Page 149 – LIFE

Classic Photos of Stars in Stop Motion

August 11, 2021March 8, 2012 by

Ask 20 random people, “What is the nature of time?” and chances are pretty good that you’ll get 20 different answers. Time is an arrow, says one. Time is a circle, suggests another. Time is relative. Time is an illusion.

But no matter how assured or unhesitating their answers might be, most people would be hard-pressed to offer a single, definitive method for illustrating time. Here, LIFE.com offers a selection of marvelous photographs, stroboscopic and otherwise, by the great Gjon Mili. These technically brilliant pictures fiddle with moments, junctures, sequences, and in the process offer a playful commentary on time.

“To see a world in a grain of sand,” William Blake once wrote, “and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.” At their best, Gjon Mili’s stroboscopic photographs not only serve as a kind of modern adjunct to Blake’s vision; they also celebrate with an unsentimental, clear-eyed wonder the reality of sentient beings moving through both time and space.

Stroboscopic image of a trick shot by billiards champion Willie Hoppe in 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of ballerina Nora Kaye performing a pas de bourrée in 1947.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Choreographer Martha Graham performs her own work at Gjon Mili’s studio, 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Drummer Gene Krupa at Gjon Mili’s studio, 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

United States pentathlon champion John Borican leaps a hurdle in 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A nude descends a staircase, 1942

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New York Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell throws a curve ball, 1940.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dancer and actor Gene Kelly in a multiple-exposure dance sequence from the movie Cover Girl, 1944.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

FBI agent Del Bryce draws his gun, 1945.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rope-skipping champion Gordon Hathaway in action, 1947.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Multiple exposure photograph of Pablo Picasso using a small flashlight to “draw” a figure in the air in 1949.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of Martha Graham dancer Ethel Butler in 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. as “Sportin’ Life” in the MGM production of Porgy and Bess, 1958.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stan Cavenaugh juggles tenpins, 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of the head and shoulders of a model wearing an elaborate hat and jewelry, 1946.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of New York University fencing champion Arthur Tauber (left) parrying with Sol Gorlin, 1942.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image showing a repetitive closeup of Isaac Stern playing violin at photographer Gjon Mili’s studio in 1959.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of choreographer George Balanchine watching New York City Ballet dancers rehearse in 1965.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

College Basketball’s Golden Days

December 19, 2019March 7, 2012 by

These days college basketball careers go by in a flash—no sooner does a player make an impression on fans than he has left school to play professionally. It used to be different. Athletes stayed in college for four years. Fans could see stars mature and develop before they moved on to the NBA.

Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of photographs from a golden era of college hoops, featuring all-time greats (Lew Alcindor, a.k.a, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; Oscar Robertson; Pete Maravich; Wilt Chamberlain; Bob Cousy; Jerry Lucas) as well as other players who made brief splashes in their time and then like so many athletes, quietly faded from the public’s view.

A prime example: Yale’s Tony Lavelli, a terrific 6′ 3″ forward in the late 1940s who scored close to 2,000 points and graduated as the fourth highest-scorer in college history. (Today, he is no longer in the all-time top 250.) Lavelli was selected as the Boston Celtics’ first pick in the 1949 draft. But as music was his true passion and he had hoped to study at Julliard in New York, Lavelli agreed to sign with Boston on one unusual condition: that the Celtics pay him an extra $125 per game to play his beloved accordion at half-time at the old Boston Garden.

Lavelli played two years of pro ball, but ultimately returned to his first love, going on to a long career as a performer and songwriter.

Pete Maravich (LSU) fired off a fade-away jumper against Alabama in 1969.

