Page 116 – LIFE

The Apollo 1 Launchpad Fire: Remembering Grissom, White and Chaffee

January 18, 2020January 26, 2014 by

Men and women have been rocketing into space from the Earth’s surface for the past half-century—long enough that much of the general public now views space missions as relatively safe, rote endeavors.

But the business of space exploration is not, and has never been, safe. Here, LIFE.com recalls one of the worst disasters in NASA’s history—and its first public tragedy—when astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire inside their command module on a Cape Canaveral launchpad on Jan. 27, 1967. As TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger (the author of Apollo 13) once wrote, when commemorating the three astronauts:

Test pilots can sense straightaway if they’re working with a good vehicle or a bad one, and the Apollo 1 crew . . . knew almost immediately that they’d been assigned to a stinker. By late 1966, the last of the sturdy, two-man Gemini spacecraft had flown, and NASA was rolling out the three-man Apollo ships that would, at last, carry men to the moon. The spacecraft were sweet-looking machines, but in test-runs on the pad, they were a mess. The electrical system fritzed, the communications died, repairs and upgrades were late in coming. . . . Most worrisome, however, was NASA’s insistence on continuing to use 100% pure oxygen in its atmospheric systems an explosively flammable gas that had worked fine so far in the Mercury and Gemini ships but that could burn like gasoline in the presence of so much as an errant spark . . . Early one Friday evening, when the Apollo 1 astronauts were locked down in the spacecraft for a practice session out on the pad, just such a spark got loose from a frayed wire next to Grissom’s seat. In less than a minute, all three men were dead. For a while, it seemed, the Apollo program would perish too.

The program, of course, survived, and less than three years after the 1967 launchpad fire, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew Apollo 11 to the moon and back—leaving human footprints on the lunar surface—in what some consider the signature triumph of the 20th century.

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

American astronauts Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom in the Apollo Mission Simulator, a replica of the capsule in which they died.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Readying for Apollo I tests, Cape Canaveral, Fla., 1966.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo I astronauts (left to right) Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, Fla.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo 1 astronauts (left to right) Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, photographed the week before the fatal fire at Pad 34, from which their mission was to have launched in February 1967.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo 1 astronauts Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, 1967.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo 1 astronauts (front to back) Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, Cape Kennedy, Fla.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roger Chaffee with his wife Martha and their children, Sheryl and Stephen, in their Houston home, 1965.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Ed White leapt off a truck before an attentive audience of his fellow astronauts during a training exercise, 1963.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a husband-and-wife appearance before the press, Pat and Ed White (far left) and Pat and Jim McDivitt shared delight with the news that President Johnson had promoted the astronauts after the flight of Gemini 4 in 1965.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

NASA astronaut Ed White and his wife Pat at home.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

During a family work-out on the horizontal bar, Bonnie Lynn and Eddie White competed against their father, astronaut Ed White.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Ed White and family, Houston.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Gus Grissom in his space suit.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gus Grissom often found relief from the pressures of being an astronaut simply by going fishing. He cast for sea bass near Cape Kennedy.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Gus Grissom with his sons.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Home a hero after his successful 1965 mission in Gemini 3, [Gus Grissom] greeted his parents who came from Mitchell, Ind. for the flight.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gus Grissom at home with his son.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gus Grissom with his wife Betty and their sons Scott and Mark.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In seclusion at a private home high in the Hollywood Hills, the prime crews for the first and second Apollo flights spent two days earlier this winter in an intensive but informal review of flight plans. Grouped around the table were Gus Grissom (far left), Ed White, Roger Chaffee (back showing), Rusty Schweickart (above), Jim McDivitt and Dave Scott (far right).

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, February 3, 1967

LIFE magazine, February 3, 1967.

The Leopard and the Baboon: Anatomy of a Classic (Staged) Photo

August 11, 2021January 22, 2014 by

A staff photographer for LIFE for more than 20 years, the late John Dominis photographed . . . well, everything, and he made some of the most memorable pictures to ever grace the pages of LIFE. Among his most famous shots, in a career filled with phenomenal work, is a hair-raising portrait of a leopard and a baboon, seen mere moments before the huge cat kills its terrified prey. It’s an explosive, unsettling and mesmerizing picture. And it was staged.

Or, more accurately, it was not quite the utterly impromptu scene encountered, fortuitously and unexpectedly that one might expect to find in a classic photograph, especially from a photojournalist of Dominis’ rightly celebrated bona fides. Instead, the picture was set up, in accordance with the practices of the time.

