You know those times when you glimpse a photograph and you think you know what’s happening in the picture, but then something indefinable about the shot plants a seed of doubt, and you look again, and you find that your first impression was absolutely, utterly wrong?
For a lot of people, this 1949 Loomis Dean picture is one of those photographs. At first glance, it looks pretty straightforward: a hunting dog, soaking wet after going into the water to retrieve a duck blasted from the air by its master, sits with the dead or perhaps mortally wounded, but certainly doomed waterfowl in its jaws.
But wait a second. That duck doesn’t look injured. In fact, judging by its still (apparently) vibrant eye and, especially, its rapidly fluttering right leg, the duck is most definitely, emphatically alive.
The priceless look on the dog’s face, meanwhile, is hardly that of a ghoul. In fact, if anything, the dog looks downright embarrassed as if it would rather be anywhere but there, with a live duck in its mouth.
What is going on here?
We’ll let the caption that accompanied this picture in the unputdownable 2008 LIFE book, The Classic Collection, clear up any lingering confusion.
“Don’t worry!” wrote the book’s editors. “The duck’s fine!”
And that is why this photo is funny, and not tragic. Here’s the story: One day in 1947 the Olson family in Yakima, Wash., brought home a duckling named Donald (of course). Donald instantly became friends with the family dog, to the extent that Donald emulated everything the dog did, including chasing children and other dogs from the yard. Donald actually became quite a nuisance in the neighborhood, so the Olsons gave him to a rancher a dozen miles away. There he became pals with a Chesapeake Bay retriever named Trigger. Now, whenever the rancher tossed Donald into the pond so that he could be with the other ducks in other words, his own kind Trigger would immediately dash in and retrieve him. Trigger was as gentle as possible, as we can clearly see here, but ultimately it was decided that Donald would be best back with the Olsons.
The original plan was for an outdoor rock festival, “three days of peace and music” in the Catskill village of Woodstock. What the young promoters got was the third largest city in New York state, population 400,000 (give or take 100,000), location Max Yasgur’s dairy farm near the town of White Lake.
So began LIFE magazine’s description, in its August 29, 1969 issue, of what has come to be seen as one of the defining events of the 1960s. Here LIFE.com presents a gallery of pictures many of which never ran in the magazine from those heady, rain-soaked days and nights.
Lured by music [the story in LIFE continued] and some strange kind of magic (“Woodstock? Doesn’t Bob Dylan live in Woodstock?”), young people from all over the U.S. descended on the rented 600-acre farm.
It was a real city, with life and death and babies—two were born during the gathering—and all the urban problems of water supply, food, sanitation and health. Drugs, too, certainly, because so many of its inhabitants belong to the drug culture. Counting on only 50,000 customers a day, the organizer had set up a fragile, unauthoritarian system to deal with them. Overrun, strained to its limits, the system somehow, amazingly, didn’t break. For three days nearly half a million people lived elbow to elbow in the most exposed, crowded, rain-drenched, uncomfortable kind of community and there wasn’t so much as a fist fight.
For those who passed through it, Woodstock was less a music festival than a total experience, a phenomenon, a happening, high adventure, a near disaster and, in a small way, a struggle for survival. Casting an apprehensive eye over the huge throng on opening day, Friday afternoon, a festival official announced, “There are a hell of a lot of us here. If we are going to make it, you had better remember that the guy next to you is your brother.” Everybody remembered. Woodstock made it.
One of the LIFE photographers on scene during the festival, John Dominis, summed up his own recollections of Woodstock this way:
“I really had a great time.,” Dominis told LIFE.com, decades after the fact. “I was much older than those kids, but I felt like I was their age. They smiled at me, offered me pot. . . . You didn’t expect to see a bunch of kids so nice; you’d think they’d be uninviting to an older person. But no they were just great!
“I worked at LIFE for 25 years,” Dominis said, “and worked everywhere and saw everything, and I’ve told people every year since Woodstock happened that it was one of the greatest events I ever covered.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Woodstock, August 1969.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“I’m quite fond of this picture,” photographer John Dominis said. “You can’t plan this sort of thing; one moment during those three days when there’s no giggling, no laughing. They’re just uncomfortable and that somehow makes it work.”
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“I like this shot of a handsome young hippie couple,” photographer John Dominis said. “They seem so comfortable with each other. A very endearing image, I think.”
