Some call it a woodchuck. Others prefer the more evocative title, “whistle-pig.” But for most of us — and certainly for those who turn their gaze toward Gobbler’s Knob, Pa., in the first week of February each year — the squinty-eyed, sharp-toothed creature in the picture above is, and always will be, a groundhog.
With Groundhog Day upon us — when the most famous groundhog of them all, Punxsutawney Phil, emerges from his burrow and either sees his shadow, or doesn’t — we thought we’d take a moment to praise the often-maligned and largely misunderstood marmot. For example, far from the soft, doughy layabout of popular myth, the groundhog in the wild is an active animal (a single groundhog moves an average of 700 pounds of dirt when excavating a burrow); a fierce defender of its own territory; and a skilled tree-climber — when pursued by predators, at least.
Groundhogs also have a charming habit of whistling when alarmed — hence the whistle-pig moniker — and they really, really like to eat. The average groundhog will consume enough grass, grains, fruit and other non-meat foodstuffs that, if he or she was a 175-pound person, it would be the equivalent of eating a 15-pound salad. Every single day.
We could go on and on, extolling the virtues of the groundhog — and, admittedly, outlining the reasons why lots of people, especially farmers, can’t stand them — but it’s almost time for Phil to make his entrance, and we don’t want to miss it. This winter can’t end soon enough for us.
Happy Groundhog Day.
Groundhog
Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Much has changed about the Olympics since 1964. Only 38 countries participated back then, compared to 92 at the 2018 in South Korea. The country that was the big medal winner in the 1964 Games, the USSR, has long since been broken up. Snowboarding and other more modern sports that highlight today’s Games had yet to be added to the competition.
And yet — some elemental things about the Olympics remain the same. Here, in photos made by LIFE’s Ralph Crane, George Silk and Paul Schutzer, we see the same intensity in the athlete’s faces, the same striving for excellence, that we see every four years in both the summer and winter Olympiads. We see the same spirit of togetherness that seems to win out—however briefly—over the constant drumbeat of nationalism. In short, we see many of the same familiar, comforting scenes that greet us every time the Olympics, however modernized, roll around. And maybe that’s why, in the end, we like the Games so much: because in the midst of all the drama about who will win what event, and by what margin, so much about the Games remains the same.
A ski jumper soared at the 1964 Winter Olympics
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At the opening ceremonies for the Innsbruck Games, before 55,000 onlookers, athletes took the Olympic oath in the arena below the ski jump.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Opening ceremonies at the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Opening ceremonies at the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Austrian alpine skier Josl Rieder lit the Olympic flame during the opening ceremonies of the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A scene from the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A parking lot at the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Figure skaters at the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1964 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Happy fans and autograph-seekers at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.
Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Medal ceremony, 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
1964 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A team photo of American skiers at the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics, including medalists Jean Saubert (front row, center), Jimmie Heuga (front, far left) and Billy Kidd (front, far right).
In 1964, photographer Michael Rougier accompanied an expedition to the bottom of the world, where researchers planned to retrace the steps of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary (and ill-fated) World War I-era Antarctic expedition. By the time LIFE magazine published his pictures in May 1965, the focus of the story had narrowed considerably — namely, Rougier’s photos appeared in an article about American and Russian scientists studying the navigational prowess of Adélie penguins. Along the way, he made countless pictures of the charming creatures and their cousins —Emperor penguins, for example—in their brutal, gorgeous natural habitat. Not incidentally, he also almost lost his life.
Just another assignment for a photojournalist whose talent was matched only by his versatility.
Born in England in June 1925, Rougier shot for LIFE for a quarter century, covering the Korean War, the Boy Scouts, drug-addled Japanese teens, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, horse racing and myriad other subjects. The pictures he made in Antarctica in 1964, meanwhile, remain among his most impressive: it’s hard to think of another photographer who, in black and white, could so neatly capture both the forbidding beauty of the great southern continent and the endearing quirkiness of its most famous residents.
At one point during the assignment, however, things went terribly wrong for Rougier, as he lost his footing and went sliding—for close to half a mile, out of control—down the side of a glacier. As his daughter Karen recently told LIFE.com, her dad managed to save himself. Barely.
“As a last gasp,” Karen Rougier says, “he threw his pick out to grab the ice, and that’s what kept him from sliding right off the edge of the glacier.”
Rougier was badly hurt in the accident, but after recovering he went on to complete many more assignments, for LIFE and other publications. Michael Rougier passed away in January 2012. A small peak near where he almost lost his life, east of Antarctica’s LaPrade Valley, was named Rougier Hill in tribute to him.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Antarctica, 1964
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Scientists, helped by Navy personnel, carry boxed penguins to a Navy transport to be taken to a distant release point.”
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Antarctica, 1964.
Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Once again, football season is upon us, and once again, the occasion brings with it all the marketing mayhem, fan frenzy and trash-talking that sports are so often heir to. Pro football is unique among American sports due to its sheer, outsized spectacle. It’s louder than baseball, brasher than basketball, and more routinely violent than the phenomenally physical sport of NHL hockey and the high-speed lunacy of NASCAR. In fact, of all the major sports in North America, football is arguably the one that brings out whatever vestiges of machismo might be lurking in even the most seemingly mild of fans.