Art Rickerby The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wilt Chamberlain (Kansas) soared in 1957.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Burke Scott (above, with ball) was a starter on Indiana’s 1953 NCAA championship team.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Seven-foot, two-inch Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, here being fitted for trousers with a 51-inch inseam in 1967) left his native New York for UCLA, where he helped the Bruins win a record 88 games in a row and three national titles.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Long Island University Blackbirds practiced in 1940. Under Hall of Fame coach Clair Bee, the Blackbirds were a powerhouse in the 1930s and ’40s, winning two NIT titles.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Oregon State Beavers travelled by train, 1953.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Yale basketball star Tony Lavelli played his accordion, circa 1948.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 6′ 8″ Jerry Lucas (above, in 1960) is still regarded as one of the best big men in the history of the game. In three college seasons with Ohio State he averaged 24.3 points and 17.2 rebounds and led the Buckeyes to three NCAA title games. They won it all in 1960.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bradley vs. St. John’s, Madison Square Garden, New York, in 1951.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New York’s Madison Square Garden (the old Garden, built in 1925 and razed in ’68) was the mecca of college basketball, hosting every round of the NIT for 40 years and home to the Final Four for much of the 1940s. Above: Bradley vs. St. John’s (in white, the ninth-winningest program in NCAA history), 1951.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The great Kansas coach Forrest Allen, nicknamed “Phog,” is often referred to as the “Father of Basketball Coaching.” Allen (here demonstrating some sort of funky move in 1957) coached Dean Smith; he recruited Wilt Chamberlain to Kansas; the Jayhawks’ Allen Fieldhouse is named for him, and a banner hanging in the fieldhouse reads, “Pay heed all who enter, beware of the Phog.”

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

MIT’s Dimitry Vergun (above, in 1956, the year he graduated) became an expert on designing buildings to withstand earthquakes.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

One of the first big guards in basketball, 6′ 5″, 220-pound Oscar Robertson (shown in 1959) led the nation in scoring in each of his three seasons at Cincinnati and left school as the top scorer in college history. The Big O was inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame in 1980.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

La Salle’s Tom Gola (driving to the hoop in 1954) was one of the college game’s earliest superstars, a do-it-all forward. The four-time All-American also scored 2,462 points, for career averages of 20.9 points and 18.7 rebounds.

Hank Walker The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the eight-team 1958 Dixie Classic, the Michigan State Spartans (in the dark uniforms) made it all the way to the final before falling to host North Carolina State (in white)..

Hank Walker The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bob Cousy (above, at right, in 1950 when he was with Holy Cross) brought a showman’s flair to the sport before it was an accepted part of the game, regularly dribbling behind his back and throwing no-look passes.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The great North Carolina State Wolfpack coach Everett “The Gray Fox” Case cut down the net after winning the Dixie Classic title in 1959.

Hank Walker The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Nobel Prize in Literature: Portraits of Legendary Laureates

August 9, 2021March 5, 2012 by

The Swedish Academy, which began bestowing the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901, has missed some opportunities to honor deserving authors (Tolstoy, Joyce, Borges, Nabokov, Proust, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene are but a few of the giants without Nobel laurels). But this is a failing that, to most, pales beside the excellence and striking variety in style and subject matter, if not race and gender, among those who have won.

Among literary prizes, the Nobel carries unique weight. Unlike the Pulitzer, the Man Booker, the Goncourt, et al. which each year honor discrete fiction and nonfiction titles, the Nobel celebrates and solemnizes a writer’s life work.

Here, LIFE.com looks back at how LIFE magazine portrayed some Nobel winners through the years.

NOTE: Only two honorees have ever declined the Nobel for literature, one voluntarily, the other under threat. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre sent his regrets, stating at-once graciously and forcefully, “A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.”

In 1958, the great Russian poet and author of Dr. Zhivago, Boris Paternak, accepted the Nobel, but was later forced by the Soviet authorities, to the enduring shame of the USSR, to decline the prize. In 1989 Pasternak’s son, Evgenii, accepted the Nobel medal on his father’s behalf at a ceremony in Stockholm.

German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann in Tulsa, OK, in 1939.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1947 Nobel laureate Andre Gide, at work (left) and in a portrait by LIFE’s Yale Joel.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

French writer Albert Camus smokes a cigarette on the balcony outside his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard’s office in Paris, 1955. Camus won the Nobel in 1957; in 1960, when he was 46 years old, he was killed in a car crash along with Gallimard, who was driving.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Hemingway in Cuba in 1952. He was awarded the Nobel in 1954. When LIFE magazine published Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, in its entirety, in its September 1, 1952, issue, five million copies of the magazine were sold . . . in two days.

