in the age of remote working, holiday office parties are not what they used to be. That new reality lends an extra note of nostalgia to a story from 1948 entitled, “LIFE Goes to an Office Party: Employees and Bosses Loosen Up All Over the Place.”
The fashions in the story are pure 1940s, but the social dynamics on display will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an office.
“One night or another the lights burn late in many American business houses,” the story began. “The occasion is that great leveler, the office Christmas party, an antidote to the social formality which ranks between a few discreet cocktails and a free-for-all fight. Then all business barriers collapse; executives unbend; the office clown finds a sympathetic audience.”
For this story LIFE photographer Cornell Capa visited the offices of Schiff Terhune, a New York firm of insurance brokers. (The company, well established at the time, carried on until the 1980s, which it was acquired by larger corporation. A nice history of the firm is included in The New York Times obituary of Frank Schiff, the son of William Schiff, who appears in one of Capa’s photos).
Capa’s photos ran over two packed pages in the Dec. 27, 1948 issue, which featured on its cover a more sober seasonal story on Giotto’s paintings of Christ.
The Schiff Terhune office party appears to have been quite the frolic. People danced and wore funny hats. Santa led a conga line. They even had kissing under the mistletoe—a tradition that has all but disappeared as companies have become more aware on the topic of sexual harassment. Indeed, some of these pictures, showing male executives dancing with female underlings, could be used for a human resources slide show on behaviors that are frowned upon.
In general, office parties have been a wellspring of cautionary tales about regrettable behavior—the Seinfeld episode featuring Elaine’s dancing is one sitcom example— which is why around holiday season etiquette guides and advice pieces for how to manage the office parties abound online.
Still, it looks as if the employees of Schiff Terhune found their party a welcome respite. Wrote LIFE, “By the time a conga line and a frolicsome vice president were in action, even the most shrinking violet felt expansively aware of the brotherhood of man.”
Santa, in the form of company vice president Arthur D. Marks, led a conga line through the file cabinets.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Menroe. the “office cut up,” brandished a pair of pink cotton pants he had been given by the office Santa Claus.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Max Sherman’s soda bottle became tangled in the “pink drawers” that Santa gave him at the office Christmas party.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Stenographers posed with assistant department head Al Lyons at an insurance office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Insurance company vice president John Griffin danced with a giggling stenographer at their office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Menroe and biller Jessie Merman met under the mistletoe at the office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Company president William Schiff danced with secretary Theda Berkeley at their office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Stenographer Dorothy Newman took a moment to rest her tired feet at the office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
George Dixon returned to his desk to get some work done during his office Christmas party, 1948.
The most consequential night in the history of fright occurred in June of 1816 at Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva, where the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley were vacationing with Shelley’s 19-year-old fiancée, Mary Godwin, her half-sister Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s physician and traveling companion, John Polidori. Confined to their villa by two weeks of torrential rain, they began telling ghost stories to amuse themselves. Three years earlier, Byron had written “The Giaour,” a poem that warns of a corpse who, “as Vampyre sent,” is torn from its grave to “suck the blood of all thy race.” On this particular evening in Switzerland, he suggested that each traveler should produce a supernatural tale as entertainment for the others.
At midnight, Dr. Polidori recorded in his diary, as Mary nursed her four-month-old baby, the group “really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face and gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.”
By the end of that “wet ungenial summer,” Mary Shelley had conceived the germ of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Polidori, then 20, completed The Vampyre, a short novel whose profound creative impact still endures in literature, theater, television, and film.
Polidori’s vampire, the rakish Lord Ruthven—said to be based on Byron himself—is an amoral debaucher of young women with a “dead grey eye” who stalks London, drinking the blood of his victims. The Vampyre was delivered to the Countess of Breuss and pretty much forgotten until the spring of 1819, when, amid Polidori’s acrimonious falling out with Byron, it was published in the New Monthly Magazine. To capitalize on Byron’s notoriety, the publisher released The Vampyre under Byron’s name. Polidori was outraged at this violation of his copyright. For his part, Byron disavowed authorship: “I have a personal dislike to Vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets.”
Translated quickly into French, The Vampyre appeared in Paris as a popular stage play and gave birth to so many imitations that a decade later a critic complained, “There is not a theatre in Paris without a vampire!”
Two centuries after The Vampyre hit the stands, we’re up to our necks in feral figures who prey on the living—or shrink from them. Of all supernatural monsters, none is as boldly erotic as the vampire, who more often than not takes control of victims. “Dominance and submission come together,” said Anne Rice, best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. The vampire must feed nightly, and he or she tends to attack his or her hosts when they’re most helpless—usually, when they’re asleep.