Football, after all, is for manly men. But there are many types of toughness. Mental toughness (Jackie Robinson); quiet toughness (Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper); gritty toughness (a weary, determined American Marine); crazy, spasmodic toughness (Cagney’s sociopath, Cody Jarrett, in White Heat); run-right-over-you toughness (Jim Brown); and on and on.
Here, LIFE.com offers a look back at some of the iconic faces and personalities that, in their own time and in their own chosen pursuit, were tough enough to answer that age-old question: Who’s the man?
John Garfield 1938
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marine on Saipan 1944
W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jimmy Stewart 1945
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Kirk Douglas 1949
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
C.H. Long 1949
Leonard McCombe Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gary Cooper 1949
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
James Cagney 1949
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando 1949
Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackie Robinson 1950
J.R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gregory Peck 1950
W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Humphrey Bogart 1951
Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rocky Marciano 1951
Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ernest Hemingway 1952
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Spencer Tracy 1955
J.R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mickey Mantle 1956
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mercury Astronauts 1959
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burt Lancaster 1959
Grey Villet Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Sinatra 1961
Leonard McCombe Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen 1963
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali 1966
Bob Gomel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John Wayne 1969
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jim Brown 1969
Henry Groskinsky Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Johnny Cash 1969
MIchael Rougier Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jack Nicholson relaxing at home in Los Angeles, 1969.
Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?
That was the direct, provocative question asked in an August 1949 LIFE magazine article that helped cement Jackson Pollock’s reputation. It was a question Pollock spent much of the rest of his life struggling to answer while desperately hoping to show the skeptics why LIFE was right to even ask such a monumental question in the first place.
As the single most recognizable practitioner of Abstract Expressionism—the movement that put America and, specifically, post-World War II New York at the epicenter of painting’s avant-garde—Pollock was a genuine art star. But he soon abandoned the radical “drip” technique that had earned him both fame and, among some art critics, vilification and spent the last few years of his life battling the twin demons of depression and alcoholism.
Here, LIFE presents outtakes from photographer Martha Holmes’ 1949 shoot with Pollock images that offer a unique portrait of the artist’s home life with wife and fellow painter Lee Krasner on eastern Long Island, and the singular working method that made him an art-world icon.
With a down payment loaned to them by art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock and Krasner bought land in the hamlet of Springs, New York, and moved into the house that would be Pollock’s residence for the last decade of his life. Pollock converted a small nearby barn into a studio, where he was to create many of his most famous works. As his fame grew, the little town of Springs — part of East Hampton—attracted other major artists and writers, including Willem de Kooning, Kurt Vonnegut, Nora Ephron, Philip Roth and Joseph Heller.
Despite moving out of the city to live on a farm near the ocean, it’s hard to say that nature was an inspiration for Pollock’s paintings, which were so abstract that their only apparent source was the artist’s subconscious. Still, the natural world did find its way into his paintings in the form of sand and other materials that the artist routinely applied to his canvas, along with his paints, while the titles of some work—like his gargantuan Autumn Rhythm (1950)—reflect a sensibility attuned to the seasons.
Pollock’s work was often referred to as “action painting,” and the dance-like performance in which he engaged while making a painting was integral to the aesthetic result. Instead of using an easel, he’d stretch a canvas on the floor of his barn and scamper around all four sides as he painted. Rather than using brushes, he used sticks to flick and drip paint, or he poured it straight from the can, favoring household enamels over traditional oils.
Today, a painting from Pollock’s “drip period” can fetch north of $100 million at auction.
After he became famous and successful, Pollock bought his own open-air carriage, a 1950 Oldsmobile 88 convertible. This was the vehicle he was driving on August 11, 1956, when, less than a mile from his house, he drove off the road and flipped the car, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger, and injuring his mistress, Ruth Kligman.
Krasner, a talented abstract painter in her own right, had put her career on hold during decade with Pollock in the Long Island house in order to support her husband’s career. After his death, she began painting in the barn that had been his studio. By the time she died in 1984, at age 76, she was finally recognized for her own work, and not merely as “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” Today, the farmhouse and barn studio comprise a museum devoted to the study of the married painters’ intertwined working lives.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Jackson Pollock worked in his Long Island studio, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Long Island, April 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock and neighbor, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At Daniel Miller’s general store in Springs, New York, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock talked with Tino Nivola, a new arrival at the artist colony that began to sprout around the Pollocks’ Long Island village in the late 1940s.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock, Long Island, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock worked in his Long Island studio, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock worked in his Long Island studio, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock admired the watercolors of neighbor Mary Monteverdi, a self-taught artist inspired to take up painting after seeing Pollock’s work.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Grocer Daniel Miller (left) visited Pollock and Krasner at their Long Island farmhouse, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neighbor Nathaniel Edgar Talmadge (age 84) and his horse Rowdy Kate (age 21) stopped by for a chat with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in April 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock dried dishes with Lee Krasner in the kitchen of their farmhouse, 1949.
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 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
![Home a hero after his successful 1965 mission in Gemini 3, [Gus Grissom] greeted his parents who came from Mitchell, Ind. for the flight.](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/01/140123-apollo-1-grissom-white-chaffee-17-1024x804.jpg "Home a hero after his successful 1965 mission in Gemini 3, [Gus Grissom] greeted his parents who came from Mitchell, Ind. for the flight.")
