March 2012 - LIFE

Johnny Longden: Giant in the Saddle

August 17, 2021March 31, 2012 by

It’s hardly surprising that racing fans can reel off the names of dozens or even scores of great horses far easier than they can bring to mind, say, ten great jockeys. Here’s one you should know: the late, great Johnny Longden an English-born, Canadian-raised titan who first made a name for himself riding in California and, by the end of his four-decade career, had won the Triple Crown (aboard Count Fleet) and most every important race in the land.

As LIFE magazine put it in a May 1952 issue:

When wizened 42-year-old jockey Johnny Longden booted home his 3,999th winner, the routine of horse racing at California’s Hollywood Park was completely upset. Fans suddenly stopped playing form and, anxious to help Longden get his 400th win, began playing his horses for sentimental reasons. Officials who had planned a big ceremony fidgeted: Longden himself acted coy. “I never give it no thought,” he said. “I know it’s come, just like night and day.” It came seven races later hen, next day, he won No. 4,000, about 1,000 more than any other U.S. jockey.

Famous for getting his horses off to a fast start and keeping them out in front, little (4 ft. 11 in.) Johnny Longden has at one time or another won almost every big race in the country. Despite his age and a fat bank account, he is still the most industrious jockey going, riding six or seven races every day of the week and occasionally flying down to Agua Caliente, Mexico to ride on Sunday. Rising horses, says Longden, is the one thing he really enjoys. And he expects to win 5,000 before he is 50.

In fact, he ended his career with more than 6,000 wins including his very last race, the 1966 San Juan Capistrano Invitational Handicap at Santa Anita Park, where Longden had enjoyed so many of his greatest triumphs.

But Longden wasn’t merely a Hall of Fame rider who competed as a jockey until he was 59; he is also the only man to ride to victory in the Kentucky Derby, and then train a horse that won the Derby, as well, in 1969 with Majestic Prince.

Johnny Longden was, in many ways, one of the major figures in horse racing for decades. He should be remembered, and celebrated, for even longer. This is a start.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Johnny Longden, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden, 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden (second from right) with fellow jockeys, Hollywood Park, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden (second from right) with fellow jockeys, Laurel Park, Maryland, 1952.

Mark Kauffman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden (left) and fellow jockey, California, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden, Hollywood Park, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden wins at Hollywood Park, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden at Hollywood Park in 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden poses after his 4,000th career win in 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden and son at the track, 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden and family, 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden with his pet cockateil, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden and family, 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden (hands in pockets) in 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden and friend, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE at an Ohio Prom That Lasted 32 Hours

August 11, 2021March 29, 2012 by

Nowadays, in order for a high school prom to garner national attention, something rather extraordinary or, better yet, something vaguely scandalous has to occur before, during or after the event—perhaps a celebrity cameo, or a showdown that sets of a social media firestorm.

But back in the day specifically, back in 1958, students at an Ohio high school simply had to stay awake in order to get their names and faces in the June 9, 1958, issue of LIFE magazine. Stay awake and dance, that is. And go riverboating. And eat breakfast. And ride roller coasters. And dance some more. . . .

“Traditionally,” LIFE noted, “senior proms are the high school students’ big night to howl. To keep them happy and off the roads and ultimately wear them out, many high schools now sponsor all-night dances. The only trouble is that each generation seems to take longer to wear out.”

The article continued:

Students at Mariemont High School near Cincinnati came close to the ultimate this year when they put on a “prom” that lasted almost 32 hours. It started with a progressive dinner (spaghetti to strawberry cake), followed by a formal but highly energetic dance. Then the students boarded a river boat for a cruise and dancing to a jazz combo. Dawn found them somewhat subdued and back at the school for breakfast. Sent home for a short rest period, they emerged refreshed and descended on an amusement park. By nightfall half the students had discovered they were mortal and had gone home to bed. The rest whipped up another dance. “It keeps getting better and better,” one said, “as I get more and more numb.”

