In 1939 LIFE noticed that youngsters around the country were, in increasing numbers, playing football under the aegis of organized leagues. But one Colorado league, in particular, caught the eye of LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. As the magazine told its readers in its Oct. 9, 1939, issue:
In Denver this fall, the daydreams of some 550 youngsters, 8 to 18 years old, are coming true. These schoolboys are all members of a non-school organization called the Young America League, which is teaching them to play regular eleven-man football. It is much more fun than scrimmaging in a backyard. When they play for the League, they have their own brightly colored uniforms. Regular coaches teach them to block and tackle. Every Saturday they play regular games, and sometimes 4,000 people come to watch them. With such experience, they figure, they are sure to be great football heroes when they go to college.
The League was started in 1927 when a distracted Denverite named Frederic Adams was entertaining two young nephews. He created an athletic club and arranged for the kids to play football. An essential feature was that every boy, regardless of ability, would have a chance to play. The idea spread and branch clubs were formed. Today the League claims to have the world’s youngest organized football players.
The kids also love the initiation. A candidate swears to be a good student and not bully the girls. Then he must say: “I promise to remember that what matters most is courage; that it is no disgrace to be beaten; but that the great disgrace is to turn yellow.”
Courage is a good thing. Not bullying girls — or boys, or anyone — is a good thing. Being a good student is, generally speaking, a good thing. Sounds like the Young America League might have been on to something.
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young America League Football, 1939
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe and baseball legend Joe DiMaggio wed in 1954 (second marriages for both), and were divorced nine months later. That the union was doomed from the beginning was, perhaps, easy to foresee. But even if the marriage was not a happy one for either of the two famous partners, there seems to be little doubt that there really was genuine affection there at the start and at the end. In fact, after Monroe’s divorce from her third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, was finalized in 1961, DiMaggio came back into her life and, by all accounts, desperately tried to bring some stability and calm to an existence that was veering dangerously out of control.
He tried to get her away from people who, to his mind, were nothing but trouble (including, it seems, the Kennedys), and even proposed to her, asking her to marry him again. It’s awful, now, to think that if Marilyn had been given a little more time, DiMaggio could have been just the person to pull her back from the brink of depression, drugs, disastrous affairs with married men. In other words, he might have saved her life.
But a year and a half after her marriage to Miller ended, Marilyn all of 36 years old was dead. DiMaggio, it seems, could not protect her from whatever demons drove her. He was only in his 40s when Marilyn died on August 5, 1962, but he never married again.
Here, LIFE.com presents pictures from October 6, 1954, when Marilyn stepped out of the house on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills to announce she was seeking a divorce from DiMaggio on the grounds of “mental cruelty.” DiMaggio had initially been drawn (like a few hundred million other men) to Marilyn’s “sex goddess” persona but he was never comfortable with her flaunting it, and was something of a self-admitted control freak. Neither DiMaggio nor Monroe could possibly have been content or satisfied in a marriage in which two such divergent personalities held sway.
The photographs here are not pleasant. They’re not easy to look at. There’s real pain in Marilyn’s face, posture and demeanor.
Still, these pictures tell a small but integral part of the Marilyn Monroe story, and capture the star at a pivotal point in her fraught life. She would marry again. She would make more movies in the coming years, including several classics. But deeper and more enduring pain was also in her future.
Of the October 1954 divorce filing, meanwhile, LIFE told its readers:
Even for Hollywood, where unhappy endings for the real love stories come with almost unseemly haste, this ending seemed abrupt. It was only last January that the press was mobbing the San Francisco city hall, waiting for Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to emerge as newlywed man and wife. Now the press was gathered again in front of the DiMaggio home in Beverly Hills, waiting for Joe and Marilyn to come out as newly-separated man and wife.
Nobody had been surprised when they got married—they had been going with each other for two years. Nobody doubted their love they had smiled happily through their married life. And almost nobody professed surprised when they broke up. The conflict in their two careers seemed inevitable.
Marilyn Monroe divorce announcement 1954
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe at the time she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Hills, October 1954.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe and her lawyer, Jerry Giesler, at the time she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Hills, October 1954.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe at the time she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Hills, October 1954.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe at the time she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Hills, October 1954.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe at the time she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Hills, October 1954.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The contact sheet of George Silk’s photos from the press conference announcing Marilyn Monroe’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The phenomenon known as Dust Bowl was a horror of the middle part of the last century, and the result of a destructive mix of brutal weather and uninformed agricultural practices that left farmland vulnerable.
