April 2013 - LIFE

Hawaii Before Statehood: Color Photos, 1959

February 26, 2020April 29, 2013 by

The image and legend of Hawaii as a tropical paradise endures for countless reasons. Few places on earth can boast more dramatic or romantic landscapes; the weather is generally gorgeous; the variety of climates one can encounter within the space of a few miles from arid to tropical to near-alpine to sun-splashed beach is mind-boggling.

But paradise, as we all know, exists only in fairy tales—or, if a paradise did once exist in the Pacific, it long ago gave way to the complex, ambiguous and often politically fraught realities of the modern world. The Hawaii of the travel brochures—as marvelous as it might be in theory, and even at times in fact—is a beautiful construct that often ignores the island chain’s bumpier, and endlessly fascinating, history. (For instance, how many Americans in the contiguous 48 know anything at all about the nonviolent “democratic revolution” of labor strikes and major acts of civil disobedience that roiled the islands in 1954, reshaping Hawaii’s political landscape for all time?)

Here, LIFE.com presents color photographs made in 1959, the year that Hawaii was admitted to the Union. The admission took place on August 21, and in a March 1959 article, “Hawaii Beauty, Wealth, Amiable People,” for which these pictures were shot, LIFE painted a largely rosy picture of the place:

The first proposal to make Hawaii a state was put forward more than a hundred years ago when President Franklin Pierce cast his eyes across the Pacific and proposed that the splendid and strategic islands be taken into the union. Pierce’s plan faded and it was not until 1898 that Hawaii was annexed as a U.S. territory. Proposals to make Hawaii a state have been on the books of Congress for more than 40 years. Now it seems almost certain that in this session Hawaii will achieve its aim. [Hawaii was granted statehood in August 1959.]

As a territory, Hawaii has developed a sturdy economy based on U.S. military expenditures at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere, and on sugar, pineapple, tourism and livestock. The islands, which have a total area roughly that of New Jersey, have bred an incredibly polyglot and racially integrated population of nearly 600,000. This mean that Hawaiian statehood, besides conferring full U.S. status on a potentially rich and decidedly vital area, would also indicate to all the peoples of the Pacific and of Asia that the U.S. can still be the tolerant, hospitable melting pot of old.

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

Cattle grazed under volcanic cliffs on Oahu, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Foodland supermarket, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A black-sand beach, made by waves battering volcanic rock, on the Big Island, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dole’s 15,000-acre Wahiawa plantation near Honolulu, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Catherine’s Church on Kauai, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wash hung out to dry, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fans at a football game, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A drum majorette led the band at a Honolulu football game, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Football game, Honolulu, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This paddle dance, performed in honor of Lono, god of peace and agriculture, was taught to fourth-grade students at the Kamehameha Schools by a teacher of pure Hawaiian blood, Esther Waihee McClellan.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The dunking pool at a Hawaii fair, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roman Catholic church, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaiian police, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene on a Hawaiian plantation, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tourists in Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Surfing, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young Hawaiian mother, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pearl Harbor, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Swimming in a freshwater pool, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart, 1945: A War Hero Comes Home

November 3, 2020April 29, 2013 by

When James Maitland Stewart, the oldest child and only son of Alexander and Elizabeth Stewart of Indiana, Pa., enlisted in the United States Army in 1941, he wasn’t like most privates. For one thing, he was already well into his 30s. For another, he had already been rejected by the military for being too skinny. (The first time around, he was five pounds under the Army’s weight standard for new recruits.) And finally, no other World War II inductee had won a Best Actor Oscar, as Stewart had for his performance as reporter Mike Connor in the 1940 classic, The Philadelphia Story.

Putting his Hollywood career on hold to join the Army Air Corps—a forerunner to today’s Air Force—Stewart ultimately reached the rank of colonel, making him one of few Americans ever to rise from private to colonel in four years. He flew dozens of combat missions, some as command pilot, on sorties deep into Nazi-occupied Europe, and returned from the war on the Queen Elizabeth, covered in medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal.

For the cover story of LIFE magazine’s September 24, 1945 issue, photographer Peter Stackpole followed Stewart as the Hollywood star and war hero returned to his hometown.

