May 2014 - Page 2 of 5

Surfing, U.S.A.

July 30, 2020May 26, 2014 by

The best surfing photos can capture an essence of the sport—and so can observations from some of the greatest surfers of all time. Some pithy of words of wisdom follow, as well as some extraordinary images of surfing in days gone by.

“Out of water, I am nothing.” Duke Kahanamoku

“Surfing’s one of the few sports where you look ahead to see what’s behind.” Laird Hamilton

“It’s like the mafia. Once you’re in, you’re in. There’s no getting out.” Kelly Slater

“If in doubt, paddle out.” Nat Young

“One of the greatest things about the sport of surfing is that you need only three things: your body, a surfboard, and a wave.” Naima Green

“I surf to get tan.” Shane Dorian

“It’s not tragic to die doing something you love.” Mark Foo, who would drown while surfing at Mavericks in California in 1994

“I’ve tried changing my surfing, which is the worst thing you can do. Everyone surfs their own way. If I try to surf like someone else, I look like a dork.” Andy Irons

“Surfing is such an amazing concept. You’re taking on Nature with a little stick and saying, ‘I’m gonna ride you!’ And a lot of times Nature says, ‘No you’re not!’ and crashes you to the bottom.” Jolene Blalock

“I could not help concluding this man had the most supreme pleasure while he was driven so fast and so smoothly by the sea.” Captain James Cook, on watching a Hawaiian surfer in the late 18th century

“Surfing is very much like making love. It always feels good, no matter how many times you’ve done it.” Paul Strauch

“You’re sayin’ the FBI’s gonna pay me to learn to surf?” Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves), Point Break

“If it swells, ride it.” Anonymous

Surfers, Malibu, California 1961

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, California, 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Lima, Peru, 1959.

Frank Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Malibu, California 1961

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Manhattan Beach, Calif., 1965.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Australia, 1958.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Hawaii, 1963.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Lima, Peru, 1959.

Frank Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Malibu, Calif., 1961

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Hawaii, 1959.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Malibu, Calif., 1961.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Malibu, California, 1961.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sixteen-year-old Kathy Kohner (the real-life inspiration for the character of Gidget) rode a wave, Malibu, Calif., 1957.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Malibu, California, 1961

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, San Onofre, California, 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Lima, Peru, 1959.

Frank Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, Malibu, California, 1957

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, San Onofre, California, 1950

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfing, San Onofre, California, 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Real Story Behind the Best Photo Ever Made of a Delighted Mom-to-Be

August 11, 2021May 25, 2014 by

We’re not the first site to put this 1954 Wallace Kirkland photo online. In fact, it’s been bouncing around the Internet for years. The estimable Maggie Koerth, for instance, posted it on Boing Boing a while back, while posing the compelling question: What was the nature of the prenatal gender-screening compound mentioned in the caption that has accompanied the picture all over the Web?

The caption referenced in Koerth’s post, and reproduced by countless blogs, reads: “Mrs. Jane Dill, four months pregnant, reacts to the news that she is carrying a baby girl, Northbrook, Ill., 1954. She had just taken a test, administered by the unidentified man in the lab coat, by placing a wafer soaked in a secret formula on her tongue.”

All well and good — except that, alas, that is not the caption that accompanied the photo when it originally ran in LIFE magazine in 1954, nor is the man in the lab coat unidentified. The caption beneath the photo in that long-ago issue of LIFE reads: “Mrs. Dill reacts happily as [Charles] Welbert shows her sex-test wafer which remains colorless, indicating second child will be girl she wants.”

(Koerth and others can certainly be pardoned for citing the former caption, as the original description of the photo, as far as we can determine, is only to be found in that 60-year-old issue of LIFE. For some reason, the original caption did not follow the picture from the printed page to the digital realm.)

The May 1954 article, meanwhile, provides more information about what’s really going on in Kirkland’s photo:

Mrs. Jane Dill . . . whooped with delight at the glad news. She had just been informed by Charles Welbert that her unborn child will be a girl. “Oh, I’m so glad,” she exclaimed. “I have one little girl already. Now I’ll have two.”

But was Welbert right? Nobody can be sure until August, when Baby Dill is born. [Note: “Baby Dill” was, indeed, a girl. — Ed.] Welbert, a Frenchman, is in the U.S. to promote a sex-prediction test devised by Jean Reisman. In 30,000 cases in France, claim Welbert and Reisman, the test was 98% accurate. Their statistics have not been subjected to impartial analysis, but the chance that the test might really work has brought Welbert U.S. customers by the hundreds.

The test, now being marketed mostly by mail, seems amazingly simple. A tiny paper wafer soaked with a secret chemical formula is placed on the mother’s tongue for 15 seconds to absorb a sample of her saliva. Then it is mailed — with a $5 fee — to Welbert who adds another chemical. If the wafer turns purple, it means male hormones have been detected. The baby will be a boy. A colorless wafer: a girl.

Most scientists are profoundly skeptical. No previous test — whether based on the moon and stars, on X-rays of the fetus or on examination of the mother’s eyes, blood, tears, shape of abdomen or samples of the fluid surrounding the fetus itself — has ever proved to be both accurate and safe.

