If there’s one consolation during the scorching, often unbearably humid days of summer, it’s the prospect of being outdoors with friends and family, swapping stories and enjoying a cold beverage as a huge variety of food cooks on a nearby grill, filling the air with the mouthwatering aroma of a good old-fashioned barbecue.
Here, LIFE.com offers up a selection of photographs celebrating one of the season’s time-honored traditions: the picnic and barbecue, or barbeque, or BBQ. However you spell it, it still translates as “delicious.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Backyard barbecue, 1953
Gordon Parks Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
One of only thirteen American women — known as the Mercury 13 — to participate in NASA’s Mercury space program, Jerrie Cobb (left) barbecues in 1959.
Ralph Crane TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Jerrie Cobb keeps watch over the grill, 1959.
Ralph Crane TIME & LIFE Pictrues/Shutterstock
Barbecue, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1953
Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Family barbecue, 1960
Ralph Crane TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Family barbecue, 1960
Ralph Crane TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1953
Eliot Elisofon TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Beach barbecue, Massachusetts, 1953
Eliot Elisofon TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Beach barbecue, Florida, 1956
Lisa Larsen TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
UCLA fraternity picnic and barbecue, 1940s.
Walter Sanders TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Florida barbecue, 1961
Lynn Pelham Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Vermont barbecue, 1957
Walter Sanders TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Vermont barbecue, 1957
Walter Sanders TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
John D. Lodge (in the suit), the governor of Connecticut from 1951-55, surveys the scene at a salmon barbecue in 1953.
Bobby Fischer was only 29 when, in the midst of the Cold War, he defeated the Russian defending champion Boris Spassky in the World Chess Championship on September 1, 1972, ending 24 years of Soviet dominance in the intense, rarefied realm of big-league chess. The match, held in Reykjavik, Iceland, was a massively hyped event “The Match of the Century” with a build-up worthy of a Super Bowl or the Olympics and the sort of pre-battle media conjecture usually reserved for heavyweight title bouts. Which, in a sense, the match was.
That Fischer was a genius, with one of the most innovative and thrilling minds ever to address a chess board, is largely undisputed. He played in eight U.S. chess championships and won all eight, decisively. In 1956, when he was just 13, he defeated the celebrated American chess master, Donald Byrne, in what Chess Review pegged as “The Game of the Century.” He routinely won international matches by record margins, and in the early 1970s was the number-one rated player in the world for more than four years.
But as renowned and imaginative a Chess Master as Fischer was, in later years his bizarre behavior and his increasingly strident political views (virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic, for the most part, although his mother was Jewish) overshadowed his brilliance and his accomplishments. When he died in 2008, he was living in Iceland—the scene of his greatest professional triumph, and where he had been granted full citizenship in 2005. The American Chess Federation had permanently revoked his membership years before, after he publicly applauded and defended the September 11, 2001, terror attacks as utterly justified and predictable payback in light of America’s policies in the Middle East and elsewhere around the globe. (“The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians for years,” he said shortly after 9/11.)
Long before he beat Spassky, however, and five decades before he finally went to ground in Iceland to live out his last days, LIFE’s Carl Mydans photographed Fischer as a prodigiously talented (and, already, clearly a bit odd) young man living in Brooklyn, New York.
In a February 1964 profile of Fischer, “One-Track Mastermind,” that LIFE published more than a year after Mydans made his photographs, the magazine noted:
Once in a while Bobby Fischer strolls into one of the Times Square amusement arcades and stokes coins into a pinball machine. If you noticed him at all as he stands there, staring at the lighted scoreboard, you’d probably write him off as just another lost young man, and maybe not a very bright one.
You would be mistaken. Bobby hasn’t the slightest flicker of doubt about who he is or what he wants to do. In an age that idolizes well-roundedness he has a single aim: “All I want to do, ever,” he says,” is play chess.”
But even in this genuinely glowing portrait of a quirky, brilliant loner, there are nevertheless hints of a monomaniacal self-absorption and a dismissive attitude toward anyone not Bobby Fischer that, encountered years later, feel very much like the early rumblings of profound trouble to come.
His sister, LIFE notes, taught him chess “when he tired of Parcheesi and other children’s games,” but Fischer’s attitude toward women in general comes across even for the early 1960s as sneeringly adversarial.