Jimmy Stewart and his dad outside the family hardware store, Indiana, Pa., 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Thirty-seven-year-old Jimmy Stewart sat down at the table with (clockwise from left) his younger sister Mary, his mother Elizabeth, his father Alexander, and his other younger sister, Virginia, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart, home from the war, helped clear the table at his parents’ house, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Jimmy Stewart chatted with George Little, the oldest employee in his father’s hardware store, 1945. Besides all the usual hardware goods, the store also boasted Jimmy’s “Philadelphia Story” Oscar on display.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

While his father chatted with a customer at the hardware store, a uniformed Jimmy Stewart set up a date to go fishing, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart on the phone at his father’s hardware store, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart went fishing with his old friend Clyde “Woodie” Woodward, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart and friend, Indiana, Pa., 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The house where Jimmy Stewart grew up in Indiana, Pa., about 50 miles from Pittsburgh, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart signed autographs in Indiana, Pa., 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy kidded his father about the old days. His sister Mary (center on swing) was an artist and married to a chaplain in the Navy. His other sister Virginia (left) was a magazine writer and married to artist Alexis Tiranoff, who was in the Army.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart plays the piano with his sister Virginia, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

James Stewart looked in his family’s hardware store window and spotted a model plane he’d built years earlier, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In 1945, Jimmy Stewart eyed a stuffed squirrel he’d shot years earlier. The creature was only “slightly moldy,” LIFE reported.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Visiting his hometown in 1945, Col. Jimmy Stewart played with a pair of puppets he made when he was seven years old.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart entertained some local children, Indiana, Pa., 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart took out his father’s horse, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Magician Bill Neff wasn’t just a friend of Stewart’s; he once provided Jimmy with a summer job, when they “took a tour as magicians.”

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

James Stewart, back home after serving in World War II, read in bed at his parents’ house, Indiana, Pa., 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart, 1945.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With the ‘Lizard King’: Jim Morrison and the Doors, 1968

December 8, 2020April 28, 2013 by

Reflecting the uncertain, tumultuous era in which it was made, much of the popular music of 1968 was moody, trippy, obtuse and, perhaps not surprisingly, utterly confounding to many in the mainstream.

Among the counterculture protagonists that LIFE sought to bring to its millions of readers was Jim Morrison, the highly influential lyricist and front man of the Doors. For a LIFE feature, “Wicked Go the Doors: An Adult’s Education by the Kings of Acid Rock,” the writer Fred Powledge studied Morrison through his lyrics and his notorious onstage antics.

Here, LIFE.com presents color portraits of the then-24-year-old rocker/poet, plus shots that never ran in the magazine of the Doors playing New York’s famed Fillmore East.

At the time of his 1968 portrait session with photographer Yale Joel in New York, Morrison and his bandmates had released two albums (featuring hits such as “Light My Fire,” “People Are Strange” and “Love Me Two Times”), and were about to record a third, Waiting for the Sun. As their popularity grew, the 33-year-old Powledge, taking a break from his typical beat (civil rights and race relations), aimed to “dig,” in an almost scientific fashion, the weird but compelling music his 9-year-old daughter was into.

The most satanic thing [Powledge wrote] about the Doors is Jim Morrison, the lead vocalist and author of most of the group’s songs. Morrison is 24 years old, out of UCLA, and he appears in public and on his records to be moody, temperamental, enchanted in the mind and extremely stoned on something . . . [Morrison’s lyrics] are not what you’d call simple and straightforward. You can’t listen to the record once or twice and then put it away in the rack. And this is one of the exciting characteristics of the new music in general: you really have to listen to it, repeatedly, preferably at high volume in a room that is otherwise quiet and perhaps darkened. You must throw away all those old music-listening habits that you learned courtesy of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade and Mantovani.

“Once you see him perform,” Powledge continued, “you realize that he also seems dangerous, which, for a poet, may be a contradiction in terms.”

LIFE’s physical description of Morrison, meanwhile, name-checked a famous burlesque dancer and pinup girl: “He wears skin-tight black leather pants, on stage and away from it; and when he sings, he writhes and grinds and is sort of the male equivalent of the late Miss Lilly Christine, the Cat Girl. But with Lilly Christine you had a good idea that the performance was going to stop short of its promised ending-point. You don’t know that with Morrison.”

The anything-goes attitude Powledge sensed in Morrison was not unfounded: While working on his story in 1967, the writer was in the audience for a Doors concert in New Haven, Conn., and watched as Morrison who had been ranting to the audience about local police was arrested onstage on indecency charges (later dropped).

You are reminded that the music is a plastic reflection of our plastic world. The sounds are transistorized, sharper than sharp, just as the plastic lettering over a hot dog stand is redder than red. Out of this context the music even the conventional sounds of the church organ or the street noises is unreal; it is marvelously effective in reflecting what’s going on in our society. It dances close to disharmony, to insanity; sometimes it does sound insane and disharmonious, but then you listen closer and find a harmony hidden deep within it.

“Morrison is a very good actor and a very good poet, one who speaks in short, beautiful bursts, like the Roman Catullus,” Powledge wrote. “His lyrics often seem obscure, but their obscurity, instead of making you hurry off to play a Pete Seeger record that you can understand, challenges you to try to interpret. You sense that Morrison is writing about weird scenes he’s been privy to, about which he would rather not be too explicit.”