ALFRED EISENSTAEDT

Pearl Buck at her desk in 1942 (left), and in 1956 (right). She was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 1938.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sinclair Lewis in New York in 1937. He won his Nobel for Literature in 1930.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Irish-born playwright George Bernard Shaw, 90 years old, stands in the yard of his home in the Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence, England, in 1946. He was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 1925.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 1949 Nobel laureate William Faulkner, photographed in Hollywood in 1940.

PIX Inc. The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 1962 Nobel laureate John Steinbeck in New York City in 1937.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jean-Paul Sartre at his home in Paris in 1946. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, but famously declined to accept it.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

PhilosopherBertrand Russell at his desk at UCLA in 1940 (left), and in England in 1951 (right). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

Playwright Eugene O’Neill in New York in 1950. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936.

PIX Inc. The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wallis and Edward: Reassessing the Windsors’ “Romance of the Century”

January 30, 2022March 3, 2012 by

Wallis and Edward, the Romance of the Century. The evocative phrase so often attached to the marriage of the esrtwhile King of England and the twice-divorced American socialite, Wallis Simpson, has a wonderful ring to it. After all, what sort of cold-hearted wretch wouldn’t thrill, even a little bit, to the story of a ruler of an ancient realm abdicating his throne so that he might marry his true love? What kind of flinty-souled Scrooge would even question motives, or reasons, in the narrative of a former monarch finding happiness with a “commoner” from across the sea?

And yet … there’s just one little catch. History (as well as authorized and unauthorized biographies, magazine articles, movies, newspaper stories and more) suggest that the “romance of the century” was, in fact, more or less like any other marriage: there were good times, and bad times, and little evidence that the former outnumbered or outweighed the latter.

For example, the balance of power in the relationship was, for long stretches of the marriage, completely out of whack. (Most men and women, if they’re honest with themselves and with each other, will admit that even when a marriage is founded on genuine love and respect, it’s impossible to ignore the central role that the wielding of power with a lower-case “p” can play in ensuring or wreaking havoc with a relationship.) The Duchess was, by almost all accounts, the protagonist in the marriage. She was the more outspoken, the more driven of the pair, while the Duke frequently seemed content to play the doting husband to his glamorous, intelligent and unapologetically ambitious wife.

But even if the romance between the Duke and Duchess was, as millions of people around the globe so earnestly wished it to be, a marvelous union made stronger by the remarkable sacrifice that paved its way even if the romance, in others words, really was the Romance of the Century there would still be those nagging little details that, over the years, have cast an enduring pall on the Windsors’ tale. (See photos from the Duke and the Duchess’ apparently jaunty journey through Nazi Germany in 1937.)

The trouble with the image that so many people still evidently harbor of the 20th century’s gleaming, flawless romance is that, in short, the gleaming, flawless romance never really existed. That the Duke and the Duchess loved one another, in their way, is something that even their most vocal detractors especially the Duchess’ vocal detractors, and there are legions of them readily admit. But beyond their powerful attraction to one another, the Windsors also shared some of the less-savory sensibilities common to so many of their upper-crust peers in the late 1930s and even into the war years of the 1940s. Namely, they displayed a comfort with far right-wing movements and ideologies grounded, in large part, in an abhorrence of far left-wing ideologies that at times was difficult to distinguish from infatuation.

The two, after all, gladly met with Hitler during their highly publicized tour of Germany in 1937, and neither of them displayed much compunction about associating with figures suspected of being pro-German, if not outright fascist. Even in the midst of the Second World War, when England was fighting for its life against the Reich and the Windsors were passing the time in the Bahamas where the Duke was made Governor neither of them worked overtime to dispel the notion that, in the end, it didn’t much matter to them whether or not Germany won the war.