“Women are lousy at chess. They’re meant to say at home. I bet I could take any man of average intelligence, a rank beginner, give him, oh, around two months of lessons, and have him at the end of that time beat the women’s world champion. Any man.”
Near the end of the piece, the narrow but unfathomably deep focus of Fischer’s life comes into pitiless focus:
Always in his mind are the 64 squares of the chessboard, with its pieces arranged in one of millions of possible combinations. Always he is thinking of his next match.
“It’s not exactly easy, keeping up the [U.S.] championship,” he says. “It’ll keep me busy all the rest of my life.”
Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photos most of which never ran in LIFE that capture the phenomenally gifted (and commensurately confident) Fischer as he leaves his “child prodigy” years behind and enters, a tad awkwardly, the fraught world of adulthood. This is a portrait of the chess artist as a young man: images capturing a relatively calm stage in a life that, for all of its triumphs, would grow increasingly dark and relentlessly unbalanced as the years passed.
Bobby Fischer in New York City, 1962
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer with his half-sister, Joan, and her daughter, Elisabeth, 1962.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer in New York City, 1962
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer in New York City, 1962.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer on the subway, New York, 1962.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer in a used bookstore, New York, 1962.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer plays chess with an unidentified opponent , New York, 1962.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer at a ballgame, New York, 1962.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “With chess problems spinning in his head by the millions, Bobby relaxes at a coin pinball machine.”
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer in New York City, 1962.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Fischer in New York City, 1962.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong, who died in 2012, was one of those rare, genuine heroes whose legend grew larger with passing years not because he nurtured the myths that attached to him as the first human to walk on the moon, but because he quietly, resolutely refused to play the role of the publicly lauded Great American.
And yet, as private as he was, much of Armstrong’s career with NASA was chronicled, in depth, by LIFE magazine and other media. They were there, covering Armstrong’s role as one of the agency’s astronauts — an astronaut who would ultimately become far more famous than most by virtue of his role on the Apollo 11 flight, but who was, for the entirety of that career, as disciplined a team player as the space program ever produced.
Evoking Armstrong’s personal and professional ethos to perfection, LIFE in 1969 wrote of him: “He grew up in Middle America during the Depression, steered by a set of stern and stubborn values: work hard, smile, save your money, count your blessings (things could be worse) and pray a lot (things could be better). Also: learning is the salvation of the human race, and sloth by far its greatest peril.”
Neil Armstrong worked hard. He inspired others not by any self-consciously grand gestures, but by his dedication to excellence and his tenacious search for ways to further human knowledge and human experience; by firing imaginations around the globe with his humility (“One small step for a man …”); and by his quiet, understated, unquestionable courage.
Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 mission to moon, in training for his work on the lunar surface, 1969.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong, LIFE magazine, July 25, 1969
Apollo 11 lifts off on its historic flight to the moon, July 16, 1969.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jan Armstrong, wife of astronaut Neil Armstrong, and sons gaze up as Apollo 11 heads for space, Florida, 1969.
Vernon Meritt III Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong and family, 1969.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong plays with his 10-year old son Mark, spring 1969.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin chat over drinks in Houston before their historic flight.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
NASA’s newest astronauts, 1963: Bottom row (from left): James Lovell Jr., James McDivitt, and Charles Conrad Jr.; second row: Elliot See Jr. and Major Thomas Stafford; third row: Captain Edward White II and Lt. Commander John Young; top row: Neil Armstrong and Major Frank Borman.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong beside a prototype lunar lander module, Edwards Air Force Base, 1964.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gemini 8 astronauts David Scott (left) and Neil Armstrong, 1966. Their March 1966 Gemini mission was NASA’s sixth manned space flight.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gemini 8 astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott, floating in the Pacific after splashdown, 1966.
NASA/LIFE
Neil Armstrong training for the Apollo 11 mission, Ellington Air Force Base, Texas, 1968.
Lynn Pelham Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong ejecting safely as a “flying bedstead” (a prototype lunar lander) crashes and burns, 1968.
Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin operate a simulator prior to their lunar mission, 1967.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Apollo 11 Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin; Command Module pilot Michael Collins; Mission Commander Neil Armstrong, March 1969.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A view of Earth from space during the Apollo 11 mission, July 1969.
