Here, on Memorial Day weekend more than 150 years after the first troops were interred there, LIFE.com offers a series of photographs made at Arlington by George Silk. Never published in LIFE magazine, Silk’s pictures are appropriately quiet, reflective portraits of a small corner of the country that occupies a special, prominent place in the national consciousness.

[Buy the LIFE book, The Power and the Glory: An Illustrated History of the United States Military.]

After all, an awful lot of people who were at the fight that night never saw, or later claimed that they never saw, the punch that floored Liston. Others, including Sports Illustrated‘s Tex Maule, were adamant that the punch was hardly a phantom, but instead was a perfectly timed blow that legitimately rocked the former champ.

In the years after the fight, various theories have been floated in order to explain what some fight fans simply can’t or don’t want to accept — namely, that Ali beat Liston, period.

But Liston was in debt to the Mafia and threw the fight to pay it off, some say. Or: Liston was frightened that Black Muslim extremists, gunning for Ali (who had had a falling out with Malcolm X before the latter’s assassination in February 1965) might kill him by mistake. All very fascinating and even, in a sordid way, kind of romantic. But sportswriters like Maule, Lou Eisen and others are just as sure that the one punch in question was more than enough to rattle the older, out-of-shape and, frankly, undisciplined Liston.

In his cover story in the June 7, 1965, issue of SI, for example, Maule wrote that “the knockout punch itself was thrown with the amazing speed that differentiates Clay [as he was still called then by most in the media] from any other heavyweight. He leaned away from one of Liston’s ponderous, pawing left jabs, planted his left foot solidly and whipped his right hand over Liston’s left arm and into the side of Liston’s jaw. The blow had so much force it lifted Liston’s left foot, upon which most of his weight was resting, well off the canvas.”

“He knocked out big Sonny Liston,” the magazine asserted elsewhere in the same issue, “with a punch so marvelously fast that almost no one believed in it — but it was hard and true.”

Maule also noted that “about 30 seconds before the end, [Ali] hit Liston with another strong right that may have started Sonny’s downfall.” A picture of that earlier punch (the fourth slide in this gallery) was the cover photo for the June 7 issue of Sports Illustrated. George Silk took that photo; all the rest of the pictures in this gallery are by Silk’s LIFE colleague, John Dominis. In fact, in Silk’s picture, Dominis (wearing a dark blue shirt) can be seen resting his own camera on the canvas, just to the right of the ring post.

[MORE: See the TIME article, "What's Behind The Drop in U.S. Teen Birth Rates."]

This is all, of course, good news at a time when so much of what we’re hearing about the state of Americans’ health — especially the ongoing obesity epidemic — is downright depressing. But it’s also worth remembering that teen pregnancy, and the societal issues associated with the issue, have been on the cultural, medical and even the political radar in the U.S. for a long time. Here, LIFE.com looks back four decades, to a remarkable cover story in the April 2, 1971, issue of LIFE magazine titled, quite simply, “Help for High School Mothers,” that chronicled the day-to-day lives of teen moms and moms-to-be in an otherwise typical southern California town called Azusa:

In a public high school classroom [the article began], a 16-year-old student, eight months pregnant and unmarried, presents a book report. Her classmates and teacher are unruffled, for the quiet scene is an everyday event at Citrus High in Azusa, Calif. — and elsewhere around the country where educators are taking radical new approach to an old and painful problem. Until a few years ago, the nation’s public schools dealt with teenage pregnancies by expelling the girls or by putting pressure on them to leave. Many humiliated families arranged secret and illegal abortions for their daughters. Others sent them away to “visit relatives” or, if they could afford it, hid them in private nursing homes.

Today the attitude toward high school mothers is changing dramatically. While teenage pregnancy is just as unwanted and undesirable as ever, more and more parents and schools are trying to help the girls put their lives together again instead of ostracizing them. In nearly every major city programs now exist to meet the special educational, medical and psychological needs of teen-age mothers. In almost every case the programs have won strong community support. … Many communities provide medical clinics and counseling for the new mothers — who will number an estimated 200,000 this years.

[That said], there are still not enough programs in the country. A recent study concludes that 75 percent of pregnant teen-agers drop out of school. But more and more girls are making the tough decisions to stay in school, for their own good — and for the future of their babies.