LIFE’s April 1968 take on Jim Morrison and his band wasn’t the only time the magazine visited the topic. Just two months later, in a story titled “The New Rock” (featuring not only the Doors but also Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention, Cream, the Who and Country Joe and the Fish), Morrison explained his philosophies and his cathartic stage shows.

“Rather than start from the inside, I start on the outside and reach the mental through the physical,” he told LIFE. “Today is the age of the heroes, who live for us and through whom we experience the heights and depths of emotion. The spectator is a dying animal and the purgation of emotion is left up to the actor, not the audience.”

That sort of quasi-mystical hocus-pocus is, of course, exactly the reason countless rock and roll fans have always been drawn to the Doors, and why so many others find them so gratingly pretentious. Hardly anyone who is at all familiar with their music is lukewarm toward the band a fact that would no doubt bring a smile, or a sneer, to Morrison’s face if only he were still alive.

Not long after Yale Joel made the photos in this gallery, the sinuous Morrison seen here had changed: he became hairier and heavier as he descended deeper into drinking and drugging. He was just 27 when he died.

Still, he was prolific in the three short years between the Joel photo session and his death, fronting memorable concerts, recording three more Doors albums and writing two volumes of poetry all of it building upon the material that elevated him from rock ‘n’ roll front man to pop-culture icon.

Jim Morrison, photographed in New York City by LIFE’s Yale Joel in 1968.

Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection

Jim Morrison, 1968

Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection

The Doors performed at New York City’s Fillmore East in 1968.

Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection

Jim Morrison, 1968

Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection

On Arbor Day, Gratitude and Praise for Trees Great and Small

November 2, 2020April 26, 2013 by

In her classic 1918 novel, My Antonia, the writer Willa Cather re-created and paid homage to a vanished world of America’s Great Plains — a world of hardy homesteaders and tiny, solitary towns tenaciously clinging to the land amid vast and still-wild spaces. Among the countless memorable, vivid passages in the book, one in particular stands out as a near-perfect distillation of the almost unbearable solitude of the lives lived out on the great, rolling prairie.

“Trees were so rare in that country,” the book’s narrator recalls, “and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”

There is, after all, something sociable about trees — whether we encounter them singly, in small groves, or in enormous forests. Trees give us paper and pencils, guitars and parquet floors, whiskey barrels and church pews. They offer shade on hot days. They lock away carbon dioxide. Their incredible root systems control runoff from heavy rains and help keep streams and rivers free of choking silt and mud. They act as windbreaks, minimizing snowdrifts in the winter and reducing topsoil erosion all year round. They keep city streets cool, and help muffle noise pollution.

Here, on Arbor Day, we offer gratitude and praise to trees — steadfast companions on our small planet.

Johnny Cash: A National Treasure

August 12, 2021April 25, 2013 by

There aren’t too many American musicians of the past century who left a richer legacy, or were more influential across a broader range of genres, than the Man in Black. Through six decades, Johnny Cash created music that spoke with power and eloquence to sharecroppers, punk rockers, prison inmates and hip-hoppers. Many of the songs he penned or famously recorded—”Big River,” “I Walk the Line,” “Ring of Fire,” “A Boy Named Sue,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Get Rhythm,” “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” “The Matador” and on and on—have not only become classics, but have been embraced as national treasures by Americans of every political stance, creed and ethnicity.

[Buy the LIFE book, Johnny Cash: An Illustrated Biography]

But Johnny Cash was not merely a great songwriter and singularly engaging singer. He was a cultural force. When he sang with a young Bob Dylan on Dylan’s gorgeous “Girl From the North Country” in 1969, the pairing was a quiet revolution, reconciling Dylan’s New Folk counterculture blues with Cash’s old-school, hillbilly honky-tonk.

When he recorded Peter LaFarge’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes” in 1964 and took it to No. 3 on the Billboard country charts, he brought the terrible tale of how one of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima died, drunk and alone, to far more people than had ever heard the song or the story before.

Here, in tribute to the one and only Johnny Cash, LIFE.com presents a selection of photos made for a November 1969 feature in the magazine titled “Hard-Times King of Song.”

Some of these photos will be of particular interest to fans of the outstanding 2005 biopic Walk The Line. The pictures of Johnny Cash on his tractor or fishing with his father on the pier by his house call to mind key moments from that film, which received five Oscar nominations.

Cash, LIFE told its readers, was a man who had lived hard, had come through and, by all measures, showed no sign of letting the limelight alter the essentials of who he was and what he believed.