NASA/Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin stands on the lunar surface, photographed by Neil Armstrong, July 1969.
NASA/Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant the American flag on the moon, July 1969.
NASA
Buzz Aldrin on the moon, photographed by Neil Armstrong, July 1969.
NASA/Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jan Armstrong follows the Apollo 11 mission on television with friends and neighbors, 1969.
John Olson Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Astronaut Neil Armstrong making historic moonwalk during Apollo 11 lunar mission, 1969.
CBS News/Time & Life Pictures
A tired but quietly jubilant Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong in space capsule after his historic walk on moon, July 1969.
NASA
Footprint left on the moon by Apollo 11 astronaut, 1969
NASA/Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President Richard Nixon speaks with Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin (still in their quarantine room) aboard the recovery ship Hornet following the crew’s return to Earth, July 24, 1969.
Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin peer out the window of their quarantine room aboard the recovery ship Hornet following their return to Earth after historic mission to the moon, July 24, 1969.
NASA/Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong chat inside the quarantine room in Houston, July 30, 1969.
AFP/Shutterstock
Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin inside a glass-enclosed cage to preserve their post-mission quarantine, July 1969.
Arthur Schatz Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins wave to crowds during a parade celebrating their return from the moon, August 1969.
NASA/LIFE
A photo of the American flag on the moon, taken during lift-off from the lunar surface, July 1969.
NASA
Neil Armstrong training for the Apollo 11 moon mission, Ellington Air Force Base, Texas, 1968.
So many scenes from the August 28, 1963, March on Washington are now familiar to so many of us and the cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is so much a part of the national consciousness it’s easy forget that for the hundreds of thousands of people who marched and rallied that day, the event was wholly, thrillingly new.
There had been, of course, other civil rights protests, marches and demonstrations. But none had been so large (estimates range from 200,000 to 300,00 people) and none garnered so much attention before, during and, especially, after the event itself.
The landmark 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, for example, which also took place in the nation’s capital, had shown everyone—segregationists and civil rights proponents—that large, peaceable rallies in the heart of Washington were not only possible, but were necessary if the movement was going to achieve its central, early goals of desegregation and voting rights reform.
But the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was on a scale so much larger than anything that had come before that it is rightly recalled as a touchstone moment for the Civil Rights movement: a single event so significant that the history of the movement can, in a sense, be measured in terms of Before the March, and After the March. The day is remembered almost exclusively for MLK’s “Dream” speech, famously delivered to the throngs from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
(“I Have a Dream” was, in a way, a work in progress. King had delivered a speech to tens of thousands of people in Detroit several months before, for example, that included several sections and phrases that he included in his Washington address.)
Here LIFE.com presents a selection of pictures most of which never ran in LIFE magazine commemorating that day. What is especially moving about so many of these pictures (those shot “on the ground” by Paul Schutzer, in particular) is that they illustrate the scene as witnessed not by those who led and organized the event, but by those in the crowd. There is huge emotion here, and excitement and the photos evince a palpable sense of inclusion. One is left with a feeling that power was, if only for a moment, passing to the people.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the crowd during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scene from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scene from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lena Horne at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scene from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Joan Baez sang during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Odetta performed during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Actress and activist Ruby Dee, who with her husband, Ossie Davis, served as “master and mistress” of ceremonies at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An overalled couple with the New York delegation joined the crowd by the Lincoln Memorial.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Like other remote, “exotic” lands, the vast expanse of mountains, forests, tundra, wild streams and endless, rugged shoreline known as Alaska has long fired the imagination of millions who have never set foot there. Just as mind-boggling as the 49th state’s spectacular (if sometimes harsh) beauty, however, is that fewer than three-quarters of a million people call the state’s 660,000 square miles home. In other words: Alaska has about one resident per square mile; New Jersey, by comparison, has about 1,200 inhabitants per square mile.
Get the picture? The place is huge, and even after all these years as a U.S. territory and as an exporter of key resources (primarily oil, abut also seafood, timber, minerals and more) it remains relatively empty.