That the Duchess hated England was an open secret; that many in England, and especially many in the royal family and the higher reaches of government, despised and distrusted her in return was equally well-known. Such a toxic dynamic between the former Wallis Simpson and so many in England hardly excuses the laissez-faire attitude that both the Windsors seemed to adopt toward the fate of what, after all, was the Duke’s ancestral home. It does, however, help explain it. How many of us, after all, can maintain even the appearance of goodwill toward those who publicly and privately deride us?

But in the end, maybe it’s about time that the “Romance of the Century” tag is retired, and we try to see the Windsors for what, in an elemental way, they were: a married couple who lived much of their private lives in public, and upon whose marriage countless people projected (and still project) their own hopes, fears, passions and fantasies. There’s really no need to despise them; there’s no need to admire, or celebrate, or try to emulate them, either. We’ll just leave them to history.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, 1940

Thomas D. McAvoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

May 22, 1950, cover of Life magazine featuring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

Might as Well Jump: LIFE Cover Portraits by Philippe Halsman

August 17, 2021March 1, 2012 by

Of all the 20th century photographers who made a name for themselves almost exclusively from their portrait work, few managed to capture as dizzying an array of subjects as adroitly as the Latvian-born master, Philippe Halsman. A friend to the likes of Dali, Picasso and Einstein, Halsman’s approach to portraiture judging by the uniform excellence of his work for LIFE and other publications from the early 1940s onward appears to have been as an equal-opportunity chronicler of the great, the famous and the utterly unknown, alike.

But there was, it turns out, a quite deliberate method at the heart of Halsman’s portraiture: in short, shoot men and women differently. The outline of the idea is no doubt familiar to portraitists shooting today although it’s also a very good bet that no one shooting today would phrase his or her modus operandi quite so … plainly.

LIFE once quoted Halsman as saying that, when photographing a woman, “I try to photograph her beauty; with a man I try to show his character. Once I photographed a man with a big nose, and emphasized his nose, and he was very pleased with the picture. That could not happen with a woman. The most intelligent woman will reject a portrait if it doesn’t flatter her. Only once in my whole career did it happen that a blonde asked me, ‘Please make me look intelligent.’ Unfortunately it was impossible.”

Halsman (b. May 2, 1906; d. June 25, 1979) began his long, enormously productive relationship with LIFE in 1942, and eventually shot more than 50 covers for the magazine. Of all the projects, themes, creative ideas and wonderfully revealing pictures Halsman devised and created throughout his long career, he is perhaps best know today for his portraits of rich, famous and often very powerful people jumping. Literally, jumping. And in true, mischievous Halsman style, he managed to make these portraits both mesmerizing and, somehow, significant — pictures that are saved from mere silliness by the evident technical prowess at play in each one.

The exuberant November 9, 1959, cover of LIFE that featured a laughing, barefoot Marilyn Monroe in midair came out at about the same time as a remarkable tome, Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book, which was filled with these singular, strange and, at times, downright thrilling portraits.

Other notables seen jumping in the book and in the issue of LIFE with Marilyn on the cover? Princess Grace of Monaco, Sophia Loren, Judge Learned Hand, Brigitte Bardot, Vice President Richard Nixon, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theologian Paul Tillich and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, to name a few.

Why did they do it? Quite simply, because Halsman asked them to. (Only a very few subjects , including Herbert Hoover and the pianist Van Cliburn, ever refused.)

“In a burst of energy the subject overcomes gravity,” Halsman wryly noted of his jumping pictures. “He cannot also control all his muscles. The mask falls. The real self becomes visible, and one needs only to snap it with a camera. I call this jumpology. The time may someday come when psychiatrists will diagnose hidden characteristics not with the slow and painstaking Rorschach test but with the rapid and hurtling Halsman.”

The rapid and hurtling Halsman. A marvelous phrase that, as aptly as any other, captures the quicksilver imagination and the finely harnessed talent that still, all these years later, animate the work of one of the all-time greats.

LIFE Magazine, November 9, 1959. Marilyn Monroe, photographed by Philippe Halsman.