Ultimately, though, we’re not especially interested in whether or not Reisman’s test was scientifically legit. We don’t know, for example, if the process he devised was ever peer-reviewed. Instead, we’re posting Kirkland’s photo — and the text of the article in LIFE — for two reasons. First, to correct some inaccuracies that have been out there for a while regarding the photograph, and the people in it.

Second, we’re publishing this for the simple reason that it’s a marvelous, memorable, enormously enjoyable picture. It has energy to spare, of course, and beyond Mrs. Dill’s near-manic delight there is the evident good will or is it self-satisfaction? in the hint we see of Welbert’s grin.

Maybe today’s home pregnancy tests, as remarkable and welcome as they are, reliably generate this sort of over-the-top reaction. But somehow, we doubt it.

Mrs. Jane Dill reacts with joy, 1954

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Maleficent Comes Alive! 1958 Edition

August 11, 2021May 25, 2014 by

“No witch ever swished her black cape with a witchier sneer,” wrote LIFE magazine of Maleficent, the now-iconic villainess of Disney’s 1959 classic, Sleeping Beauty. The angular, fiercely horned dark fairy, whose very name conveyed ill-will, took standards for dastardly animated characters to new heights and has reliably terrified generations of moviegoers.

The “Mistress of All Evil” was the product of both painstaking cel animation and live acting. LIFE photographer Allan Grant captured the moment as model Jane Fowler acted out some of the movements that made Maleficent a powerhouse villainess. Actress Eleanor Audley, the voice behind the evil stepmother in Disney’s Cinderella, also provided live-action modeling — and the chilling voice — for Maleficent. A team of animation artists used Fowler’s and Audley’s motions to bring Marc Davis’s medieval artwork-inspired designs to life.

Some critics voiced concern that scenes — especially a memorable bit with Maleficent as a dragon — were too frightening for children. The Los Angeles Times fretted that the film’s six production years, 300 artists and $6 million price tag would make it “the last as well as the biggest of these fairy tale features.”

Well, not quite. Angelina Jolie’s live-action film about Maleficent — with an estimated production budget of $180 million — has taken in more than $700 million internationally at the box office, a career best for the actress. Wicked.

Martha Groppo is a doctoral student studying history at Princeton University

Maleficent, 1958

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ghosts of D-Day: Omar Bradley at Omaha Beach, June 1969

April 21, 2023May 24, 2014 by

In some ways, it’s a simple photograph: An old soldier stands on the shore at Normandy in June 1969, 25 years after the D-Day invasion. We can guess at some of what’s going through his mind: memories of comrades, living and dead; a kind of grim satisfaction in having played his part in an epic endeavor; a hope that, ultimately, the peace won by the violence that convulsed Omaha Beach — and that defined all the terrible battles that followed — was somehow worth it.

But in other, critical ways, it’s not a simple picture, at all. First, the old soldier is Gen. Omar Bradley, who as a three-star Lieut. Gen. in 1944 oversaw the training of the invasion force in England; was in command of all American forces — 1.3 million troops — aimed toward Berlin from the west after Normandy; and by the time he retired was one of only nine generals in American history to hold a five-star rank. (“I’ll see you on the beaches,” he famously told his men in the run-up to D-Day — and the man the troops called “a GI Joe with three stars on his shoulders” kept his word, landing on Omaha Beach just 24 hours after the invasion launched.)

But beyond the complexity of the man himself, there’s the wonderful story behind the making of the picture. As photographer Bill Ray remembers it, he had tried for days before the 25th anniversary of D-Day to convince the general — or rather, to convince Bradley’s numerous handlers — to fly out to Omaha Beach for an exclusive portrait for LIFE. “I begged, I pleaded, I cajoled,” Ray recalls. “I wanted to photograph this man who had played such a central role in the planning and execution of the D-Day invasion, on the beach, on the very spot where it had all taken place.”

Finally, after endless phone calls back and forth, the general consented. Ray hired a helicopter and, with Bradley pointing the way to the area of the beach where, to the best of his recollection, he had come ashore 25 years before, the photographer and the five-star general — in uniform — walked the strand, alone.

“After all the time I spent working to set this up,” Ray says, “actually taking the picture probably only took 15 minutes, tops. [Bradley] was a very quiet man, but it was obvious to me, as he stood there, that there was a lot going on under that calm demeanor.”

Ray laughs, and shares the punchline to the entire story.

“And you know what? After all that — the pleading, getting the helicopter, flying out to the beach, taking this exclusive picture of the man who commanded the First Army during D-Day — LIFE never ran the picture!”

Here, LIFE.com is pleased to rectify that long-ago oversight.

[See more of Bill Ray’s work at BillRay.com]

[Buy the LIFE book, D-Day: Remembering the Battle that Won the War — 70 Years Later]

Omar Bradley, Normandy, 1969

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Margay Kitten in a New York Apartment!