A few weeks later, the letters to the editor that were published in LIFE in response to the story were mostly negative, along the lines of one from a reader in Manitou Springs, Colo., who wrote that “the April 2 cover sets some sort of new dimension of achievement in crass, lurid, inelegant journalistic bad taste. To proffer a picture of this pathetic schoolchild with her grotesque maternity figure over the bold type ‘High School Pregnancy’ simply makes a bad, sad scene.”

The vice-president of a senior high school class in Redondo Beach, Calif., meanwhile, applauded the teen pregnancy program at Citrus Hill, but went to note that he felt “that the LIFE story was done in the epitome of poor taste. The entire tone of the article was such that one would think the greatest way of getting through high school is by having babies.”

[See the gallery, "The Invention of Teenagers: LIFE and the Triumph of Youth Culture."]

Granted, one can also point to a number of greats who left at the top of their game — Jim Brown, Steffi Graf, the amazing Sandy Koufax — but the list of those who stuck around for too long is far lengthier, and for sports fans, far more fun to debate. (Did Emmitt Smith really retire later than he should have?)

One name high on most lists of players who dragged it out a little bit at the end is that of legendary Yankees center fielder Mickey Mantle. By all accounts one of the greatest natural talents to ever play the game, Mantle could do it all — and for several years, from the mid-1950s through the early ’60s, he was a dominant force on the diamond. A seven-time Word Series champ, three-time MVP and one of only 17 Triple Crown winners, Mantle still holds records for, among other things, the most World Series home runs (18), RBIs (40) and total bases (123) and is remembered not only for his blazing speed and his stellar glove, but for the almost unbelievable power he packed into his 5-foot-11, 195-pound frame.

In 1953, for example, the switch-hitting Mantle (batting right-handed) famously slammed a homer that, while it almost certainly didn’t travel the 565 feet claimed by the Yankee’s public relations man, Red Patterson, is still widely regarded as one of the very longest ever hit. Over the course of his 18 seasons in the pros, in fact, Mantle hit many home runs so freakishly far that they left fans and fellow players stunned.

[See the LIFE gallery, "Mickey Mantle: Glory and Pain."]

As electrifying a player as Mantle was, however, from his early days in the big leagues he was plagued by injuries great and small — until, at the end, his legs were so thoroughly wrapped and bandaged on game days that he literally hobbled to the plate to hit. (Years of alcohol abuse certainly didn’t help, either.)

The John Dominis picture featured here, meanwhile, remains not just one of the best photos of Mickey Mantle, and not just one of the finest baseball pictures to run in LIFE magazine, but one of the most powerful photographs ever made of a sports hero in decline. Shot during a meaningless game at Yankee Stadium during the team’s abysmal 1965 season — the Yankees finished below .500 for the first time in 40 years — Dominis’ picture of Mantle tossing his helmet in disgust after a lousy at-bat distills in a single frame the wounded pride of the great, fading athlete.

[See all of TIME.com's sports coverage.]

Whether it’s a boxer who can no longer dodge an opponent’s jab, or a tennis player no longer nimble enough to return a rocket of a serve, all athletes eventually face that moment when their bodies simply can’t perform at the very highest level. The competitive fire might burn as hot as ever, but the hands grow weaker, the legs heavier, the lungs shallower. After a certain point, no matter how much experience and craft an athlete has, time and age become the true and only rivals.

And yet … in Dominis’ marvelous, riveting photograph, there remains something defiant, something unbroken, in the ballplayer’s gesture — even as we know, and even as the fans at the time knew, that Mantle’s days as a formidable player were gone forever. The graceful, almost balletic posture of the hand that tosses the helmet; the prodigious strength so evident in Mantle’s muscled forearm and, indeed, in his entire frame — these details, captured so perfectly by Dominis, remind us that even in decline, the truly great athlete retains something of the physical magnetism that made us stand and cheer in the first place.

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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But drought or no drought, Oklahomans, like most Americans living in the country’s famed Tornado Alley, are hardly strangers to the havoc that even mid-sized tornadoes can suddenly visit on communities. In fact, 58 years ago this week, an outbreak of scores of tornadoes across both Oklahoma and Kansas killed more than 100 people, injured hundreds more and destroyed homes and businesses in dozens of counties. On the night of May 25, 1955, a monster F5 twister (in the Fujita Scale’s grim terminology, a tornado capable of “incredible damage”) slammed into the northern Oklahoma town of Blackwell, not far from the Kansas line. Twenty people died and hundreds of homes and businesses were demolished.