October 16, 1944 cover of LIFE magazine featuring Lauren Bacall.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

May 22, 1950, cover of Life magazine featuring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

August 13, 1951, cover of Life magazine featuring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

September 3, 1951, cover of LIFE magazine featuring Gina Lollobrigida.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

December 17, 1951, cover of LIFE magazine featuring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

April 7, 1952, cover of LIFE magazine featuring Marilyn Monroe.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

November 2, 1953, cover of LIFE magazine featuring Winston Churchill.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

April 26, 1954, cover of LIFE magazine featuring Grace Kelly.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

Classic Photos of People Watching TV

December 18, 2019February 27, 2012 by

Monumental events, mindless comedy, sports victories, talk shows, filibusters and on and on: television has shown it all. Almost any TV show will find an audience and some will find millions. Long before the recent dawn of cord-cutting and personal screens, when TV was in its infancy and then rising as a black-and-white cultural mainstay, it sometimes served as a venue for group gatherings. A shared activity, even if that activity was (usually) pretty passive.

Here LIFE looked back at some Americans, famous and not, who liked to watch.

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

Radio Corporation of America (RCA) executives watched a brand new invention called television at their New York offices before introducing the product to the public, 1939.

Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Russell Finch, a writer, enjoyed the latest invention of the day, a portable television, while taking a bath, 1948.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Men gathered to watch TV through a store window in Pennsylvania in 1948.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A boy watched TV in an appliance store window in 1948.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sisters at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Erie, Penn., watched a program on a new local TV station, 1949.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watching a Western, 1950

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A group of swimmers at an indoor pool watched the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Jacob Malik, filibustering in the UN Security Council in 1950.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grade school kids in Minneapolis watched a video “classroom lesson” on TV while the city’s public schools were on strike in 1951.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A rapt audience in a Chicago bar watched the 1952 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. (The Yankees won.)

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Six-year-old girls used a “Winky Dink” drawing kit on their home TV screen as they watch the kids’ program, Winky Dink and You, 1953. The show, which aired for four years in the 1950s, has been cited as “the first interactive TV show,” especially in light of its “magic drawing screen” a piece of plastic that stuck to the TV screen, and on which viewers could trace the action on the screen.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A performing chimpanzee named Zippy watched TV in 1955.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An adopted Korean war orphan, Kang Koo Ri, watched television in his new home in Los Angeles in 1956.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Milwaukee fans watched the 1957 World Series, when their Braves beat the Yankees in seven games.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A railroad worker’s family watched TV in a trailer at a camp for Southern Pacific employees in Utah in 1957.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An awe-struck baseball watched the Braves win the World Series in Milwaukee in 1957.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A traveling businessman watched TV in a hotel room in 1958.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tenant farmer Thomas B. Knox and his family watched Ed Sullivan and ventriloquist Rickie Layne on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picketing workers watched TV in a tent outside the gates of a U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, during a strike in 1959.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, watched the 1960 GOP convention in Chicago from their hotel suite.

Hank Walker The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Kim Sisters—a Korean-born singing trio who had some success in the U.S. in the 1960s —watched television in Chicago in 1960.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Eventual VP candidate Lyndon Johnson watched TV during the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A “Three-Eyed TV Monster” created by Ulises Sanabria permitted simultaneous two- and three-screen viewing, 1961.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Scott Carpenter’s wife, Rene, and son, Marc, watched his 1962 orbital flight on TV. Carpenter’s was NASA’s second manned orbital flight, after John Glenn’s, and lasted nearly five hours.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Die-hard New York Giants fans watched the 1962 NFL championship game against the Packers outside a Connecticut motel, beyond the range of the NYC-area TV blackout, December 1962. Green Bay won, 16-7.

John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A crowd watched John F. Kennedy address the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra watched his son, Frank Jr., 21, emcee a TV show, 1964.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Different CATV (Community Antenna Television) stations available to subscribers in Elmira, New York, in 1966.

Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Diahann Carroll and journalist David Frost watched themselves on separate talk shows. Carroll and Frost were engaged for a while, but never married.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Classic Photos of People Watching TV

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