Stories about vampires have been circulating for thousands of years. Though just about every culture has showcased some form of vampire, anthropologists generally consider them a Slavic invention. They haunted the lore of Albania, where they were known as vurvulak; Bosnia (lampir); Croatia (vukodlak); and Montenegro (tenatz). Vampire comes from the old Slavic word obyrbi. “If anything unites the pre-Serbian undead, it would be the spreading of a mysterious plague,” said Al Ridenour, host of the podcast Bone and Sickle, a celebration of the intersection of horror, folklore, and history. “The sickness was not passed on necessarily by direct contact or bites but could be more of an evil miasma that accompanied the undead rising from the grave.” Plague survivors looking for a scapegoat would blame the first victim.
America’s own Vampire Panic in New England ran from the late 1700s to the late 1800s. Similar cases were documented in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island, most linked to savage outbreaks of tuberculosis. In 1830, a “vampire heart” was reportedly torched on the town green of Woodstock, Vermont. In Manchester, New Hampshire, a 1793 heart-burning ceremony at a blacksmith’s forge drew hundreds of onlookers: “Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton,” an early town history says. “It was the month of February and good sleighing.”
“The belief that circulated did not involve blood-drinking corpses, but the notion that those who had appeared to die of TB would live on in the grave, somehow feeding off the lives of those in the community in the process, causing them to succumb to the disease,” said Ridenour. There were at least 40 recorded instances in which corpses were exhumed, their vital organs burned, and stakes driven through their hearts. The most famous and possibly last of these was Mercy Brown.
During the 1880s, the town of Exeter, Rhode Island, was struck by an epidemic of consumption, as TB was then called. In 1883, Mary Eliza Brown died of the disease. Her oldest daughter, 20-year-old Mary Olive, died the following year. The entire town turned out for Mary Olive’s funeral and sang “One Sweetly Solemn Thought,” a hymn that she had picked out for the occasion. Not long after, the same illness struck Mary Olive’s 18-year-old brother Edwin, a strapping store clerk in excellent health. He left for Colorado Springs to take “the cure.”
In January 1892, Edwin’s 19-year-old sister Mercy Brown died. Then Edwin, having returned from Colorado Springs to Exeter “in a dying condition,” according to one newspaper account, took a turn for the worse. As he lingered on, a rumor gained purchase in the tight-knit farming community that the Brown family was cursed, and that one of the women was in fact not dead but secretly a vampire who was feasting “on the living tissue and blood of Edwin,” as the Providence Journal later put it. They persuaded the children’s father, George Brown, to allow the exhumation of all three bodies. Wielding shovels and pitchforks, a party of men went to the family burial plot in Chestnut Hill Cemetery and dug up the bodies. It was wintertime, and the remains of the long-dead Mary Eliza and Mary Olive were little more than bones. But the body of Mercy—who had died only a few months before and was kept mostly in a crypt above the ground—hadn’t much deteriorated. “The body was in a fairly well-preserved state,” the Journal’s correspondent wrote. “The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found.”
Though the presiding physician noted the presence of “tuberculosis germs,” the villagers interpreted the presence of fresh blood as a sign that Mercy was undead. To stop members of her family from meeting the same vampiric fate, they gathered firewood and kindled a bonfire on a nearby rock. Then they cut out Mercy’s heart and lungs and burned them on the pyre. The ashes of her heart were brought back to the Brown homestead and mixed into a potion, which was fed to the ailing Edwin.
Evidently, the vampire remedy did little good: He died two months later.
Over five decades of solitary and deeply personal work, Charles Schulz drew 17,897 Peanuts comic strips, producing a body of work that constitutes not only the richest achievement in comic strip history, but also the most resonant sports strip of all time. Thousands of Peanuts panels are filtered through Schulz’s love of sports, a collective subcategory that perhaps more than any other delivers the essence of his work.
The simple genius of Peanuts lies in Schulz’s ability to get to the heart of large matters (unrequited love, loneliness) and critical life questions (is there a Great Pumpkin?) through the lens of emotionally precocious children. The reason the sports stuff works so well is that sports, by and large, compels a part of us that has never grown up. In a strip drawn after the Giants’ narrow loss to the Yankees in the 1962 World Series, Charlie Brown and Linus sit silently and glumly on a curb for three frames. In the fourth Charlie Brown blurts out, “Why couldn’t McCovey have hit the ball three feet higher?” It’s a movable lament for baseball fans: Why couldn’t Buckner have fielded that ground ball in 1986? Why couldn’t Bartman have backed off in 2003?