Of course, different parts of what is now Alaska have been occupied by various peoples for thousands of years, long before Europeans and, from the other direction, Russians began arriving in significant numbers a few centuries ago. And yet, after many hundreds of years and several waves of immigration, the fact that Alaska still holds far fewer than a million people is rather astonishing and in many ways, adds to the Last Frontier’s mystique as a bastion of hardy, rough-and-tumble, solitude-loving homesteaders scraping a living from the land, rivers and sea.
(That Alaskans receive more federal aid per capita, in relation to taxes paid, than the citizens of almost any other state is something that isn’t celebrated quite as loudly as that can-do, pioneer spirit.)
Here, LIFE.com presents pictures many of which did not run in the magazine made by photographer Ralph Crane for a major cover story in 1965.
As LIFE put it in the introduction to the piece:
Alaska, the 49th state, is also the largest, most forbidding and least understood. Its 250,000 people [Note: now three times that number] are suspended, a bit uneasily, between memories of a pioneer, hardscrabble past and dreams of a glittering, prosperous future. The photographs [here] explore this hostile and demanding land which seems to conspire against man even as it engenders and commands his fierce loyalty.
Though some of the pioneers [who built Alaska] were simply moving out of range of the sheriff, and others would be misfits anywhere, most of them were the kind of men whose hearts beat faster out of doors, who drew strength from the struggle with nature … folks who just wanted to get away from the confines of the onrushing civilization.
More than five decades after those words were written, Alaska still retains a good deal of its allure as a place outside of both time and beyond the the strictures and constraints of “the lower 48.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Original caption: “In the bright light of an Alaskan afternoon a band of Eskimos [sic] tossed their whaling captain into the air alongside ceremonial arches made of whale jawbones.”
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Skagway girls who dance in the Days of ’98 show do the cancan in the middle of Main Street. The domed Golden North Hotel and false-front buildings date back to Klondike gold-rush days.”
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alaska, 1965
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Image from the cover of the October 1, 1965, issue of LIFE.
In May 1944 LIFE magazine published a series of photographs by the Albanian-born technical virtuoso Gjon Mili—images featuring a hugely talented young actor, dancer and choreographer named Gene Kelly as he danced, in his own inimitable way, around Mili’s studio.
“Gjon Mili,” LIFE noted, “who would rather photograph dancing than almost anything else in the world, recently trained his high-speed camera on the nimble feet and lithe body of MGM’s brilliant dancing star Gene Kelly.” What’s wonderful about Mili’s work in these pictures made, it’s worth stressing, seven decades ago is the technical brilliance and economy that he brings to bear on Kelly’s explosive artistry.
Here, LIFE presents a series of Mili’s photos many of which were not published in LIFE deftly capturing Kelly at a pivotal point in his career. He had appeared in half-a-dozen movies by 1944, and had choreographed sequences in several of those films, but the starring roles and legendary performances for which he’s remembered and celebrated today were still a few years down the road.
But there’s no doubt that, whether or not he was a bona fide star at the time, Kelly not only knew what he was doing: he knew where he was going.
In fact, perhaps the most significant and engaging aspect of these pictures is not Mili’s masterful technique and his facility with “trick” photography, but rather Kelly’s charm and, above all, his confidence evident in every frame. Very few American movie stars of the 20th century can lay claim to an immediately recognizable persona of their own making James Cagney, of course; Jimmy Stewart; Steve McQueen and a handful of others. And right up there with them is Gene Kelly, whose playful, clever and yet, deep down, hopelessly romantic characters propelled the action of classics like On the Town, An American in Paris and, of course, the greatest Hollywood musical of them all, Singin’ in the Rain.
While Kelly never won an Oscar for any of his specific roles or for his directorial efforts, he was presented with an Honorary Academy Award in 1951 “in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.” Not bad for a Pennsylvania boy who always claimed that his dream in life was to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Original caption: “Many elements have shaped Gene Kelly’s dancing style. This leap shows the influence of the classical ballet.”
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Kelly dancing, 1944.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Kelly’s present style, which is very versatile, shows influence of ballet, Spanish dancing on early hoofing. Kelly is heir to Fred Astaire’s title as movies’ top dancer.”
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Kelly dancing, 1944.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Kelly dancing, 1944.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Kelly dancing, 1944.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Kelly dancing, 1944.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Kelly dancing, 1944.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Kelly dancing, 1944.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Portrait of Gene Kelly, 1944.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