In the days following the Blackwell twister, LIFE photographer Joe Scherschel was on the ground there, documenting the devastation and the recovery effort in one small town that had nearly, but not quite, been wiped off the map by a shockingly destructive force that disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.

[MORE: See photos from the aftermath of the deadly May 20, 2013, Oklahoma City tornado.]

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In the middle part of the last decade, meanwhile, many Hollywood studios put their faith — at least in part — in photographs of their comeliest stars striking what, in retrospect, were perfectly absurd poses, wearing perfectly absurd outfits. The creation of these “pinup” shots — often referred to by the catchall term “cheesecake” (see below) — was a miniature industry all its own, with stylists, makeup artists, electricians, grips and other behind-the-scenes experts working with photographers and, of course, the actresses themselves to produce publicity stills.

The use of “cheesecake” as a word to characterize these pinup shots is a matter of some contention, although one of the most widely accepted explanations of the term’s origins is that men who first saw these sorts of photos in the early pinup days would exclaim that looking at them was “better than [eating] cheesecake.”

For our purposes, what’s striking about the pictures in this gallery is not just that there are a couple of future stars here among the half-dozen young starlets — including three-time Oscar nominee Piper Laurie and Yvonne De Carlo — but that LIFE’s Ed Clark made all these pictures in order to demonstrate the variety of ways that one studio, Universal, tried to sell its own stars to the public.

One of LIFE’s west coast correspondents, Virgina Hobbs, wrote at the time that the photos in question feature “cheesecake-wise Universal starlets … demonstrating the most prevalent ways and means of girl presentation.” In other words, the studio allowed Clark to photograph a number of its most promising young stars, and even lent stagehands and makeup artists, so that LIFE could show its readers how “cheesecake” was made.

The actresses featured in this gallery are: Piper Laurie (born Rosetta Jacobs); Canadian native Yvonne De Carlo (born Margaret Yvonne Middleton); Leslye Banning (born Mary Lousie Welch); Joyce Holden (born Jo Ann Heckert); Peggy, a.k.a., Peggie Castle (born Peggy Blair); and Susan Cabot (born Harriet Shapiro).

]]> http://life.time.com/culture/pinup-girls-cheesecake-photos-of-young-movie-actresses-in-1950/feed/ 0 http://timelifeblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/05_111139833.jpg?w=287http://timelifeblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/05_111139833.jpg?w=821 Peggy Castle, 1950 lronk1271 http://life.time.com/culture/cancer-photos-from-the-early-fight-against-a-killer-disease/ http://life.time.com/culture/cancer-photos-from-the-early-fight-against-a-killer-disease/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 23:16:22 +0000 Liz Ronk http://life.time.com/?p=35981 ]]> Angelina Jolie’s bombshell announcement that she underwent a preventive double mastectomy in hopes of minimizing her risk of breast cancer still has, understandably, an awful lot of people talking. Some commentators have suggested that Jolie’s action and, more importantly, the powerful, public way that she let the world know of her decision — on her own schedule, in her own words — could end up saving lives, if only because so many women who might have put off testing for years are now avidly searching for all the information they can find on breast cancer.

Of course, guarded optimism (and open pessimism) in the face of cancer is hardly new. Or rather, the last half century or so has seen truly extraordinary strides in treatment of myriad types of the disease. Sixty-five years ago, in May 1958, LIFE magazine published a cover story that considered an arsenal of new medical, technological and chemical approaches to diagnosis and treatment — approaches, the magazine suggested, that might do away with some cancers within the lifetime of those then fighting them.

The article, titled titled, “Cancer — on Brink of Breakthroughs,” put it this way to LIFE’s millions of readers:

It is a bad way to die and its name has long struck fear in human hearts. Fifty years ago a diagnosis of cancer was literally a sentence of death. No longer is that true, but in 1958 it will kill 250,000 Americans. [That number has more than doubled in the past 65 years. Last year, the American Cancer Society released a report stating that "in 2012, about 577,190 Americans are expected to die of cancer, more than 1,500 people a day. Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the US, exceeded only by heart disease, accounting for nearly 1 of every 4 deaths. — Ed.]