The events and relationships in Peanuts are for the most part events and relationships distilled from Schulz’s life. (Not long after a phone bill reveals to Schulz’s wife, Joyce, that he is having an extramarital affair, Charlie Brown prevents Snoopy from canoodling with a girl beagle. “And no more long-distance phone calls!” Charlie Brown warns.) And that distillation holds true in the arena of sports. Active as an amateur hockey player and organizer, Schulz was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 1993. In Peanuts we see Snoopy at times as a goalkeeper and other times as a hard-checking skater doing battle with Woodstock on the frozen-over birdbath. Both of these players, it emerges, can also drive a Zamboni. Schulz’s father buried soup cans in the lawn so that young Charles could practice putting. Snoopy, in turn, plays the Masters and outdrives Sam Snead and Ben Hogan; Charlie Brown is his caddy. Schulz famously uses football as metaphor through action—Lucy yanked the pigskin away from Charlie Brown once a year, every year, from 1952 to 1999— and also through words: “I thought I had life solved,” Charlie Brown says, “but there was a flag on the play.”
No sport proves more present or more resonant than baseball. As a child, Schulz played on and ran a sandlot team, which preoccupied him. In one series of strips, Charlie Brown awakens to see the sun rising as a giant baseball. Next it’s the moon, then an ice cream cone that’s a ball. Finally, Charlie Brown develops a rash in the pattern of a hardball’s stitching on the back of his smooth, spherical head, leading him to a pediatrician. “Doctor, am I cracking up?” he asks. “Is it the bottom of the ninth?” On another occasion he loses a spelling bee after spelling maze “M-A-Y-S.”
For Charlie Brown, baseball is the end-all; he’s out pitching in deep snow and pelting rain. On the mound he gets undressed (literally) by opponents’ line drives. In the field he prays under a pop-up, then misses it. His failures lead to self-reflections and laments— “every now and then I am plagued by self-doubt”—but they are overcome by his unbeatable optimism. “This is the moment of moments,” Charlie Brown says, standing on the field, his glove on his hand, his face covered in bliss, “the beginning of a new season.”
For the others in the Peanuts gang—think of Lucy in right field with her umbrella, Snoopy at shortstop with his supper dish—baseball is folly. This may be Schulz’s most valuable lesson to the impressionable child: In the end, sports don’t matter all that much. In one strip, after Linus tells Charlie Brown that he has been “the victim of a short and sad love affair,” we see Linus under a fly ball. “I got it!” he shouts. “At least I think I’ve got it! Who knows? Actually who cares? When you’ve lost at love, you’ve lost at everything… Nothing matters.” The ball drops.
Only a small portion of Schulz’s work gets into his sports side, but those strips convey a lot about the Peanuts gang, as well as about ourselves as fans. Some of the best baseball strips are gathered into book collections, including 1977’s There Goes the Shutout. The title derives from a strip in which the team falls behind 63-0 in the first inning. On the bench afterward, Linus says to Charlie Brown, “Well, there goes our shutout.” The game itself, by implication, is still within reach.
Charles M. Schulz with a few of his Peanuts characters, including (on top of books) Lucy van Pelt and Charlie Brown, and below, from left, Linus (with blanket), Snoopy and Schroeder (at piano), in 1962.
CBS/Getty Images
The first frame of the first Peanuts comic strip, 1950.
If there’s one takeaway from Nina Leen’s photographs of dancer and choreorgrapher Margaret Severn, it is that a mask is the beginning of a costume, but not the end.
Severn was a master of the mask. She made her reputation performing masked dances at the Greenwich Village Follies, a downtown variation of the Ziegield Follies that ran from 1919 to 1927. Severn explained in the 1982 documentary Dance Masks: The World of Margaret Severn that those performances revived an ancient tradition that spanned centuries and cultures, but had fallen out of favor starting around the 18th century. “When I put them on they hadn’t been used for years in the theater, so this was called a complete novelty by some, those who didn’t know anything about the history of masks, and by others it was a renaissance of the art of the mask.”
In her performances, she said, she viewed the mask as a portal to a new identity. “The mask has this peculiar quality, as if it were inhabited by a disincarnated spirit of some sort, and when the dancer puts the mask on, he is possessed by this spirit and ceases to be himself, and so I just allowed that to happen with these masks that I wore,” she said.
She added that, “Each mask, in its particular feeling, usually finds some person, and perhaps many people, in the audience who respond to that particular emotion, who see themselves in that particular guise. I think that’s one reason they have such universal appeal.”
Severn and Leen met in 1940 to create this photoset, which focuses on Severn but also includes images of a group performance (it’s hard to identify Severn in those pictures because, well, everyone is masked). These pictures never ran in LIFE, and without any accompanying story or surviving photographer’s notes, it is hard to say precisely what inspired this collaboration at that particular moment. Regardless, the photos capture a master of a particular, and peculiar art.