Original caption: “Formal dance held at the Kenwood Country Club was only traditional part of Mariemont’s prom.”

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Informal games started at progressive dinner. Here students pull each other off in ‘chicken.'”

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mariemont High School Prom, Ohio, 1958.

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Third dance was held at the amusement park. Here couples gather around as band plays ‘Tequila.'”

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “A chilly dawn as boat neared dock quenched some student fire. Most revived after hot breakfast.”

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “River Cruise was kept lively by dancing. Here Leslie Ingram and Jim Rockaway lead a bunny hop.”

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mariemont High School Prom, Ohio, 1958.

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Snoozing in sun at park pool, Nancy Reynolds and Wally Wyatt nap to help keep them going.”

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Roller Coaster ride keeps students moving. Holding hands in air during ride is judged brave.”

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mariemont High School Prom, Ohio, 1958.

Francis Miller Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams: Portraits of an American Genius

August 12, 2021March 23, 2012 by

While Eugene O’Neill, with his Nobel Prize and four Pulitzers, is the greatest American playwright of the 20th century, Arthur Miller the most lastingly relevant, Edward Albee the most challenging and Sam Shepard simply the coolest, one could argue that Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III is the most influential, and his work the most universally beloved.

Putting one’s finger on why Williams’ plays have held pride of place in theater goers’ hearts for so long is another matter. Yes, the dialog is a thrilling mixture of the perfectly colloquial and the poetic. Yes, the passions on display in works like The Rose Tattoo, The Glass Menagerie and, of course, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are as blistering as those given voice by any other American dramatist, while the characters Williams brought to life remain, for many of us, as indelible as members of our own families.

In the end, though, the appeal and the power of Williams’ very best plays might reside in this: that he manages, somehow, to peel back layer after layer from his characters as the story rolls on, and rather than diminishing these men and women in our eyes, the gradually unfolding revelations and the playwright’s clear-eyed compassion for his own creations ennoble and humanize them. Stanley, Blanche and Stella; Maggie the Cat, Brick and Big Daddy; Amanda Wingfield in Menagerie and Serafina in The Rose Tattoo these and so many other Williams characters are profoundly memorable not because they’re heroic, but because they’re so deeply and recognizably flawed. They’re damaged, searching, isolated creatures and still they go on. Williams, never sentimental, sees in that simple act of endurance a quality worth celebrating. And so do we.

Here, on Williams’ 101st birthday (he was born, not in Tennessee, but in a small town in eastern Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, and died in New York City in 1983), LIFE.com offers a series of portraits of the great American playwright by some of LIFE magazine’s finest photographers: portraits of what LIFE, in 1948, called “a dreamy young man with an unconquerable compulsion to write.”

That Tennessee Williams creatively harnessed that compulsion for so many years, battling an army of relentless personal demons (alcohol, drugs, depression) every step of the way, is one more act, William’s own act, of endurance worth celebrating.

Tennessee Williams stands in front of a poster advertising his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, in New York in 1948.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams in New York in 1955.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Backstage poker with the musicians attracted Williams much more than flashy night life during his month in New York after Streetcar’s premiere.”

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams in 1948.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams, New York, 1948.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams at a diner in New York in 1948.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams in Mexico in 1963 during filming of a movie from his play, The Night of the Iguana, in 1963.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cartier-Bresson: ‘Red China’ in Color, 1958

August 17, 2021March 22, 2012 by

The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) was influential in ways and on a scale that, in all likelihood, will never be repeated or matched by any other practitioner of the craft. So much of what the world now knows and recognizes as photojournalism, after all, was originally shaped by Cartier-Bresson’s work in the 1930s, and especially by the methodology he developed and pursued with his peers Robert Capa and David Seymour, or “Chim”: incessant travel, always with camera in hand; the search not for mere adventure, but for meaning in both conflict and in utterly quotidian calm; and finally, the hunt for specific, never-to-be repeated scenes, instances, gestures that would, in less than a heartbeat, tell a tale that no moving image or written word could possibly surpass.