But within the lifetime of men living today the devastation will slacken. In act, if all the tools and techniques known today could be put into universal use overnight, one of every two victims could now be fully cured. Already these methods save one in three.

The facts about cancer are tangled in superstition and rumor. False news of miracle cures are always on the wind. As victims lose faith in medical help, as many as a fourth of the gravely ill fall prey to deluded or dishonest quacks.

Some of the photos in this gallery, meanwhile, will no doubt surprise and even shock contemporary readers. Prisoners injected with cancerous cells in order to test patient’s resistance to some cancers after exposure? Obviously, testing (of drugs, surgeries, exposure to pathogens, etc.) on both animals and on humans has always been a central component of the practice of medicine. But rarely does one see as graphic a representation of the way such tests were conducted in the middle part of the last century as in some of the pictures in this gallery.

[MORE: See all of TIME.com's coverage of cancer.]

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Here, LIFE.com celebrates the at-once humble and remarkable bee by transporting our readers back six decades, to a bustling bee market in the Netherlands. At the annual bee market at Veenendaal — “the biggest in Europe,” according to LIFE (August 1956) — beekeepers and prospective buyers of bees go through the ancient motions seen at markets the world over, for countless centuries: purchasers considering the wares, haggling over prices, considering the wares again … and eventually, a sale, with (relatively) happy faces all around.

As for the striking first image in this gallery, LIFE explained that beekeeper Gerrit Norssleman “wore the hood to protect his face and eyes from the swarms, had the pipe because its smoke calmed the bees and kept them at a safe distance. His hands, tougher than the sensitive area of his face, were bare so he could handle his bees dexterously without crushing them.”

If only the most dire peril facing bees today was the not-so-dexterous hands of their keepers! Something worth remembering the next time you bite into a peach, a strawberry, an apple, a pear — anything that grows with the quiet, restless, diligent help of the irreplaceable bee.

What is it about one personality or persona that draws our attention? That rivets us? And, perhaps even more to the point — especially in light of the picture above — is charisma a quality or a trait that one either has or doesn’t have, or is it something that one radiates by virtue of attaining a certain level of notoriety or fame? Would we bother looking at a picture of someone shaving in a men’s room in 1965, his head wrapped in a towel, if it wasn’t a picture of Frank Sinatra shaving in a men’s room in 1965, his head wrapped in a towel?

LIFE photographer John Dominis spent weeks with Sinatra in 1965 — the year the singer turned 50 — emerging with one of the most revealing photographic records of any major performer’s private world ever captured on film. From rehearsals in smoke-filled recording studios to Vegas nightclub performances to golf in the Nevada sun to playing with his dog Ringo in his home office to late-night hijinks with his drinking buddies, the Sinatra in Dominis’s remarkable photos is at-once far more approachable than the near-mythic bad boy of legend, and more Olympian in the way he dominates every scene. In large gatherings and small, in hotel suites and in sports arenas, virtually every frame Dominis shot makes it clear that, when Sinatra was around, no one else mattered.

[See the gallery, "LIFE With Sinatra: Portraits of ‘The Voice’ in 1965."]

Call it what you like — charisma, magnetism, star quality — there’s little question that by the time 1965 rolled around, Sinatra had “it,” and “it” made his every move, every gesture, no matter how commonplace or trivial, somehow significant. Or, if not significant, at least suggestive of something more. Power, perhaps.

[Buy the LIFE book, The Rat Pack: The Original Bad Boys.]

Ultimately, though, what makes a simple picture of Frank Sinatra shaving so weirdly engaging — especially when he’s obviously unconcerned with looking cool, or tough, or hip — is that such a picture feels so unexpected, so contrary to the way that, for the longest time, celebrities allowed themselves to be portrayed. Today, of course, when so many pop-culture creatures feel compelled to post, share and tweet every sordid or pointless experience (“Had another hangnail today!”) and every ill-formed thought in their heads, a picture of a half-naked singer peering in the mirror as he shaves would hardly raise any eyebrows.

