June 2014 - Page 2 of 2

Grace and Mayhem: Women’s Roller Derby, 1948

December 23, 2021June 13, 2014 by

“It is a teeth-jarring sport for skaters who race 30 miles every night,” LIFE wrote of roller derby back in December 1948. The sport, LIFE continued, features “enough spills and body contact to gratify even an ice hockey fan.”

LIFE.com here features a number of photographs of women’s roller derby teams in Chicago, made by longtime LIFE photographer George Skadding. Known primarily as a chronicler of politics and presidents—before and after World War II, he was an officer of the White House News Photographers Association—Skadding clearly immersed himself in this particular assignment.

Maybe the open aggression of the sport was a tonic after years of covering Washington, where the assaults tended to be more buttoned-down. Whatever the reason, Skadding evidently enjoyed himself while chronicling these skaters. And according to LIFE, so did the fans at the rink.

“The rules of this spectacle appear to have been cribbed from six-day bike racing . . . and professional wrestling. . . . Audiences have already learned to hiss the sport’s more clumsy villains, but lady skaters are not ostracized when they kick one another in the face.”

Is it any wonder that, while always on the fringes of sporting culture, roller derby still endures?

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

A skillful shoulder block thrown by ‘Fuzzy’ Buchek (left) foiled an attempt by Vivian Johnson (center) to slip between two skaters and start a jam. These were all legal moves.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roller Derby, Chicago, 1948.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A fight broke out between ‘Toughie’ Brashun (No. 12), Gerry Murray and a hapless mediator from a men’s team (No. 13).

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roller Derby, Chicago, 1948.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roller Derby 1948

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roller Derby, Chicago, 1948.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An illegal hold by the skater at the left (No. 3) let her partner take the lead. It was observed that girls’ tactics were often dirtier than men’s.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, Dec. 13, 1948.

LIFE Magazine

Vintage Yosemite: Breathtaking Photos of a National Treasure, 1962

January 16, 2020June 8, 2014 by

On June 30, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act, establishing Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove as America’s “first protected wild land for all time,” while also creating the very first California state park. The Yosemite National Park that we know and love today was not established until October 1890—but it’s still remarkable to consider that, in the midst of a civil war that threatened to destroy the nation, Congress and Lincoln had the foresight, and the guts, to protect America’s natural treasures in perpetuity.

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of photos made in the park in 1962 by LIFE’s Ralph Crane. Looking at these pictures, one would be hard-pressed to disagree with the famous assertion that, collectively, the national parks comprise “America’s best idea.”

A hiker at Vernal Falls in Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Yosemite Valley, a crown jewel of scenic treasure, has been preserved largely because of a pioneer’s love. Naturalist John Muir fought for a Yosemite National Park so things like the great granite shoulder of El Capitan (left) and Bridalveil Falls could be held in public trust for future visitors.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Campers made an early morning breakfast at their site in Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Children walked on a spit of rocks at Mirror Lake in Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tourists floated on a raft in the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A horseback ride in Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Yosemite Falls at Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hikers passed beneath a rainbow formed by mist from Vernal Falls, Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vernal Falls in Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“Firefall” — burning hot embers spilled from the top of Glacier Point at Yosemite National Park — was a nightly tourist attraction for years, until the Park Service ordered the owners of the Glacier Point Hotel to put a stop to the dramatic, but highly unnatural, proceedings.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Father and son (unwisely) fed a deer, Yosemite National Park, 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Early Days of Professional Dog Walking

November 3, 2020June 8, 2014 by

New York City has always been a proving ground for entrepreneurs. The Alfred Eisenstadt photograph above, for example, depicts a dog walker in Central Park in 1967—and documents a phenomenon born just a few years before the photo was made.

Here’s how it started: one morning in 1964, a man of Upper East Side gentility awoke at dawn to walk an acquaintance’s dog. By the end of the year he was making more than $500 a week walking other people’s pooches.

Over time, this dog walker, Jim Buck gained many more clients, and in a few years he employed a stable of two dozen assistants walking hundreds of dogs a day.

As the ’60s pressed on, Mr. Buck founded Jim Buck’s School for Dogs—the first of its kind, being one part canine-training, one part exercise and other walking needs—and ran the business for more than 40 years.

Buck closed his school shortly after the new millennium, and retired. His death in July 2013 at the age of 81 was noted with an obituary in The New York Times. But his was a classic American success story: He was an innovator who saw a need, and filled it, and a man who, legend has it, wore through the soles of his shoes every other week.

Olivia Marsh is a filmmaker, writer and history student at New York University.

Dog walkers in Central Park, New York, 1967.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Ghosts of World War I: The Tragic Legacy of Verdun

August 11, 2021June 7, 2014 by

In the spring of 1964, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt—who served as a German artilleryman during World War I and saw action in the terrible fighting at Passchendaele—and correspondent Ken Gouldthorpe traveled to Verdun, in northeastern France, where one of the costliest battles of WWI took place five decades earlier. Here, LIFE.com presents Eisenstaedt’s quietly powerful color pictures from Verdun: images of an idyllic landscape that still bears the scars, and seemingly harbors the ghosts, of “the war to end all wars.”