Here, LIFE.com looks back, through the lens of the great Margaret Bourke-White, at a period when as LIFE phrased it in a May 1954 issue there was a “Dusty Plague Upon the Land.”
The delicate, lethal powder spread in a brown mist across the prairie horizon. Across Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, the darkening swirls of loosened topsoil chewed their way across the plains, destroying or damaging 16 million acres of land. Man fought back with such techniques as chiseling. . . . driving a plow six inches into the soil to turn up clots of dirt which might help hold the precious land from the vicious winds. Against the dusty tide these feeble efforts came too little and too late. Two decades after the nation’s worst drought year in history, 1934, the southern plains were again officially labeled by the U.S. government with two familiar words “Dust Bowl.”
The threatening storm rose above a farm near Hartman, Colo. Once range land, it was almost ruined by wheat farming.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A protective pattern was spread across a farm near Walsh, Colo. by farmer using two tractors (upper right).
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Colorado farming family during the 1954 Dust Bowl.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The antidust measure of furrowing land, taken by a conservation-minded farmer in Baca County, went for naught when a neighbor’s unfurrowed land blew across his farm, killing a crop of winter wheat.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An irrigation ditch near Amity was cleared of dust, which filled it for 20 miles to depth of six feet.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado dust bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Coloradans Art Blooding and his family inspected their newly bought farm in 50-mph wind.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Wild ducks that had choked to death on the dust made a graveyard of what was at one time a watering stop on their spring migrations.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Felled broomcorn lay near Walsh, once ‘Broomcorn Capital of U.S.’
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A farm house was damaged by a dust storm, Colorado, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Colorado farming family during the 1954 Dust Bowl.
Ask any American today under the age of, say, 40, “Who was Gypsy Rose Lee?” and chances are pretty good that the reaction will be utter bewilderment. “Gypsy Rose who?”
On the other hand, ask anyone who came of age in the 1940s or ’50s the same question, and the reaction will likely be something along the lines of, “Gypsy Rose Lee? I haven’t thought about her in decades! But let me tell you, back in the day. . . .”
Gypsy Rose Lee (born Rose Louise Hovick in Seattle in 1911) was and remains a force in American popular culture not because she acted in films (although she did act in films) or because she wrote successful mystery novels (although she did write successful mystery novels). The reason Lee’s influence endures can be attributed to two central elements of her remarkable, all-American life story: first, her 1957 memoir, Gypsy, which formed the basis for what more than a few critics laud as the greatest of all American musicals, the 1959 Styne-Sondheim-Laurents masterpiece, Gypsy; and second, her career in burlesque, when she became the most famous and perhaps the most singularly likable stripper in the world. (Modern “neo-burlesque” performers, like Dita Von Teese, Angie Pontani and others, cite Gypsy in near-reverent terms as a pioneer and inspiration.)
Here, LIFE.com celebrates Gypsy Rose Lee’s life and her career with a selection of pictures by George Skadding, a LIFE staffer far better known for photographing presidents (he was long an officer of the White House News Photographers Association) than burlesque stars. But, as the images in this gallery attest, Gypsy was hardly just another stripper; instead, as a performer, a wife and a mother of a young son, she had something about her an approachable, self-deprecating demeanor aligned with a quiet self-certainty that any politician would envy.
“I’m probably the highest paid outdoor entertainer since Cleopatra,” she’s quoted as saying in the June 6, 1949 issue of LIFE, in which many of these pictures first appeared. “And I don’t have to stand for some of the stuff she had to.”
“Confidently taking her place among history’s great ladies, Gypsy has for the first time in her life gone outdoors professionally,” LIFE wrote at the beginning of Gypsy’s six-month tour with what was called “the world’s largest carnival,” The Royal American Shows. The prospect of having to do her old strip-tease act 8 to 15 times a day “all across the country to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,” meanwhile, although hardly thrilling to the 38-year-old mom, was also something Gypsy could, characteristically, put in perspective:
“For $10,000 a week,” she told LIFE, “I can afford to climb the slave block once in a while.”