Seeing a bona fide musical colossus unselfconsciously scraping away at his stubble, on the other hand, is so unusual that it somehow doesn’t even register as mildly intrusive. Instead, Dominis’s photograph is notable, all these years later, precisely because Sinatra is so supremely oblivious to our gaze. It’s not that we, the viewers, don’t matter; it’s just that, having done it all and seen it all in his long, prodigious career, the Chairman of the Board  has nothing left to prove.

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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Many of Israel’s neighbors, meanwhile, as well as more than a score of other countries around the world, from Afghanistan and Algeria to North Korea, Somalia, Yemen and beyond, have never officially recognized Israel, while others that shared diplomatic relations have, at one time or another, suspended or broken ties completely over the years.

Thus, in the seven decades since its birth on May 14, 1948, Israel — a country roughly the size of New Hampshire — has arguably played a more salient (and divisive) role in international geopolitics than any other non-superpower on the planet. Surrounded by enemies, today and at the hour of its creation, Israel remains what it has to some degree always been — a kind of Rorschach state that assumes myriad shapes for myriad observers: aggressor, defender, usurper, bastion, homeland.

For example, far from being universally celebrated, the period when Israel won its independence — i.e., the era of civil war and of the war against neighboring Arab states after May 14, 1948 — is commemorated by Palestinians as Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” And no wonder, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes during, and long after, those wars of the late ’40s. In recent years, the contentious (to put it mildly) issue of Israeli settlements and continued Palestinian displacement on the West Bank has added fuel to what has always been a dangerous, smoldering fire.

In other words, for an awful lot of people around the Mideast and around the world, the intractable “Palestinian problem” might be better characterized as “the Israeli problem.”

In light of this fraught legacy — and the nature of the enmities that have, in large part, come to define the region — long-time Middle East watchers can perhaps be forgiven a certain pessimism when discussing the prospects for a lasting peace from the eastern Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea.

[MORE: See all of TIME.com's coverage of Israel.]

Here, however, through a series of pictures — most of which never ran in LIFE — by Frank Scherschel, LIFE.com looks back not at the Mideast’s thorny, enduring troubles, but at the immediate aftermath of Israel’s independence. A conflict photographer who made some of the most devastating images to emerge from the Second World War, Scherschel brought to his coverage of Israel’s birth a correspondent’s cool, clear eye, and a storyteller’s ability to find the smaller, quieter narratives amid the ruin and chaos of a war-battered landscape.

For its part, in an article published just weeks after Israel’s official independence — an article that featured some of the photos in this gallery — LIFE magazine acknowledged the ancient hopes of the Israelis at the dawn of their new nation, while presciently noting that nothing, nothing at all, was ever likely to come easy to the fledgling, embattled state:

In the deepening dusk on May 14, 1948 — which to them was the 24th day of the month of Iyar in the 5,708th year after creation — the Jews of Palestine gathered n their cities and villages to celebrate the most fateful moment in their history. The British mandate still had eight years to run, but already the last high commissioner, Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham, had retired to the cruiser Eurylas in Haifa harbor. There he sat watching the night creep across he eastern Mediterranean and the twilight envelop yet another fragment of old empire. He was too far offshore to hear the Jews chanting their ancient “Hatikvah” (Song of Hope), but he well knew the words: We have not forgotten, nor shall we forget, our solemn promise. …

In the all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ended nearly 2,000 years of Jewish longing for a homeland with a great blow of his fist upon the speakers’ table. “The name of our sate shall be Israel,” he intoned, and a new nation was born.

Encouragement for the new state was not long in coming. Neither was trouble. Both the U.S. and Russia promptly recognized Israel and thus gave stature to the provisional government. When Dr. Chaim Weizmann was named first president — Weizmann at the time was in New York rallying support for his nation — he was invited to Washington for a 21-gun welcome.

But as these diplomatic bouquets were tossed, the embittered Arabs threw shells and bombs. From the ring of Arab states around Palestine the long-threatened attack had begun. King Abdullah of [the British protectorate of] Trans-Jordan sent his Arab Legion against Jerusalem and by week’s end had the Jewish defenders compressed into an ever-narrowing sector within the old walled city. Egypt’s planes repeatedly bombed Tel Aviv. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia pitched in — for whatever their scattered efforts might be worth. Israel was born indeed, but the Jews would need of the Shield of David to keep their nation alive.

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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