Of all the battle sites along the 350-mile sweep of the Western Front [Gouldthorpe wrote in the June 5, 1964, issue of LIFE], none has come to symbolize the carnage and futility of World War I’s fighting more than the fields and hills of Verdun. Here the Germans tried to bleed the French army to death. . . . Today in an ossuary near Douaumont, even now smelling of death, rest the bones of 130,000 unidentified casualties from both sides: skulls, thighs, and — almost indistinguishable — the hobnailed sole of a soldier’s boot. Th erupting shells of a thousand bombardments killed and dug up and mixed and then reinterred the bodies until they intermingled inseparably beneath the mud. [But] not all the memorials honor unknown soldiers. In the wall of Fort Vaux . . . a couple of poppies from nearby fields decorate a plaque [picture #17 in the gallery] to one French victim of Verdun. It says, simply, “To my son. Since your eyes were closed mine have never ceased to cry.”

The sullen turrets of Verdun’s forts continued to guard one the world’s most deadly battlefields.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Verdun, France, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In an ossuary near Douaumont rested the bones of 130,000 unidentified casualties from both sides.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Verdun, France, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Verdun, France, photographed from the air, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Verdun, France, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

14,000 marble crosses honored Americans” at Verdun.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At Vaux rested a plaque to one soldier.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This monument was erected in remembrance of refugees.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Near the crest at Montfaucon, where in 1918 U.S. infantry routed the Germans with bayonets but suffered enormous losses, a village cross held up a shell-shattered Christ.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At Douaumont a statue of a French soldier lay with 15,000 actual dead.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Verdun, France, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brazil in the Fifties: Portrait of a Beautiful, Troubled Country

January 16, 2020June 2, 2014 by

The title of a 1957 feature on Brazil published in LIFE magazine was: “Growing Pains of a Big Country: Ambitious Brazil Has Great Riches, Fine Prospects — and Big Problems.” The operative word here, of course, is “big,” as Brazil is huge in many ways, not least in geographic size (the 5th largest country on earth) and in population (200 million people).

But enormous troubles—many of which stem, at least in part, from the country’s endemic corruption —have held Brazil back from realizing its phenomenal economic potential. A story with a similar headline could easily be written today. This gallery features color photos made when beautiful, troubled Brazil was enduring “growing pains” not dissimilar to what it has gone through in more recent times.

Rio’s peaks, while beautiful, also strangled traffic. Still, they made a lovely sight at dusk.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1957.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Decrepit engines, such as this 1904 wood burner on the Belem-Braganca run, plagued railroads. The eucalyptus logs they burned gave off the fragrance of cough medicine.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The basin of the Amazon river was home to 3.5 million people, a number of them recently arrived from Japan and Puerto Rico.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brazil, 1957.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This U.S.-built Dam, Peixoto, was constructed by a subsidiary of the U.S.-owned American and Foreign Power Company to serve industrial centers outside Sao Paulo.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brazil, 1957.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rio, 1957.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brazil, 1957.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brazin’s old capital was Salvador, north of Rio in the sugar-growing country. It lost its position to Rio in 1763, after gold was discovered farther South. Salvador is a double city, the lower part (foreground) built along the harbor, and the upper part, with churches, monasteries that date to 17th Century, on a high bluff.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picking cotton, Brazil, 1957.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This coffee plantation stood in the terra rosa (purple earth) territory of the state of Parana. The plantation, or fazenda, had its own little village of warehouses, workers’ houses and stores (center), surrounded by symmetrical rows of thousands of coffee trees 5 to 12 feet high. Each of these trees produced about one pound of coffee each year. The country produced almost half the world’s supply.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A new capital was being built in Brasilia by workers who lived in a cluster of 2,000 temporary wooden buildings. Traders from the nearby cities came to sell dry goods and razor blades from suitcases on the streets. There was no finished road to the site and practically all traffic in and out was by plane.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1957.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, Oct. 21, 1957.

The Magic of the Off-Screen Trampoline: A Young Man Soars Above The Beach

August 11, 2021June 1, 2014 by

With most pictures—and certainly with most pictures made by professional photographers—we can grasp what’s happening inside the frame the moment we lay eyes on it. If the photograph is in focus, and if the action or subject of the picture is remotely discernible, it takes the eye a mere instant to tell the brain what’s going on.

That’s a couple kissing. There’s a sunset. That’s a baseball player sliding into home.

But some photos capture scenes so unfamiliar so outside the realm of what we usually see, or expect that it can take a while to wrap our minds around what’s depicted. Case in point: This Loomis Dean picture, made on the beach in Santa Monica in 1948. We know, when we first encounter it, that the photograph depicts a beach scene. We know that the central figure in the composition is a human being. But many of us, for a good while, are unable to understand, to really grasp, what’s happening.

The caption “A man flies off of a trampoline” explains how that fellow ended up there, soaring effortlessly (it would seem) through the air. But some of us will see this picture for the first time and, for a fleeting moment, before it all becomes clear, we might think we’re seeing . . . what? A misguided diver about to face-plant in the sand? Icarus falling from the sky?

What do you see? And why?

A man flew off a trampoline, Santa Monica, 1948.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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Grace and Mayhem: Women’s Roller Derby, 1948

Vintage Yosemite: Breathtaking Photos of a National Treasure, 1962

The Early Days of Professional Dog Walking

Ghosts of World War I: The Tragic Legacy of Verdun

Brazil in the Fifties: Portrait of a Beautiful, Troubled Country

The Magic of the Off-Screen Trampoline: A Young Man Soars Above The Beach

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