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robin Hallock attended the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Overcome by the driving rhythm, a flutist abandoned herself to dance during an impromptu amateur performance in the woods at Woodstock, 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Max and Miriam Yasgur on their land after the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969.
In December 1951, LIFE published one of the most extraordinary photo essays ever to appear in the magazine. Across a dozen pages, and featuring more than 20 of the great W. Eugene Smith’ pictures, the story of a tireless South Carolina nurse and midwife named Maude Callen opened a window on a world that, surely, countless LIFE readers had never seen and, perhaps, had never even imagined. Working in the rural South in the 1950s, in “an area of some 400 square miles veined with muddy roads,” as LIFE put it, Callen served as “doctor, dietician, psychologist, bail-goer and friend” to thousands of poor (most of them desperately poor) patients only two percent of whom were white.
The article in LIFE, titled simply “Nurse Midwife,” that chronicled Callen’s work and her unique role in her community is a companion piece, of sorts, to Smith’s 1948 essay, “Country Doctor.” Spending time with the two essays, one gets the sense that Maude Callen and Dr. Ernest Ceriani of Kremmling, Colorado while physically separated by thousands of miles, as well as by the even broader, thornier barrier of race – would not only understand one another, on an elemental level, but that each would recognize something utterly familiar in the other. Their lives and the landscapes they navigated might have been as different, in critical ways, as one can possibly imagine; but in the essentials, they were kindred spirits. They were healers.
Here, LIFE.com presents “Nurse Midwife” in its entirety, as well as images that Smith shot for the story but that were never published in LIFE.
The story in LIFE began this way, setting the stage for what one reader called, echoing the numerous awe-struck letters to the editor published in a later issue, “one of the greatest pieces of photojournalism I have seen in years”:
Some weeks ago in the South Carolina village of Pineville, in Berkeley County on the edge of Hell Hole Swamp, the time arrived for Alice Cooper to have a baby and she sent fr the midwife. At first it seemed that everything was all right, but soon the midwife noticed signs of trouble. Hastily she sent for a woman name Maude Callen to come and take over.
After Maude Callen arrived at 6 p.m., Alie Cooper’s labor grew more severe. It lasted through the night until dawn. But at the end she was safely delivered of a healthy son. The new midwife had succeeded in a situation where the fast-disappearing “granny” midwife of the South, armed with superstition and a pair of rusty scissors, might have killed both mother and child.
Maude Callen is a member of a unique group, the nurse midwife. Although there are perhaps 20,000 common midwives practicing, trained nurse midwives are rare. There are only nine in South Carolina, 300 in the nation. Their education includes the full course required of all registered nurses, training in public heath and at least six months’ classes in obstetrics.
Maude Callen has delivered countless babies in her career, but obstetrics is only part of her work… To those who think that a middle-aged Negro [sic] without a medical degree has no business meddling in affairs such as these, Dr. William Fishburne, director of the Berkeley County health department, has a ready answer. When he was asked whether he thought Maude Callen could be spared to do some teaching for the state board of health, he replied, “If you have to take her, I can only ask you to join me in prayer for the people left here.”
For W. Eugene Smith, work mattered. Throughout his legendary career, he sought out and chronicled the lives and the labor of people who knew their craft. Whether he was photographing a world figure like Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa or anonymous Welsh coal miners; a doctor in the Rockies or a midwife in South Carolina; Smith saw something noble in hard work, and something profoundly admirable in men and women who cared enough to do their work well.
But one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who ever appeared in LIFE’s pages whose humble and necessary work merited more admiration than that of the unforgettable, unbreakable nurse midwife of Smith’s 1951 photo essay. After the piece was published, LIFE subscribers from all over the country sent donations, large and small, to help Mrs. Callen in what one reader called “her magnificent endeavor.” Thousands of dollars poured in sometimes in pennies and nickels, sometimes more until, as LIFE later reported, she was overwhelmed by the response.
“Halfway through a recent day’s mail, [Mrs. Callen] said to her husband: ‘I’m too tired and happy to read more tonight. I just want to sit here and be thankful.'”
Eventually, more than $20,000 in donations helped to build a clinic in Pineville, where Mrs. Callen worked until her retirement in 1971.