Another LIFE great, the photographer John Loengard, interviewed Dominis in October 1993, and quoted him discussing this very picture in the book, Life Photographers: What They Saw (Bulfinch Press, 1998):

I had photographed some animals before [Dominis noted], though I certainly wasn’t a cat expert. Pat Hunt, the head of LIFE’s Nature department, lined up a hunter in Botswana who was a hunter for zoos. He had caught a leopard, and he put the leopard in the back of the truck, and we went out into the desert. He would release the leopard, and most of the time the leopard would chase the baboons and they would run off and climb trees. I had photographed all this. But for some reason one baboon didn’t get off. It turned and faced the leopard, and the leopard killed it. We didn’t know that this was going to happen. I just turned on the camera motor, and I got this terrific shot of this confrontation.

What’s your feeling about injecting yourself into the natural order of things to get pictures?

There was a different feeling about that in the 1960s. We were always setting up pictures of some sort . . . But now there are many, many more competent photographers doing this stuff over long periods of time four or five years if a scientist is on a big study. They’re getting good stuff without helping the picture. But no one was working that way then. Scientists couldn’t handle the crude cameras that we had well enough to get good stuff.

I felt that my job was to get the pictures. I learned how to bait animals and do things from the experts in Africa. We shot a gazelle and put it in a tree and waited for a cat to come. I didn’t feel bad about it at all. It sounds terrible now, I know, and maybe my attitude would be different now. But it wasn’t then, and I don’t know what more to say about it. I know, I’ve been criticized a lot. But to me, I had to do what I did.

Does the fact that this extraordinary image is not, in today’s terms, a purely naturalistic feat of photojournalism somehow detract from its power? Is the leopard’s implacable strength any less formidable, or its lethal grace any less awe-inspiring? Is the photograph itself, technically and aesthetically, any less impressive when we learn that the circumstances under which it was made were even in part manufactured?

We don’t have the answers to these questions. But we feel they’re worth asking. We also take John Dominis’ word for it when he says that he made the picture in good faith, and not with the intention to somehow deceive, or put one over on the viewer. In the end, the harrowing, beautiful photograph he made has earned its longevity.

Leopard and Baboon, 1966

John Dominis TIme & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Legendary Essay: Albert Schweitzer in Africa

January 30, 2022January 22, 2014 by

Albert Schweitzer—the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, theologian, musician and “medical missionary” who spent decades in West Africa—was one of the most recognized figures of the 20th century. To some, he was a well-meaning but ultimately patronizing European bent on enlightening the “Dark Continent” of Africa; to others he was a man whose tireless work with men, women and children suffering from leprosy, malaria, elephantiasis, whooping cough, venereal diseases and countless other vile illnesses elevated him to something close to sainthood.

The reality of Schweitzer’s life and work, meanwhile, was both more complicated and more deeply fascinating than either of those rather simplistic estimations of the man.

In November 1954, LIFE magazine published a feature story on Schweitzer, “A Man of Mercy,” with photographs made by the great W. Eugene Smith. Here, LIFE.com republishes Smith’s photos of Schweitzer, as a reminder of the man’s stature and a celebration of one photographer’s singular vision.

In that issue, LIFE wrote:

“No one knows me,” Albert Schweitzer has sad, “who has not known me in Africa.” In Norway last week, where he had come to acknowledge a Nobel Peace Prize, crowds jammed streets to cheer a great figure of our time. As they cheered they were convinced they knew him well: he is the humanitarian, warm and saintlike. In full manhood he had turned away from brilliant success as a preacher, writer and musician to bury himself as a missionary doctor on Africa.

All this was truth but admirers who have followed Dr. Schweitzer to French Equatorial Africa [specifically, Gabon Ed.] know a different man. There, amid primitive conditions, Europe’s saint is forced to become a remote, driving man who rules his hospital with patriarchal authority. For those seeking the gentle philosopher of the legend, he has a brief answer: “We are too busy fighting pain.” Then he turns back to the suffering and the work that make up the African world of Albert Schweitzer.”

The story behind the most enduring image of the entire photo essay in LIFE, meanwhile, illustrates something quite elemental not about Schweitzer, but (characteristically) about the prickly, occasionally bombastic master photographer who made the picture, W. Eugene Smith. The photograph—the first in this gallery—is beautiful, and telling: here is Dr. Schweitzer, deep inside Africa, overseeing the building of a hospital. It is a portrait that captures so many aspects of the man in one frame: his dedication, the power of his personality, his magnanimity, his “otherness” and at the very same time the rightness of his presence in a land thousands of miles from his birth.

