "The white girl," read the caption, "lives in a nearby house [and] came out to watch when she saw the gang start work."](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2012/02/141216-south-carolina-segregation-13-1024x661.jpg "Inmates dug a drainage ditch in Greenville. The girl in the foreground lived nearby and came out to watch when she saw the gang start to work.")