In later years, Maude Callen was still (rightfully) being celebrated for her life’s work. She was honored with the Alexis de Tocqueville Society Award in 1984 for six decades of service to her community, and in 1989 the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) awarded her an honorary degree, while the MUSC College of Nursing created a scholarship in her name.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Weary but watchful, Maude sat by as a mother dozed.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Waiting, a young mother leaned forlornly against the window, ignoring sympathy and looking for Maude’s Callen’s car.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frightened and sick, the nervous mother was helped by Phoebe Gadsden, the first midwife she called. Gadsen, a practicing midwife who attended Maude’s classes, had helped at several deliveries but felt that this one needed special attention and so decided to ask Maude to come and supervise.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Maude got ready in kitchen by lamplight.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In deep pain, the 17-year-old mother writhed, mumbling prayers while Mrs. Gadsden held her hand.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At 4 A.M., hard labor began for Alice Cooper.
W. Eugene SmithLife Pictures/Shutterstock
At 5:30 A.M. a few seconds after the delivery, Maude Callen held the healthy child as he filled his lungs and began to cry.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At 5:40 A.M., the long suffering over, the mother first saw her son. She had no name for him, but a week later she chose Harris Lee.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At 5:45 A.M., the mother’s aunt, Catherine Prileau, tried to soothe her so that she would go to sleep.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At 6:20 A.M., her work over at last, Callen quietly took the first nourishment that she has had for more than 27 hours.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Maude at 51 had a thoughtful, weary face that reflects the fury of her life. Orphaned at 7, she was brought up by an uncle in Florida, studied at the Georgia Infirmary in Savannah, and became a nurse at 21.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
After another delivery Maude departed at 4:30 a.m., leaving the case in charge of another midwife.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Healthy twins, who were delivered a day apart last year by Maude, received a quick once-over when she stopped in to see them and pump herself a drink of water. Only about 2 percent of her patients were white.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A tuberculosis case, 33-year-old Leon Snipe, sat morosely on a bed while Maude arranged with his sister for him to go to a state sanatorium.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An accident case was brought to Maude’s door one night. Annabelle Fuller was seriously cut in an auto accident and Maude had given her first aid. Now the girl returned to have her dressings changed.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
This girl greeted Maude at her door.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
New dresses for 9-year-old Carrie (right) and 8-year-old Mary Jane Covington were dropped off by Maude on her way to a patient.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Simple kindness overwhelmed an old man. Frank McCray had a headache one day in 1927, soon was paralyzed, and had been in this chair ever since. He broke down and wept when Maude stopped in.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Extra duty assumed by Maude included cashing of relief checks and dealing with storekeepers for several people who were mentally incompetent or, like this man, blind.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Store-bought-food donated by Maude fascinated youngsters.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
After a call she waded back to her car.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A dying baby suffering from acute enteritis was rushed to the hospital.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A transfusion was almost impossible because the fever’s dehydration had affected the baby’s arm veins, and the doctor had to try the neck. The baby died before he could get blood flowing.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. W. K. Fishburne, head of the Berkeley County health department, examined a patient brought to hospital by Maude.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Outside a clinic held in a school, a crowd waited to see Maude.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Maude Callen inspected a patient behind a bedsheet screen.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Maude made a delivery pad in patient’s home according to classroom method.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The incubator was made of box and whisky bottles full of warm water.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
This crib was made of an old fruit crate propped near a cold stove.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Teaching a midwife class, Maude showed how to examine a baby for abnormalities. She conducted some 84 classes and helped coach about 12 new midwives each year.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Nurse Midwife” as it appeared in the Dec. 3, 1951, issue of LIFE.
Life Magazine
“Nurse Midwife” as it appeared in the Dec. 3, 1951, issue of LIFE.
Life Magazine
Nurse midwife Maude Callen, South Carolina, 1951.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Pregnant woman, South Carolina, 1951.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A newborn delivered by nurse midwife Maude Callen, South Carolina, 1951.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Nurse Midwife” as it appeared in the Dec. 3, 1951, issue of LIFE.
Life Magazine
Nurse midwife Maude Callen, South Carolina, 1951.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Nurse midwife Maude Callen (right), South Carolina, 1951.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Nurse Midwife” as it appeared in the Dec. 3, 1951, issue of LIFE.
Life Magazine
Nurse Midwife Maude Callen, South Carolina, 1951.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Nurse midwife Maude Callen, South Carolina, 1951.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Nurse Midwife” as it appeared in the Dec. 3, 1951, issue of LIFE.