She also, as LIFE put it, “had it soft, as carny performers’ lives go. She lives in her own trailer with her third husband, the noted Spanish painter, Julio de Diego. With them is her 4-year-old son, Erik [film director Otto Preminger’s child, as it turned out] and his nurse. Gypsy, who loves to fish, carries an elaborate angler’s kit, and whenever the show plays near a river, goes out and hooks fish as ably as she does customers.”
But it’s in the notes of writer Arthur Shay, who spent a week with the star in Memphis, Tennessee, in May 1949, that we meet the woman who emerges when the lights go down and the crowds depart and it’s clearly this Gypsy who truly connected to audiences wherever she went:
“Funny thing about show people or just plain fans,” she told Shay at one point, offering insights into the appeal of her nomadic life. “They think if you’re not in Hollywood or on Broadway making a couple of thousand a week taking guff from everybody and his cousin in the west, and sweating out poor crowds on Broadway you’re not doing well. [But] I’ve been touring the country playing nightclubs and making twice as much as I made in the movies, and having more fun! I get a lot more fishing done, for one thing, and I can live in my trailer and see the country.”
Gypsy Rose Lee died in April, 1970, of lung cancer. She was 59 years old.
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee with fellow performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee in front of a crowd in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A sign announced the arrival of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy dictated a letter to her secretary, Brandy Bryant, who doubled up by doing a strip bit in the show.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (left) and her fellow performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (right) dressed other performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (center) dressed other performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee writes in her dressing room in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (top) with another performer in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (right) coached another performer in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (center) and other performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The audience at a Gypsy Rose Lee burlesque show in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In a reverse strip-tease act, Gypsy introduced near-nudes like Florence Bailey and dressed them on the stage.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee’s burlesque show in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee autographed programs for fans after a show in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee and some of the dancers in her show posed for publicity pictures with the carnival performer K. O. Erickson.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee with her third husband, the painter Julio de Diego, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee held her 4-year-old son (by movie director Otto Preminger), Erik, outside of her trailer, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy’s friends in the carnival included a sword swallower, a fire-eater and this cheerful bearded lady, Percilla Bejano, whose husband was the Alligator Man.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee with fellow carnival performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy’s husband Julio painted the entrance while Gypsy and son watched. His attraction in the carnival was called Dream Show.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose rode the Little Dipper with her son, Erik, and her husband, Julio, in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee gave her son, Erik, cotton candy while her husband Julio De Diego watched, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee with her husband Julio and son Erik, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee with her husband, Julio de Diego, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Between shows Gypsy and family managed to sneak off for sundown fishing on the Wolf River, where Gypsy caught a catfish.
The staggering range and sheer excellence of the late John Dominis’ pictures—his Korean War coverage; his portraits of pop-culture icons like Sinatra, Redford and McQueen; his beautiful treatment of the “big cats” of Africa; his virile sports photography—place him firmly among the premier photojournalists of his day. But a lesser-known photo essay that Dominis shot for LIFE magazine, focusing on the plight of Appalachians in eastern Kentucky in the early 1960s, spotlights another aspect of the man’s great talent: namely, an ability to portray the forgotten and the afflicted while never sacrificing the dignity of his subjects.
The extraordinary 12-page feature for the Jan. 31, 1964, issue of LIFE, titled “The Valley of Poverty” one of the very first substantive reports in any American publication on President Lyndon Johnson’s nascent War on Poverty.
At the time, LIFE was arguably the most influential weekly magazine in the country, and without doubt the most widely read magazine anywhere to regularly publish major photo essays by the world’s premier photojournalists. In that light, LIFE was in a unique position in the early days of Johnson’s administration to not merely tell but to show its readers what was at stake, and what the challenges were, as the new president’s “Great Society” got under way.
“The Valley of Poverty,” illustrated with some of the most powerful and intimate photographs of Dominis’ career, served (and still serves today) as an indictment of a wealthy nation’s indifference.
As LIFE put it to the magazine’s readers in January 1964:
In a lonely valley in eastern Kentucky, in the heart of the mountainous region called Appalachia, live an impoverished people whose plight has long been ignored by affluent America. Their homes are shacks without plumbing or sanitation. Their landscape is a man-made desolation of corrugated hills and hollows laced with polluted streams. The people, themselves often disease-ridden and unschooled are without jobs and even without hope. Government relief and handouts of surplus food have sustained them on a bare subsistence level for so many years that idleness and relief are now their accepted way of life.