Dancer Margaret Severn painted a mask that she used in her performances, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Margaret Severn painted a mask for a dance performance, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask Dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mask dancer Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A mask dance choreographed and performed by Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A mask dance choreographed and performed by Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A mask dance choreographed and performed by Margaret Severn, 1940.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A mask dance choreographed and performed by Margaret Severn, 1940.
But decades before Harley was drawn into its existence, her forebear character, Harlequin, appeared on the cover of LIFE, as part of a photo story on Broadway actors donning costumes for their dream roles. The character of Harlequin had been a particular fascination for actress Gwen Verdon, a musical comedy legend and the winner of four Tony Awards.
In the April 14, 1958 issue of LIFE, Verdon explained the appeal of playing Harlequin, which included the character’s infatuation with another character from the commedia dell’arte, the mischievous maid Columbine:
“Harlequin is a well-rounded, sensitive person,” says Gwen. “His love for Columbine—especially when she breaks his heart—makes a man of him. He’s transformed by suffering. The twirl of blue paper in his eye represents tears. The flower on his nose is a symbol of unattainable beauty—like Columbine. He hunts for it everywhere, not realizing it is right in front of him. Whenever I get a new part, I always stop and ask myself how Harlequin would do it. It’s helped me a lot.”
The concept of actors playing their dream roles was one LIFE would revisit. Five years later LIFE asked film actors to dress up for their dream roles, and the resulting story featured Paul Newman as a swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cary Grant as Charlie Chaplin, Rock Hudson as Dr. Jekyll and more.
Gwen Verdon as Harlequin on the April 14, 1958 cover of LIFE.
Photo by Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gwen Verdon in her dream role of Harlequin, 1958.
Photo by Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gwen Verdon in her dream role of Harlequin, 1958.
Photo by Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gwen Verdon in her dream role of Harlequin, 1958.
Photo by Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gwen Verdon in her dream role of Harlequin, 1958.
Photo by Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John Olson was not much of a baseball fan. The LIFE photographer was better known for images of the Vietnam War and the American counterculture, so when he ended up in the middle of another piece of history, the Miracle Mets’ 1969 season, on an assignment to cover the MLB playoffs, he didn’t particularly appreciate the magic of the moment, to put it mildly. “I was bored,” he said recently about shooting the National League Championship Series in which Tom Seaver’s New York Mets swept the Atlanta Braves and Hank Aaron to advance to the World Series. “The most memorable thing about that assignment was that I was hit by a foul ball. I was in the press box.”
But the thing about it is, Olson’s lack of interest in the game itself produced a set of photos with its own kind of value a half-century removed from the moment. In the search for something that interested him, his eye ranged widely, and as a result his 494 images that reside in LIFE archives give a broad sense of what it was actually like to be in attendance at these historic games.
LIFE ran the story in its Oct. 17, 1969 issue, and Olson’s photos were paired with drawings by cartoonist Mort Gerberg in a feature titled “What Really Happened When a Very Nice Team From Atlanta Encountered a Force Known as the New York Mets.” While Olson doesn’t remember much about the terms of the original assignment, the result suggests that editors from the outset wanted more than straightforward game reportage. That’s how you end up with pictures like the ones Olson took of the boy outfitted for the game in his jacket, tie and baseball glove, yawning as he waits for a foul ball. Or of the man who played Chief Noc-a-Homa, the Braves’ long-since phased-out mascot, sitting in the dugout in glasses while waiting for a chance to set aside his spectacles and take to the field for a celebratory home run dance. Or shots of the funny signs that were on display at Shea Stadium in New York.
Baseball fans would give their eyeteeth to have been at these games; Olson’s images put viewers inside the stadium, head on a swivel.
A fan waited for a foul ball to come his way during the National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Atlanta’s Sonny Jackson took batting practice before a playoff game against the New York Mets, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Casey Stengel, the first manager in franchise history, was on hand to watch the Mets in the playoffs, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hank Aaron was welcomed home by his Braves teammates during the National League playoffs against the New York Mets, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Braves’ mascot, Chief Noc-a-Homa, in the dugout during a playoff game against the New York Mets, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Chief Noc-A-Homa, the Atlanta mascot, performed a celebratory dance during a playoff game against the New York Mets, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A successful pickoff during the National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A successful pickoff during the National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Second baseman Ken Boswell of the New York Mets tried to tag out Orlando Cepeda of the Atlanta Braves during a playoff game in Atlanta, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tommie Agee of the New York Mets greeted his teammate Cleon Jones at home plate after they both scored during a playoff game against the Atlanta Braves at Fulton County Stadium, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The National League playoffs between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, 1969.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A view of the Braves dugout after losing a playoff game against the New York Mets, 1969.