Like William Blake’s admonition to “see a world in a grain of sand,” Cartier-Bresson’s defining aim has been summed up in the notion of (in the English translation) “the decisive moment” that is, the fraction of a second when a living tableau presents itself to a photographer, and he or she must rely on both instinct and experience to know when to make the picture, to get the shot.

That Cartier-Bresson routinely cut up literally cut up, into pieces, with scissors his contact sheets and discarded those pictures that did not come close to capturing a decisive moment hardly lessens or cheapens the scope of the man’s singular and still, today, almost overwhelming achievement. But the practice of ruthlessly culling weak images from the strong does, perhaps, provide insights into the admirably unsentimental nature of an artist like HCB and perhaps nowhere was this lack of undue sentiment more striking than in Cartier-Bresson’s color photography.

There’s a reason, it turns out, why coming across his color photos can be so jarring; not only did Cartier-Bresson infrequently shoot in color, but he destroyed virtually all of his color negatives, leaving the almost exclusively black-and-white legacy familiar to most photography fans. Finding out that Cartier-Bresson shot professionally in color — and sometimes worked on major, long-term assignments in that format — is the sort of unexpected revelation than provides the student of photography with not only a surprise, but a sudden sense of enlargement.

One of Cartier-Bresson’s most significant color projects was a 1958 assignment for LIFE: a four-month, 7,000 mile tour through communist China during that country’s convulsive “great leap forward,” when the huge, ancient nation was being alternately pushed and pulled, dragged and harried by its leaders to leave its past behind and to embrace industrialization, collectivism and the precepts of Chairman Mao. (“The staggering Chinese upheaval … goes on,” LIFE wrote of the ‘great leap,’ “spurred by the biting fury that Mao himself expressed when he declared, Communism is not love, Communism is a hammer we use to destroy the enemy.”)

“With the perceptiveness for which he is famous,” LIFE declared of the photographer’s work in China, “Cartier-Bresson has shown how the Chinese individually react and live amid the oppressive regimentation imposed on them.”

Whether or not viewers today see what LIFE told its readers they would encounter in that issue in early 1959, what remains clear in the pictures presented here, in both color and in black and white, is that decades into his long, varied career Cartier-Bresson was still seeking and still finding those never-to-be-repeated decisive moments.

LIFE Magazine, January 5, 1959

Henri Cartier-Bresson LIFE Magazine

Water: Essential, Beautiful, Mesmerizing, Fun

August 11, 2021March 21, 2012 by

Agua. Wai. L’eau. Wasser. Mul. Water.

No matter how you spell it or how you pronounce it, H2O is a wonder: a beautifully simple, simply beautiful element that means nothing less than life.

We drink it. We swim in it. We inhale it with the air we breathe, and exhale it when we sleep, when we talk, when we laugh, when we stand outside on a cold night watching the stars, our breath made visible. We sail on it, ski on it and whitewater raft on it. We are, to a large extent, made of it. Our planet is a shining blue marble in the darkness of space because of it.

Without it, you’re in trouble.

Here, LIFE.com offers a gallery celebrating the most wondrous of all the classic elements a small, humble gesture of gratitude toward dihydrogen monoxide, without which we, and everything we know and love, would simply dry up and blow away.