President Johnson, who has declared “unconditional war on poverty in America,” has singled out Appalachia as a major target. . . . Appalachia stretches from northern Alabama to southern Pennsylvania, and the same disaster that struck eastern Kentucky hit the whole region the collapse of the coal industry 20 years ago, which left Appalachia a vast junkyard. It was no use for the jobless miners to try farming strip mining has wrecked much of the land and, in any case, the miners had lost contact with the soil generations ago. . . . Unless the grim chain [of unemployment and lack of education] can be broken, a second generation coming of age in Appalachia will fall into the same dismal life a life that protects them from starvation but deprives them of self-respect and hope.
In a shack near Neon, Ky., Delphi Mobley comforted daughter Riva, who was ill with measles. Proper medical care was beyond her $125 monthly welfare pay.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Nadine McFall, 1, happily reached over to pat the stomach of a huge doll—its wardrobe long since lost and never replaced —as she squatted on a crowded couch in her great grandmother’s shack near Neon.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
On a wintry afternoon in Line Fork Creek a family trudged across a rickety suspension bridge over a sewage-polluted stream to its two-room shack.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Youngsters lapped up a surplus-commodity supper of pan-fried biscuits, gravy and potatoes at the Odell Smiths of Friday Branch Creek. The newspapers were pasted by Mrs. Smith in an effort to keep the place neat.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
JJohn Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
All over Appalachia the ruins of trestles jutted from deserted hillside coal mines. This mine had once offered workers a good living, but it closed in 1945.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tearing with bare hands at frozen lumps of coal, Willard Bryant and his son Billy crouched between railroad tracks, scavenging fuel to heat their home. When the tub was full, they dragged it to the hill where they live, reloaded the coal into bags and carried it on their backs to the house.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In a one-room school at Thornton Gap, pupils were constantly out sick during the winter.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia’s young people, like Roberta Oliver, 14, from Rock House Creek, Ky., were often sad-faced and prematurely aged. Most suffered fatigue because of a diet of surplus food, heavy in starches like flour and rice and inadequately augmented by lard and cheese, butter and ground pork.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In the Thorton Gap Regular Baptist Church, a tar-paper-covered shed heated to stifling by a big stove, preacher Elzie Kiser, 62, called on his small flock to “get with God.”
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Eighteen-year-old Ray Martin was a lucky man by local standards. He had a job in a mine near Isom, one of the shoestring ‘dog holes’ kept operating thanks to low wages, back-breaking labor, overused equipment and minimal safety measures.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A cow was a rare sight in Appalachia. The people are not country folk but an industrial population who happened to live in the country. Many kept chickens, but farming was seldom practiced.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The commonest sights around Appalachia were aging men and ragged urchins.
What you see here in these snowy photos is a metaphorical tip of the iceberg. During World War II, with the role of women beginning to change in society at large and also in the military, this was the very first class of women — at the University of New Hampshire, as it turns out — to undergo training similar to that of men in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).
If, as the natives whisper, Daniel Webster sometimes revisits his childhood haunts when the wild winds whistle through the New Hampshire hills, he would find no more baffling sign of the U.S. at war than the sight of 650 rugged bare-legged girls drilling on a bleak, snow-covered field. These girls, students at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, are the first organized college group in the U.S. to undergo pre-graduation training like men’s ROTC which will fit them specifically for service in the WAAC, WAVES, and other auxiliaries of the armed forces. [Their training] abandons purely recreational activities in favor of military drill and calisthenics, emphasizes body building and toughening achieved through hiking, conditioning exercises, and a going-over on the rigorous, man-sized obstacle course.
Thus far the only hitch in the rigid training regimen developed when the university’s imminent Military Art Ball made it necessary to let up on all exercises for a few days because the girls were too stiff to dance.
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills in the freezing weather, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
University of New Hampshire student Shirley Sylvester (standing) straightened the shoulders of sophomore Estelle Dutton in an exercise which was designed to aid posture and strengthened pectoral muscles, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students at the University of New Hampshire during gymnasium workouts, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills in freezing weather, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students at the University of New Hampshire ice skated as part of an intensive, wartime physical education program, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire fencing in gymnasium, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students at the University of New Hampshire exercised on the gymnasium floor, 1942.
