In 1949 LIFE staff photographer Frank Scherschel undertook a photo essay on beer drinkers. The essay never ran in the magazine, and without any accompanying story, it is difficult to say why he, ah, poured himself so eagerly into this topic.
The explanation is likely the obvious one. Beer, which humans have been drinking since at least 5000 B.C. and probably longer, is a sudsy bedrock of American culture. It is equally craved by the carefree college student on spring break and the laborer looking for release after a shift. In 2019 the U.S. distributed about 2.8 billion cases. That’s a lot of beer, for better or worse. Homer Simpson summed up the conundrum of America’s love affair with drinking when he hoisted a frosty mug of beer and hailed alcohol as “The cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems.”
Scherschel’s essay, capturing beer drinkers in largely festive settings, mostly feels like a celebration. He appears to have done most or all of his shooting in and around Milwaukee, the beer capital of America. He took many shots in what appears to have been a joyous company picnic for auto manufacturing employees, complete with dancing and live music and beer being quaffed from large metal containers. Other images in Scherschel’s essay include a bride and groom mid-toast, a Miller High life vendor at a baseball game (likely the minor league team which called itself the Milwaukee Brewers, which played before the big-league team arrived in town). Scherschel’s most meta image is of beer company employees enjoying a beer break.
Scherschel also naturally ventured into a bar. In shooting the patrons there, he captured moments both communal and solitary. We don’t know who these people are and can only guess at their situations. But the bar Scherschel visited is a place where Homer Simpson would fit right in.
In the early part of the 20th century, Ontario developed an innovative approach for bringing education to the children of the miners and trappers who worked in its remote northern regions. Train cars were converted to school houses and hauled from community to community, stopping for a week at a time to deliver a dose of eduction, before moving onto the next stop on its circuit. The school train would go back and forth, hitting each stop five or six times in a school year. The “schools on wheels,” as they were called—there were seven of them—operated from 1926 to 1967.
One interesting proviso in this set-up: the teacher and his family lived on the rail car for the entire school year.
In 1954 LIFE photographer Cornell Capa documented life and learning on one of these trains as it stopped in the remote mining community of Thor Lake. The star of LIFE’s story was Fred Sloman, who taught on his school on wheels for 39 years, and who also lived on the rail car with his wife and five children. The front half of the car was a classroom, and for years the 28-foot-long back section served as living quarters for seven people. The rail car was nine feet wide and had no running water.
The cramped conditions might sound like an awful way to live for the teacher and his family, but it was actually pretty great, according to Fredda Sloman, the daughter of Fred, who appeared in the LIFE story as a fifteen-year-old. Now 83, she speaks of those years as if they were a kind of paradise.
Fredda—who goes by Toby, a nickname she picked up in college—now lives in Clinton, Ontario, where the Slomans would spend their summers when school was out. Her home is on the old family property, and she also lives not far from the old rail car in which she spent most of her youth. The town of Clinton rescued the car from the scrap heap and turned into a museum, placed it in Sloman Park, which is named for her father.
Toby says that spending her youth living in such close quarters, with five kids stacked in bunk beds (though the oldest three had moved on when LIFE visited) and her parents on a fold-out sofa, seemed normal, because that was all she knew. So did the ritual of heading out to the nearest river the moment they arrived in a new town to fetch water and haul it back home. Or eating off a dining room table that was raised and lowered from its place in the wall like a Murphy bed.
“That was my life, it didn’t seem strange or odd to me,” she says now.
For her, the best part for growing up in a School on Wheels was the afternoons. When the school day was done, the other students would rush home to do their chores, so Toby would go off on her own and roam the wilderness of the Canadian north. A shy girl, she loved spending her free hours wandering in the bush, studying animal tracks in winter and collecting wildflowers when the weather was warm.
“It was a perfect childhood,” she says, adding the caveat: “Though I don’t know any other kid that would have thought it was the perfect childhood.”
The visit by Cornell Capa ended up changing the course of Toby’s life. She had minimal interaction with the LIFE photographer, which she chalks up to her shyness and also to the conventions of the era, which dictated that children did not participate in adult conversations. But she noticed Capa’s thoroughness and invention, and it gave her an idea of what she wanted to do with her life. Through much of her youth she had hoped to be a veterinarian, until she learned that she wouldn’t have been eligible for a spot in veterinary school in Canada because she hadn’t grown up on a farm or ranch. Then Capa came along to give her direction by example. When she was done with high school, she attended Ryerson Institute of Technology (now known as Ryerson University) in Toronto to study photography. After graduation she worked for 20 years as a photographer and reporter at community newspapers in Canada.
She imagines Capa would have been stunned to learn he had such an influence on the shy girl on the train, but says “for as long as I worked as a professional photographer, whenever I took a photo I liked, I would say `Thank you, Cornell.”