Swimmer Kathy Flicker spits water in a swimming pool in 1962.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Missionary priest Vincent Ferrer (left) and assistant Mahadev (right) splash in water from a new well on a model farm in India in 1968.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Thirsty young football players drink water from a garden hose in Denver, Colorado, in 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Linda Joy Young bathes in a sink, Pasadena, Calif., in 1951.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A girl in a village on Saipan (Marianas Islands) carries a bottle of water in her arms and a baby on her back in 1944.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A little girl receiving tests gazes into pool containing baby ducks —an early use of animals as part of medical therapy, 1956.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A sharecropper’s son gets water from a pump on a farm in the Mississippi delta in 1937.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A steelworker in Aliquippa, Penn., washes up at an outdoor pump in 1936.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Bald Eagle’s bath in California, 1949.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A soldier drives a Jeep out of the water in 1946.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rehearsal for an underwater wedding, San Marcos, Texas, 1954.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Water-proofing, 1948.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Writing underwater with a pen, 1948.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Women demonstrate the Porpoise Diving Fin, a streamlined 2-inch thick mahogany plank at the end of a tow rope, 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kathy Flicker dives at Princeton University’s Dillon Gym pool in 1962.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A polar bear seen underwater at a London zoo in 1967.

Terence Spencer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Underwater ballet, 1945.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1952 U.S. Olympic Skiers: Stunning Images from Squaw Valley

August 17, 2021March 21, 2012 by

In February 1952, when (as LIFE magazine phrased it) “a gay and gaudy invasion” of athletes descended on Norway’s capital, Oslo, to take part in the sixth Olympic Winter Games, “a select band of winter warriors paused there only long enough to catch their breath and another train.”

Leaving behind the main force of 1,200 athletes, this small group pushed on north to a sterner battleground. These were the true daredevils of winter sport the downhill ski racers. Their destination, 62 miles from Oslo, was Mount Norefjell, a snow-capped peak whose terrain is considered rugged enough for the most hazardous of all Olympic events. No sport on earth matches in danger the downhill race: the course at Norefjell drops a breathtaking 2,400 feet in a mile and half.

Among the men en route there this week, with less chance of winning a race than of losing a limb, was the underdog eight-man American team. All in their 20s and pink-faced from weeks of outdoor training, they included three college boys from New England, a lumberjack from the Pacific northwest, a ski-tow mechanic, a yeoman 2/c on leave from the U.S. Navy, an Air Force private and one fellow who had no other occupation than skiing for the fun of it. With them in the role of keeper was one middle-aged Frenchman named Emile Allais, their trainer and technical adviser.

Norefjell looks no more formidable than a dozen other mountains they have conquered: it is no tougher than the “rock garden” at Sun Valley or skiing down the side of the Empire State Building.

LIFE was right, in the end, in its estimation of the team’s chances in Norway or rather, LIFE was right about the men’s chances. No one on the American men’s ski team medaled in 1952. But a young native Vermonter on the women’s squad, 19-year-old Andrea Mead Lawrence (a future National Ski Hall of Fame inductee), made up for the dearth of laurels on the male side, winning gold in both the Slalom and Giant Slalom.

Here, LIFE.com presents photos of the men’s squad by George Silk as they trained for the ’52 Oslo games in Squaw Valley, California. These pictures that capture the rigor and the beauty of, as LIFE put it, “the most hazardous of all Olympic events.”

American skier Jack Reddish training for the 1952 Oslo Winter Olympics, Squaw Valley, California, 1950.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A skier trains for the Olympics, Squaw Valley, California, 1950.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American skiers in training, Squaw Valley, California, 1950.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: ” “Over the edge and seemingly off into space goes U.S. Olympic team member Dick Buek at Squaw Valley. On straight drops skiers have gone 73 mph.” Buek, an adrenaline junkie nicknamed “the Madman of Donner Summit,” died at the age of 27 in a plane crash.”

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Skiers train for the 1952 Winter Olympics, Squaw Valley, California, 1950.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Avalanche of men and snow plunges down steep side of mountain at Squaw Valley in California as American team gets ready for the Olympics. This dramatic picture was taken in early morning before the sun had touched the snow.”

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

U.S. Olympic skier training in Squaw Valley, California, 1950.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

U.S. Olympic Skier training in Squaw Valley, California, 1950.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A skier trains for the Olympics, Squaw Valley, California, 1950.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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