Life Magazine
A child being treated by nurse midwife Maude Callen, South Carolina, 1951.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Nurse Midwife” as it appeared in the Dec. 3, 1951, issue of LIFE.
Along the way Sutherland also gained a second sort fame as a father, when his son Kiefer built his own notable acting career, starring in films such as Stand by Me and The Lost Boys, and in the hit television series 24.
Here, LIFE.com offers a gallery of rare pictures (none of them ran in LIFE magazine) of Sutherland and his family, by photographer Co Rentmeester in 1970. Donald also shows his quirky side in a series of portraits taken in the process of shaving his beard. Sutherland and his wife at the time, the Canadian activist and actress Shirley Douglas, divorced not long after these photos were made.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Donald Sutherland and his son, Kiefer, in California, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland and his son, Kiefer, in California, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland and his children, twins Kiefer and Rachel, in California, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland with his wife, Shirley Douglas, and their children (left to right): Kiefer Sutherland, Tom Douglas (Shirley’s son from her first marriage), Rachel Sutherland, in California, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland shaving, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Shirley Douglas looked at photos of her husband, Donald Sutherland, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland with his twin daughter and son, Rachel and Kiefer, and his stepson, Tom (left), in California, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland and his children, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland and his children, 1970
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In 1942, the idea of women in the military was brand new. The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was founded in May of that year, and the women who first served in the corps were instantly pegged with the now-famous collective moniker, WAACs. (Soon renamed the Woman’s Army Corps, or WAC, it was an official branch of the U.S. Army from 1943-1978.) More than 150,000 American women served in the corps during World War II, and did their jobs so well, and so uncomplainingly, that no less an authority on proper soldiering than Gen. Douglas MacArthur reportedly characterized the WACs as “my best soldiers.”
The role that these women had in the military was limited. As LIFE noted in its Sept. 7 1942 issue, a story on this new phenomenon, ‘The idea behind the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps is simply this: Women can do some of the jobs that men are doing in the Army. By taking over these jobs, they can release men for active or combat duty.”
LIFE described the scene at one of the training centers for this new kind of soldier:
The WAACs who arrived at Fort Des Moines at the end of July were met by Oveta Culp Hobby, a svelte and definite Texas lady who is director of all WAACs. Director Hobby said very simply: “You have taken off silk and put on khaki. You have a debt to democracy and a date with destiny. You may be called upon to give your lives.”
Thought old Army men harumph at the sight of girls trying to act like soldiers, all WAACs get a thorough grounding in basic infantry drill. They have to live with the Army and know its ways. They also have to know how to work in groups, to take and give commands. … Except for the fact that they get no training in forearms and tactics, WAACs are like any other soldiers. Once they enlist, they are in the Army for the duration.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Female soldiers in their first gas-mask drill, Fort Des Moines, Iowa, June 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps members trained with gas masks.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At assembly, a regimental commander inspected the women to see that their hair was above collar and their stocking seams were straight.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The WAACs received the same inoculations against typhoid fever, tetanus, and smallpox that were given to all soldiers.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mary Yates, 26, was the wife of a coast artillery captain who was sent to the Philippines.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Julie Getas, 25, had worked for the Walgreen drugstores in San Francisco.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Ruby Braun had worked for a cosmetics company as supervisor of sales in the Los Angeles area before she enlisted in the WAACs.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Lorna V. Kubli, 28, was working as an office manager in the War Department when she joined the WAACs; she was glad of the chance to get out from behind the desk.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The proper length for hair was two inches above the collar.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
WAACs washed their own undergarments and stockings, but the heavy clothing was sent out to commercial laundries in Des Moines.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The WAACs were supposed to walk with the regulation 30-inch Army stride. Sidewalks were measured off so that WAACs could practice between classes.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
WAACs, 1942
Marie Hansen Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The WAACs’ calisthenics routines were designed for flexibility and endurance rather than bulging muscles.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Softball was the main group sport for these WAACs’.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
This candidate aimed to do recruiting work after graduation.
Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
With military snap, WAACs walked through the post saluting passing officers.
No photographer spent more time with the Apollo 11 astronauts especially in the months leading up to the history-making, world-changing July 1969 moon landing than LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse, who chronicled the crew’s public and private lives as rigorously as he’d done for earlier NASA missions. (Morse spent so much time with the Mercury 7, for example, that John Glenn dubbed him “the eighth astronaut.”)