The other children of Fred and Cela Sloman had varied and interesting careers. One traveled the globe as a professional nanny, another worked as a statistician. Toby’s twin brother Bill, after serving in the Army, became a miner, trucker, installer of siding and, as his 2006 obituary noted, a fan of casual clothing. Her sister Elizabeth became a pediatrician and her achievements gained her a public profile. After working for a stint in Kenya with her husband, a fellow pediatrician, she helped lead the campaign against Nestle for promoting infant formula over breastfeeding, and in 1981 she became the first female president of the Medical Council of Canada.
Toby is now working on a memoir of her youth with her friend and author Bonnie Sitter. Having raised three sons herself, Toby is amazed at how her mother was able to care for five children in the back of a train car, and especially a set of twins. “That was before the days of Pampers,” Toby says. “Can you imagine raising twin babies without running water?”
Her father, she says, was a generous and warm-hearted man who had a gift for connecting with students. The school had fewer than a dozen students per stop, and he would only see them once every five weeks as the train traveled its circuit. Toby says that her father aimed for a “five-minute miracle.” He would spend five minutes with a child, find out what they were interested in, and then set them to learning about that. “He had the magic touch,” says Toby.
Though it wasn’t part of the job, her father would also teach the students’ parents, many of whom were Italian immigrants who had come to Canada to escape their war-torn country and wanted to learn English.
Toby says her favorite photo in the LIFE collection was one of her father projecting a film inside the train, because it recalls a story which demonstrates how dedicated he was to the communities he served.
Many of the Italian immigrant workers in northern Ontario were isolated and homesick. So Fred Sloman wrote to Kodak in 1930, explaining the plight of these workers, and asked if someone from the company could possibly make films of these workers’ hometowns—small villages of Prossedi, Supino and Pisterzo, located south of Rome. Sloman also provided Kodak with some family names. Kodak happened to have an employee passing through that area of Italy and shot movies for Sloman, in some cases finding actual relatives of the homesick Ontario workers. In the movies these relatives back home in Italy looked in the camera and raised glasses of wine to toast their family members in Canada. The immigrant workers wept as Sloman projected the footage on the inside of his rail car.
With moments like that, it’s easy to understand how a nine-foot-wide train parked in the icy north could feel like a place of enlightenment.
Fred Sloman instructed students in a railcar schoolhouse in rural Ontario, 1954.
The Slomans and local parents played Crokinole, a tabletop variation of shuffleboard in which the object is to knock the opponents’ checkers out of a circle, 1954.
The Slomans’ dining table would be pulled down for meals and then folded into the wall at night so the Slomans could open their foldout sofa for sleeping.
Fifteen-year-old Fredda Sloman, a k a Toby, fed her pet dog and pet skunk; she and her brother had rescued the skunk from the wild as a baby and had it de-scented.
What happens during Paris fashion week definitely does not stay in Paris. When designers present their new fashions to retailers and taste-makers, the hope is that what happens there will reshape closets around the world.
The event was influential enough that LIFE sent three photographers to Paris for the 1951 edition and give readers a first look at what might be headed their way. Until the models hit the runways, no one really knew what the designers had been planning. “A new hemline was as carefully guarded in Paris as a barrel of plutonium in the U.S,” LIFE wrote in its cover story for the March 5, 1951 issue.
Some years, the new looks were so different that they pushed last year’s frocks to the back of the closet. The looks in 1951 were more of an evolution. “To the disappointment of an adventuresome few, but to the relief of most of the trade which did not want to cope with anything revolutionary, this showing would not, like the “new look” explosion of 1947, tend to make present wardrobes obsolete,” LIFE wrote. “The new trend, if anything, was conservative.”
The new designs may not have been radical, but they were popular. LIFE reported gangbuster sales, which may have been the real point, as the designers achieved the goal of broadening the type of stores that carried their clothes: “The stately houses, which once preferred to cater to exclusive stores and private clients, were taking increasing interest in the buyers for lower-priced stores.”
LIFE’s photographs, taken by aces Gordon Parks, Nina Leen and N.R. Farbman, capture the excitement of being there. Some pictures highlight the clothes, of course, but others show the frenzy of the business and media folks as they gathered for seven days that could change their world.
Vogue editor Bettina Ballard prepared models for a spring fashion shoot, Paris, February 1951
Photo by N R Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock
This gown was the big finish for a show by Paris newcomer Castillo of Lanvin.
These silly sunglasses featuring long blue eyelashes and small lenses were dreamed up by designer Schiaparelli, and brought a lighter note to the generally conservative spring showings in Paris, 1951.
During World War II, Miami Beach transformed from a tourist haven to military training ground. Tens of thousands of troops passed through South Florida to prepare for combat.
“America’s winter playground, home of the press agent and the bathing beauty, has gone to war,” LIFE reported in its December 18, 1942 issue. “…instead of tourists in gay sports clothes, young men of the U.S. Army Air Forces, dressed in drab khaki, drill on the green golf courses and live in hotels. For now Miami Beach is a vast army training center.”
The military was drawn to Miami for much the same reasons that vacationers have been for decades—they liked the climate and seaside location, as well as flat terrain. Within a year of the United States joining World War II, the army’s Air Forces (what it was called before the Air Force became a separate branch) had leased “almost all of the 332 resort hotels” in Miami Beach, according to LIFE.