August 11, 2021May 23, 2014 by

It’s the early 1960s. You’re dropping by a friend’s place. You knock on the door — but brace yourself. In their house or apartment there just might reside a lithe jungle cat. These creatures usually call Central and South American forests home, but as LIFE explained to its readers in a December 1961 article, margays were adapting to a whole new habitat … a concrete jungle.

Today, they’re classified as Near Threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” of endangered species. But back in the ’60s, margays (along with leopards, chimpanzees and kangaroos) were kept by the rich and famous as novelty pets. The photo here is of Montezuma the margay — “the most elegant pet to be found in New York City,” according to LIFE — romping in the Manhattan home of Mr. and Mrs. Si Merrill.

Subsisting largely on a diet of beef or turkey heart, and the occasional side of watercress, the powerful feline was full of energy. “I don’t think I could live without a margay,” Mrs. Merrill told LIFE. But Monte (as he was known) could probably do all right without her. Margays live largely on birds in their native arboreal habitat — and New York, of course, has an abundance of plump pigeons.

Montezuma the Margay, New York, 1961

Al Fenn The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

World War II, After D-Day: Deeper Into Hell

March 8, 2022May 23, 2014 by

The Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944, was so vast in scope—and so punishingly effective in establishing an Allied beachhead on European soil—that people sometimes forget just how long the war lasted, and how brutal it remained, in both Europe and the Pacific after D-Day. The successes at Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword beaches remain, rightly, among the most celebrated military operations in history—but for more than a year following those landings, the fighting went on, and on, and on in some of the war’s most appalling battles and campaigns.

Hundreds of thousands of Allied and Axis troops and untold thousands more civilian men, women and children died before Japan surrendered in September 1945, finally ending the war that for six years had reshaped the globe. This gallery features photographs — some of them iconic, many of them little-known — from Saipan, Bastogne, Iwo Jima, Berlin, Nagasaki: places where the war did not stop when Operation Overlord ended.

[Buy the LIFE book, D-Day: Remembering the Battle that Won the War — 70 Years Later]

Rescue workers helped pull victims from ruins of a building hit by a German V-1 “flying bomb,” July 1944.

Mansell The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A grizzled, battle-weary Marine peered over his shoulder during the final days of fighting on Saipan, July 1944.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American Marines in action during the fight for control of Saipan, summer 1944.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marines tended to a wounded comrades while the fighting rages on during the battle to take Saipan from the Japanese, 1944.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Lo, France, summer 1944.

Joe Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Free French soldier dashes to aid a French resistance fighter took aim at a German sniper attacking a crowd during a tour by Gen. Charles DeGaulle following the liberation of Paris, August 1944.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sniper attack, Paris, August 1944.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

V-E Day, Paris

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grim-faced American soldiers fighting on Okinawa listened to a radio broadcast of the surrender of Germany and the end of WWII in Europe, May 1945.

U.S. Army

A cathedral was turned into a makeshift hospital during the Allied campaign to retake the Philippines, December 1944.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A nurse tended to wounded soldiers in a makeshift hospital located in a cathedral during the campaign to retake the Philippines, Dec. 1944.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This tired American soldier was just back from the front lines near the town of Murrigen during the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American General Anthony McAuliffe, commander of the 101st Airborne during the Battle of the Bulge.

U.S. Army

German POWs carried the body of an American soldier killed in the Battle of Bulge, January 1945.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A lace curtain shrouded the body of an American soldier awaiting burial in Bastogne cemetery, January 1945.

Russ Engel/U.S. Army

United States Marines (foreground) blew up a cave connected to a Japanese blockhouse on Iwo Jima, March 1945.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

U. S. Coast Guardsmen assisted a wounded Marine returning from the fight on Iwo Jima, 1945.

U.S. Coast Guard

Crewmen fought fires on the deck of the USS Saratoga, which was badly damaged and set ablaze after being hit several times by Japanese bomber planes and kamikaze attacks off of Iwo Jima, 1945.

U.S. Navy

U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raised the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.

Joe Rosenthal AP Photo

Oberwallstrasse, in central Berlin, saw some of the most vicious fighting between German and Soviet troops in the spring of 1945.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collecton/Shutterstock

Russian soldiers and a civilian struggled to move a large bronze Nazi Party eagle that once loomed over a doorway of the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, 1945.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collecton/Shutterstock

American infantryman Terry Moore took cover as incoming Japanese artillery fire exploded nearby during the fight to take Okinawa, May 1945.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

U.S. Marines waited to pick off enemies who fled a cave after it was attacked with an explosive charge during the vicious fight for control of Okinawa, 1945.

U.S. Marine Corps

A gutted trolley car amid Hiroshima ruins, months after America’s August 1945 atomic bomb attack on the city.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nagasaki, September, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mother and child in Hiroshima, Japan, December 1945.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A photo album, pieces of pottery, a pair of scissors and shards of life strewn on the ground in Nagasaki, 1945.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American officers (including neck-craning skeptic William “Bull” Halsey, third fr. left) lined the deck of the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) while the Japanese delegation signed the official surrender document, Sept. 2, 1945.

Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

V-J Day kiss, Times Square, Aug. 14, 1945.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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