There’s really only one problem with this portrait: it’s not true. Or rather, what truth it contains only survives to this day because Smith drastically manipulated the photograph, combining elements from two separate negatives in order to impart in one picture the narrative he was dead-set on conveying. The silhouetted saw handle and human hand in the lower right of the frame were not part of the larger picture when Smith made it; instead, he combined elements of two distinct images to create a third, now-classic shot of a man quite literally on a mission. (One story says the saw and the hand were added to cover a blurred patch on the larger picture; others who know Smith’s work argue that he simply wished to add a new graphic element and another layer of quiet drama to the whole.)

That this sort of manipulation contravened LIFE’s own photojournalistic guidelines mattered little then—Smith, after all, developed and printed his own work, refusing to allow others to handle his film, his negatives, anything at all—and, in all honesty, it matters even less now. The fact of the matter is, by the time LIFE sent him to Africa to chronicle Schweitzer’s work and his world, Smith was already a legend. He had made some of the most memorable photographs to emerge from World War II (and been wounded while in the Pacific). He had pioneered the photo essay form for LIFE with landmark work like “Country Doctor” (1948) and “Nurse Midwife” (1951). He was prickly, difficult, indefatigable and routinely produced work that most photographers would give their right eye to have made.

The sort of tinkering Smith engaged in with that one, iconic Schweitzer photograph might be frowned upon today. Any contemporary photojournalist who admitted to such behavior would probably be excoriated by his or her peers, as well as by the general public.

W. Eugene Smith, on the other hand, has largely escaped such censure for one reason, and one reason only: he was W. Eugene Smith, and for better or worse, when it comes to aesthetics and even, to some extent, when it comes to ethics genius has always played by, and been judged by, a different set of rules than those that govern the rest of us.

Albert Schweitzer supervised the building of a hospital in Gabon, West Africa, 1954.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A new mother was carried across a hospital village’s street from the delivery room to a ward. Her baby, after being washed and clothed, would be cared for at the mother’s bed.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A big-eyed baby was fed in the hospital nursery. Children whose parents were unable to care for them were kept as long as three years before being turned over to tribal relatives.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The doctor at work examined the post-operative patients on the upper floor of the Schweitzer-designed structure. The lower section, behind the waiting patients, was used for storage and emergency rooms.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Intent on his job, one of Dr. Schweitzer’s workers leaned his weight against a crowbar as men tried to roll a great rock out of the main street of the new village for lepers.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

His umbrella, carried to work in the wet season, was stuck in the sand when Schweitzer went to another job.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

His shoes for muddy rainy season weather were nearly 30 years old.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A portable railroad, lent by a nearby plantation owner, was set down in the main street of the leper village for a major project in earth moving.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Whites and blacks worked together pushing flatcars. The doctor’s ire rose when happy-go-lucky workers used carts as roller coasters.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lepers in line opened mouths for medicine. One received pills, another water to wash the pills down.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Danish nurse Erna Spohrhannssen watched an African aid give sulphone derivatives for leprosy.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Nurse Spohrhanssen treated sores on leper’s feet.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dying of old age, Eugenia Mwanyeno sat under heavy mosquito netting on a bed in the leper hospital, swaying back and forth with eyes closed, holding tight to last moments of life.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The mourners, daughter of Eugenia, Mama Helene (left), and granddaughter, Henrietta Yeno, were in despair by her bedside. Her granddaughter broke into sobbing chant when the coffin lid was closed; for the rest, mourners guarded grief in silence.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The funeral was attended by Dr. Schweitzer, walking hands clasped behind back, to the graveyard. Though he seldom went to funerals, he made this an exception because Eugenia had long been a familiar figure in the life of the settlement.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A branch of palm leaves to cover the coffin of Eugenia rested on the ground beside the grave-digging tools. Africans often wrap their dead in palm leaves.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A nurse stood at the side of the grave, holding her floral tribute.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frugal habits marked Schweitzer’s life. He opened up used envelopes for manuscript paper and he punctured binding holes in them with old nails.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The fruit of his work hung on nails in Schweitzer’s study, out of reach of any wandering animals. He once lost half a chapter to a hungry antelope.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Albert Schweitzer in Africa, 1954.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Goats on the rooftops clattered about and often butted and wrestled each other for the best positions on the ridges. Schweitzer had imported a basic herd from Europe years earlier, and its playful descendants were allowed to run freely through the village streets and orchard.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

David Douglas Duncan and the Korean War: A Defining Photo

June 29, 2022January 22, 2014 by

Missouri native David Douglas Duncan, a native of Kansas City, is known, primarily, as the signature photographer of the Korean War. In the pages of LIFE magazine and elsewhere, his pictures brought the brutality home to countless Americans who understandably, with memories of the just-finished World War II still fresh in their minds, might have wanted nothing more than to blot out the carnage being inflicted and endured in their name half a world away.