As one history tells it, the transformation worked well, even if the effect was sometimes jarring: “The hotels,” a reporter wrote in 1943, “make good barracks. The baby pink and eggshell furniture is stored now. Three-decker army bunks jam the pastel-tinted rooms, dance floors, night clubs.”
LIFE’s photos, taken by Myron Davis and William C. Shrout, capture the juxtaposition between Miami’s picture-postcard surroundings and the seriousness of the Army’s mission. Soldiers cram into baseball stadium stands to take a course on chemical warfare. Future mess hall cooks learn their trade in resort kitchens. Palms trees sway in the background as soldiers are pushed through the exercises meant to toughen them up for combat.
The few pictures that might be mistaken for classic beach vacation photos are the ones of shirtless soldiers rushing into the water. In those shots, there is no hint of the hell they could be headed for, once they were done in Miami.
Army recruits exercised on a Miami Beach golf course in 1942; the buildings in the background were used as classrooms.
The photos in this collection of LIFE’s greatest concert photo covers a wide variety of performances. We have Leonard Bernstein at Lincoln Center and Minnie Pearl at the Grand Ole Opry. We have the Beatles making their U.S. debut and Marian Anderson at Carnegie Hall. We have The Doors rocking out at the Fillmore and Jack Benny cracking up the troops in Korea.
And that’s just for starters.
But look through these photos as a whole and you’ll get a sense of what makes a great concert photo. Sometimes it’s the expression of the performer, as evidenced by the photos of Frank Sinatra and Tina Turner. But often it’s the audience that makes the shot—whether it’s individual expression of glee, or the sheer multitude of human beings who have packed themselves into seats in the hopes of seeing something special. In photos as in life, the ‘hot crowd” can make all the difference.
The idea of an audience being central to the performance is amusingly winked at in one photograph in this collection, from an avant-garde concert in which the audiences watched 100 metronomes wind down to nothing. The spectators were the only living part of the show.
But the audience members are the true star of the most famous concert photos in the LIFE archives.
The Woodstock festival featured some all-time great performers—The Grateful Dead, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and more. But what made the concert an essential moment of the 1960s was the 400,000-plus people who swarmed the concert site in upstate New York. The images of those who gathered are what truly defined the moment.
Concerts like Woodstock are rare—”once in a generation” would be underselling it. In most shows, the performers are essential. But the audience can make the moment, or the photo.
Look at the picture of the Rudy Vallee nightclub show from 1949, in which the most prominent figure is not the singer but a woman in the foreground. She’s all dressed up and wearing a fancy hat, and a look of sheer delight. Of course it’s not Woodstock. But she’s the one who’s telling you: there’s something happening here.
Ray Charles at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1966.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Harry Belafonte performed at the Coconut Grove nightclub, 1957.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Two days after their U.S. TV debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the Beatles played for 8,000 fans at their first American concert, at the Coliseum in Washington, D.C., on February 11, 1964. Ticket price: $3.
Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Entertainer Jack Benny performed bits for troops stationed in Korea, 1951.
Here’s a fun piece of movie trivia: in the 1956 biblical epic The Ten Commandments, the role of baby Moses was played by Fraser Heston, the son of Charlton Heston, who starred as the adult Moses.
As Fraser tells it, director Cecil B. DeMille cast him before he was actually born.
“[DeMille] heard my mom was pregnant and said, ‘Well, if it’s a baby boy, he can play the part of Moses,’” Fraser told the The New York Post in 2020. “When I was born, the first telegram she got said, ‘Congratulations, he’s got the part. Love, C.B.’”
Baby Moses appears early in the film, when his mother sends him down the Nile in a basket, hoping to save him from an order by the Pharaoh to kill Hebrew newborns.
Fraser was three months old during the filming. He says that his introduction to the movie business was not without its perils.
“Obviously, my memory is a little sketchy,” he told the Post. “But I do remember my dad telling me that when they put me in the basket on the backlot of Paramount — the tank set is still there — the basket began to leak. The basket began to sink, and dad went to lift me out — and I was floating in four inches of water, perfectly happy. And the social worker who is by mandate on the set for all children grabbed me and said, “No, Mr. Heston, I’m the only one who can attend to this child during the filming.” He looked at her and said, with the voice he used on the pharaoh [Yul Brynner, in the film], “Give me that child!” And not surprisingly, she did. (laughs) When you get the voice of Moses — I used to call it the dark, gray voice — all he had to do was use that on us kids and we’d do anything he said.”
As an adult Fraser Heston worked in the movie business as a producer, director and writer. But his most lasting contribution to cinema remains, inevitably, his role in a film that has become an enduring tradition and whose airing on television is a sure sign of the holiday season.
“It’s the quintessential epic,” Fraser Heston said in a 2020 interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, promoting a Blu-ray reissue of the film. “When you think spectacle, you think C.B. DeMille. When you think epic, you think The Ten Commandments. It’s a great story, isn’t it?”
Charlton Heston with his son Fraser, playing the role of baby Moses, on the set of The Ten Commandments, 1955.