Four and a half decades after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the lunar surface (while Michael Collins orbited above), Morse spoke with LIFE.com about the Apollo 11 crew; their families; and the photographs in this gallery many of which were not published in LIFE that capture, at least in part, the mood and the look of that singular era.
“They all started out as pilots, of course,” Morse said of Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin, Command Module pilot Michael Collins and mission commander Neil Armstrong, “and they decided that they wanted to do something better, something more exciting. They had the desire to look further. To go beyond.”
Morse stressed, though, that the moon landing was the result not of supermen or a few NASA geniuses, but a huge team of smart, imaginative people working incredibly hard, together, toward a single, improbable goal.
“People today tend to forget that the goal of going to the moon was set by President Kennedy less than ten years before [the Apollo 11 mission]. We had rocket technology at that point, of course, but really no technology to get up there, land and then get back. We had to dream it up, and then build it. In only a few years, NASA made a spacecraft that could do that. When you think of it, of how talented and dedicated all of those guys were . . . it’s just incredible.”
As for photographing the families of the men who would, ultimately, put all that technology to the test, Morse recalled that, for a photojournalist just doing his job, it wasn’t all that different, at its most elemental level, than other assignments he’d worked over his long, hugely varied career.
“Right away,” he said, laughing, “the kids got used to me being around. You know how kids are; they adapt to things so much better than adults do. After a while, spending so much time with them, it wasn’t awkward or forced having me there. I was the guy who was always there, and always had a camera.
“We were with them all the time,” Morse continued, using we to mean LIFE. “Everywhere they went, we went. There was no such thing as Neil, Mike and Buzz going anywhere, or doing something, where we weren’t there, too.”
Looking at pictures that he took almost a half-century ago and that he hadn’t seen in the decades since brought back vivid memories for Morse.
“The shot of Mike lying on the beach reading,” Morse noted of slide 16, “with a stack of paperbacks under his head, really sort of captures him. It made sense that he’d be the Command Module pilot, orbiting alone above the moon while Neil and Buzz were on the surface. Mike was an extremely capable guy, and yet he was also very comfortable when he was by himself.
“Mike had lots of interests. He painted, took care of the garden, was reading all the time. A perfectly engaging man, but also the sort of person who could spend time by himself, working, and be satisfied.”
The risks of the venture that Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins eagerly embarked upon are almost unfathomable now and went largely unspoken then. For instance, as Morse pointed out, “no one knew whether or not they’d come back from the moon mission unable to have kids. In other words, sterile.”
While there’s absolutely no doubt that the three crew members earned that so-often overused designation, “heroes,” for what they accomplished, and the manner in which they accomplished it, Morse stressed that it was, in fact, the down-to-earth attitude the astronauts brought to their task, and to their lives, that so impressed him.
“These were family guys,” Morse said. “Working men. You could pass them on the street and not give them a second glance. But they were remarkable, remarkable human beings. Their IQs, all of them, were damn high. They worked their tails off to make sure everything was checked and double-checked and triple-checked. They were flying to the moon, for chrissake! But they all led pretty normal lives, for people in such extraordinary circumstances. I was damn lucky to know them, and their families.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin chatted over drinks in Houston, March 1969
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong, pizza chef.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong and family.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong played ball with his son, 1969.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong, March 1969
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins and his wife Pat with their children (from left, Kate, Michael Jr., and Ann), Houston.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Michael Collins and his wife Pat shared breakfast in their Texas home.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Michael Collins and family, Texas, 1969.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins at home.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Michael Collins played in the surf with his son Michael, Jr.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Apollo 11 astronauts, 1969. From left: Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin; Command Module pilot Michael Collins; Mission Commander Neil Armstrong.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neil Armstrong, 1969.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Michael Collins and his wife Pat at home, 1969.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Home from work after his family had already eaten, Neil Armstrong ate his customary late dinner while reviewing the Wall Street Journal stock market numbers, March 1969.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Apollo 11 astronauts discussed their upcoming moon mission with an engineer from Houston’s Mission Control Center (second from right), Texas, 1969.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Michael Collins with his wife Pat at a beach in Texas.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Apollo 11 astronauts and their families posed with a scale model of the moon.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.