Duncan’s photographs from Korea conveyed a searing, inconvenient truth: namely, that war is still hell, and men, women and children still die horrible deaths, even when the war in question is labeled a “police action.” But Duncan knew war long before he made his harrowing images at Chosin Reservoir and in the rubble-strewn streets of downtown Seoul. He was there, too, in the Second World War, covering battles and suffering shrapnel wounds in the Pacific as a combat photographer with the Marine Corps. He was in Vietnam, a decade and a half after Korea, at Con Thien and Khe San.

The photograph that accompanies this story, made in Korea in 1950, is not only one of the greatest photos made during that “forgotten war,” but is one of the finest war pictures ever made by anyone, in any conflict. In his classic 1951 book, This Is War!, Duncan wrote of the stunned, resolute Marine captain trying to steady himself after an attack by North Korean troops, as ammunition ran dangerously low and reinforcements were nowhere in sight: “Ike Fenton, drenched and with the rain running in little droplets from his bearded chin, got the news. His tattered Baker Company Marines had only those few rounds in their belts remaining. If the Reds were to launch one more attack they would have to be stopped with bayonets and rifle butts.

In its straightforward, unblinking portrayal of the futility, madness, endurance and, at times, the simple nobility one witnesses in the midst of a firefight or a protracted, bloody campaign, Duncan’s picture of Capt. Ike Fenton has rarely been equaled, and never surpassed. Like so many of Duncan’s pictures from Korea, it is indelible.

Talking to Duncan about his Korea pictures, meanwhile, was bracing not merely for the sharpness of the man’s memories so many years later, but for the unexpected and unsolicited declarations of a craftsman congenitally prone to speaking his mind.

“The thing that comes back to me right away, right now, when looking at these pictures again,” Duncan told LIFE.com, “is that at no time did any Marine feel he had to look around to see what the South Koreans were doing behind him [during that war]. The Marines in Korea never feared ‘friendly fire’ or artillery coming from the South Koreans from their allies like they sometimes did later in Vietnam, fighting with the South Vietnamese. The Koreans could be trusted.”

In the years after Korea, Duncan photographed other conflicts all over the globe, but also proved himself a sensitive portraitist and a master of place. He published books on subjects ranging from his great friend, Pablo Picasso, to the Kremlin and the Middle East (The World of Allah, 1983). He published books on the sunflowers of France, Cartier-Bresson and an incredibly moving 100-page work on his beloved German Shepherd, Thor—a creature possessed of what Duncan characterizes as an “Olympian serenity.”

In 2003, he published his monumental and, at the same time, somehow intimate autobiography-in-images, Photo Nomad, featuring pictures and recollections from across seven decades. Every one of his many books is worth seeking out; but for anyone interested in photojournalism in the 20th century, Photo Nomad is indispensable.

Marine Capt. Francis “Ike” Fenton pondered his fate and the fate of his men after being told that his company was nearly out of ammunition, Korea, 1950.

David Douglas Duncan

Anne Frank’s Friends: Photos of the Girls Who Lived

January 18, 2020January 22, 2014 by

The narrative elements that form the framework of Anne’s Diary of a Young Girl are as prosaic and as grotesque as those that animate the darkest fairy tales.

A young girl, wise and compassionate, and her family go into hiding in Amsterdam during the Second World War, desperate to evade the Nazis who occupy their adopted country; the girl and those in hiding with her are eventually betrayed (by a person or persons still, to this day, unknown) and are sent to concentration camps; most of her former companions die—or rather, are murdered by Nazis and their willing proxies along with millions of other Jews and “undesirables” in the coming years; Anne Frank herself is only 15 years old when she dies at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, one month before Allied troops liberate the camp.

These and other wrenching elements of Anne’s tale, imparted in the clear, unsentimental prose of her famous diary, are now part of the shared memory of disparate cultures all over the world.

Here, LIFE commemorates Anne’s unconquerable spirit and bears witness to the suffering unleashed by the Third Reich through a story that began with one seemingly incongruous photograph: a picture of children playing in a sandbox in Amsterdam in 1937.

LIFE magazine set the scene, and explained the significance of the sandbox photograph, in its October 12, 1959, issue:

The snapshot . . . adds a fascinating footnote to the Anne Frank legend. LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer found it when he was thumbing through a family album in the home of Maryland friends. “One familiar face caught my eye,” he recalls, “and I realized it was Anne Frank.”