His face looks ruined, his lean body whipped out. He sings, off-key, of bygone days that many of his listeners can’t even remember: railroads, hobos on the open road, Depression, hard times he knew growing up poor in an Arkansas cotton patch. These are curiously old-fashioned themes, but the homely lyrics and rough-cut personality of Johnny Cash make them fresh.

Cash, 37, has been singing and writing country ballads for 15 years. He has recorded more than 300 songs and written twice that many, most of them an unpromising mixture of folklore, sentiment and pure corn that until recently appealed mainly to fans of the Grand Ole Opry. Now the young like him because he has the ring of authenticity and supports social causes, such as prison reform. . . . Only two years ago Cash was down and out himself. Before he kicked the habit, he became so addicted to pep pills that he woke up in a Georgia jail unable to remember how he got there.

Cash appeals to Americans who are increasingly fed up with the pressure and confusions of city life and yearn to get back to the land. “Last year it was soul,” says a friend. “This year everybody is scratching in the soil. That’s why Johnny works. He’s got soil.”

The image of Johnny Cash that appeared on the cover of the November 21, 1969, issue of LIFE.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash with friends and family at his home in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash and Jack Palance, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roy Orbison played for guests at Johnny Cash’s house, Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash during a recording session at Columbia Studio B, Nashville, Tennessee.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash in Tennessee, 1969.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash fished with his father outside his Tennessee home, 1969.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash fished in a lake near his Tennessee home, 1969.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash drove a tractor on his estate, 1969.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Johnny Cash with wife June Carter at home.

Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

LIFE With Woody Guthrie: Photos of an American Treasure

August 12, 2021April 24, 2013 by

In 1943, Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie was about to publish his now-classic, semi-fictionalized autobiography, Bound for Glory, in which he wrote vibrantly about his childhood, his love of American folk songs and his epic travels as a freight car-hopping itinerant poet during the Depression.

While Bound for Glory would introduce Guthrie to a broader audience than the relatively few who, at the time, knew him only through his music, Woody was already something of an underground hero to other musicians folk and protest singers who soon, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, would be shaking America from its post-war somnolence. A politically engaged artist, Guthrie crafted wrenching tales of loss and struggle, as well as paeans to romantic love and heartfelt, platitude-free patriotism, into some of the most enduring music America has ever produced.

In fact, at the time the photographs in this gallery were made, Guthrie had written and performed, but not yet published, the simple, celebratory song that countless Americans consider the United States’ genuine national anthem: “This Land Is Your Land.”

Here, in tribute to an utterly singular American life, LIFE.com presents photos none of which appeared in LIFE magazine from 1943, chronicling the guitar-strumming Oklahoma native’s rambles through wartime New York City.

“The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution,” Guthrie once asserted, in one of his philosophically tinged writings, “because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine. . . . There’s a feeling in music and it carries you back down the road you have traveled and makes you travel it again. Sometimes when I hear music I think back over my days and a feeling that is fifty-fifty joy and pain swells like clouds taking all kinds of shapes in my mind.”

A self-taught visual artist (accomplished sketches, cartoons, caricatures and line drawings fill many, many notebooks) as well as an inveterate, almost obsessive journal-keeper, Guthrie had a relationship with music that brings to mind the grit and very occasional glamor not only of the open road, but of the troubadour’s wandering life. Of Bound for Glory, New York Times reviewer Clifton Fadiman wrote: “Some day people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world.”

Guthrie had a strong connection to New York City, too, living on Mermaid Avenue in Brooklyn in the 1940s an evocative address made famous to a new generation of fans by Billy Bragg and Wilco, who put unpublished Guthrie lyrics to music in scores of wonderful songs, collected and released by Nonesuch records as Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions (2012).

New York City was where Woody Guthrie made his first professional recordings; where he wrote “This Land Is Your Land”; where he befriended and collaborated with other politically minded artists like Pete Seeger; and where his devotees including the likes of Bob Dylan and the great Phil Ochs later ignited their own Guthrie-inspired folk scene in downtown coffee houses and dives. “You could listen to his songs and learn how to live,” Dylan once said of his hero’s life and work.

On assignment for LIFE in 1943, photographer Eric Schaal followed Guthrie as he gave impromptu performances around New York in bars, on the stoops of brownstones, on the subway. Engaging and at ease, the Woody Guthrie of these photos is exactly where he liked to be: among working people, and the children of working people, guitar in hand, sharing his own lyrics and the lyrics of other folk musicians with the very men and women those lyrics were always written for, and about.

“I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world,” Guthrie once said, “no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.”

“Woody is just Woody,” another American artist, John Steinbeck, once wrote. “Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal . . . there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who still listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.”

Woody Guthrie died on Oct. 3, 1967, from complications brought on by Huntington’s disease, when he was only 55.