His hostess, Mrs. Barbara Rodbell, who is in the snapshot, told him it had been taken by her mother in Amsterdam in 1937. She had heard from most of the other girls since the war and, with her help, Schutzer set out to track them down. One had died, like Anne, in a concentration camp—Barbara’s own sister, Susanne. On a 21,000-mile journey, Schutzer found the three others and recorded their lives 22 years after the snapshot.

Each of the women is now happily married and raising children. Meanwhile their childhood friend’s fame continues to grow. Her “Diary” has now sold 3.5 million copies. . . . [Note: Today that number has grown to more than 30 million copies. Ed.] Mrs. Rodbell, living now in contented obscurity, feels that, for most of the girls in the snapshot at least, a remark from one of Anne’s last entries has come true: “I think that it will all come out all right, this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

LIFE.com offers these photographs—many of which never ran in LIFE magazine—made by Paul Schutzer during his deeply personal trek into the past.

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

Left to right: Hanneli Goslar (a.k.a., “Lies Goosens” in early editions of the Diary), Anne Frank, Dolly Citroen, Hannah Toby, Barbara Ledermann and Susanne Ledermann (standing), Amsterdam, 1937.

Anne Frank Fonds/Anne Frank House via Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, she escaped from the Nazis in the Netherlands, lived with the underground, and met the man she would marry, Martin Rodbell, in the U.S. in 1947. Her parents and her sister, Susanne, died at Auschwitz.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, now Mrs. Martin Rodbell, in Maryland, 1958.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, now Mrs. Martin Rodbell, in Maryland, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, now Mrs. Martin Rodbell, with her family in Maryland, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, now Mrs. Martin Rodbell, 1959. “When she and her husband went to the Anne Frank movie,” LIFE wrote, “she stood debating whether to go in. Finally she decided not to. ‘I’ve seen too much human suffering already,’ she said.”

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hannah, whose husband, Ronald Marsh, was a California law student. The former Hannah Toby, she was fourth from the left in the sandbox picture; it was in her back yard that the group picture was taken.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hannah Marsh and family, Los Angeles, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hannah Marsh and child, Los Angeles, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The girl who was third from left in the sandbox photo, then Dolly Citroen, was shown with her husband, Shmuel Shoshan, and three of their four kids, on a picnic outside Jerusalem.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Dolly Citroen, now married to Shmuel Shoshan, in Israel, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Dolly Citroen with one of her four children, Israel, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Dolly Citroen with her family, Israel, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hanneli Goslar (a.k.a., “Lies Goosens” in early editions of the Diary) was Anne’s closest friend in Amsterdam. Also taken by the Nazis, she met her old playmate at Bergen-Belsen in 1945, not long before Anne died. “She was in rags,” Hanneli told LIFE. “I saw her emaciated face in the darkness.”

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Hanneli Goslar, now married to Dr. Walter Pinchas, in Jerusalem with her family, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hanneli and Dolly, childhood friends of Anne Frank, with their children in Jerusalem, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE at Daytona: Motorcycle Madness on the Florida Sands

August 23, 2021January 21, 2014 by

For years, from its inception in 1937 until the early ’60s, the prestigious Daytona 200 motorcycle race wasn’t merely run at Daytona Beach. Along with other high-speed, high-risk clashes, the 200 was run on Daytona Beach.

In 1948, LIFE magazine covered the races, both amateur and pro, at Daytona (the Road Course opened in 1936) and reported, in its April 19 issue, that “for four days last month the resort city of Daytona Beach could hardly have been noisier or in more danger if it had been under bombardment.”

Here, seven decades later, LIFE.com opens a window on that long, loud weekend that thrilled racing fans; slightly scandalized one very popular weekly magazine’s editors; and, as if proof was needed that the young sport was still in the hands of rebels and scofflaws, saw two people killed and 30 more injured in the midst of all the high-octane fun.

The 1948 event, which attracted “375 helmeted daredevils and plenty of non-racing hell-raisers,” was marred not only by deaths and injuries but, as LIFE duly noted, by classic knuckleheadism. “Because the antics of an unruly minority reflect on the dignity of motorcycling,” the magazine observed, “the American Motorcycle Association may hire special police at future races. One duty will be to restrain sophomoric cyclists who amused themselves this year by tossing firecrackers into the crowd.”

Ultimately, as LIFE tersely reported, “155 motorcycles started, only 45 finished. Winning rider, Floyd Emde, averaged 84 mph, got $2,000.” What LIFE failed to mention is that Emde (who was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998) won by the sliver-thin margin of 12 seconds; 1948 was the first time a rider led the race from flag to flag; and it was the last time an Indian Motorcycle won the 200.