The pattern is sickeningly familiar. A new and deadly strain of flu emerges in Asia, then spreads across the world and comes to the United States. A pandemic is declared.
In 2020 the world was shaken by COVID-19, which began infecting people in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and spread to exert its deadly touch in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.
In 1957 the new virus was first reported in Singapore, in February of that year, and then worked its way to Hong Kong. In June the disease had made its way to America.
In its Sept. 2, 1957 issue, LIFE reported on the race to develop a vaccine against this flu before the arrival of fall, which would make people more prone to respiratory illnesses: “For the first time in its history the U.S. has had full warning that it faces a major new epidemic.”
LIFE in that issue declared that “the government has launched the fastest medical mobilization ever attempted against an epidemic disease,” and the race for the cure began that April 1957, when forward-looking researchers from Walter Reed first began to work on developing a vaccine. The first of the photos here, which accompanied the Sept. 2 story, documented the fascinating process by which the vaccine was created, with the isolated virus being injected into an egg. After the virus multiplied inside the shell, the embryonic fluid was drawn out, the virus was killed, and the treated fluid was used as the vaccine.
The first batches of the vaccine were released while the weather was still warm, in late August and early September. The vaccine was produced quickly, but not enough to cover the entire population, and nor was it 100 percent effective. Unlike today with COVID-19, there was no mass quarantine or sheltering in place. As kids headed back to school, the number of flu patients began to multiply. In the Nov. 18 issue of LIFE, Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney predicted that “the epidemic will get worse in the next six weeks, and then decrease.”
Burney was correct, to a point. While this flu seemed to abate after Thanksgiving, it proved resurgent, and cases spiked again in early 1958. By the end, according to CDC statistics, the pandemic was tied to 110,000 deaths in the United States, and 1.1 million around the world.
Flu research was conducted at Great Lakes Naval Training Station.
Dr. Maurice Hillman of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research acquired flu specimens from Japan on April 18, before anyone in the U.S. was infected, and by May 18, his team had the virus isolated. He then gave the virus to six drug firms to develop a vaccine.
Creating the flu vaccine involved injecting the virus into eggs, where it multiplied. The virus-laden embryonic fluid was then siphoned out, and the virus was killed. That purified fluid became the vaccine. In this photo Jeff Cesarone at the Merck Sharp and Dohme plant in West Point, Pa.,explained the process.
Ask a fan of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to identify a favorite moment in the book, and you might get any number of responses. There’s the time Jo accidentally singes the hair off her older sister, Meg, as she’s helping Meg prepare for a social engagement. Or the time young, artistic Amy accidentally plasters herself into a bucket as she’s attempting to make a cast of her foot. There are the amateur dramatic productions the sisters stage inside their humble home—swashbuckling tales of high adventure. And there are the comically combative encounters with their wealthy, outspoken Aunt March, who has no compunction about expressing her disapproval over their somewhat unconventional lifestyle.
Then there are the heartbreaking tragedies and daily hardships that befall the girls: death, for one thing, as well as the daunting challenges of marriage and motherhood, fraught relationships, and unrequited romantic love.
All of that and much more is brought to life in the beautiful special edition of LIFE, Little Women: A Story for Every Generation, which is available here. The issue revisits the roots of the Little Women story, explores the many wonderful incarnations of the story on film (and stage) and shows why the story remains as relevant today as it ever was.
Drawing inspiration from her own life with three sisters, Alcott—who was born in 1832 and lived in an environment of financial tenuousness, burgeoning philosophical ideas, and then the Civil War—presented an honest, insightful collection of anecdotes that chronicled the passage from adolescence into adulthood for these four girls (and their mother, Marmee), each of whom presented her own distinctive model of womanhood. With that, Alcott created a runaway best-seller—the book was written in two parts; the first installment was so successful when it was published in 1868 that Alcott quickly produced a follow-up that was released the next year.
Alcott also forever changed the landscape of literary fiction. Taking the inner lives of girls seriously at that time amounted to a revolutionary act, and her nuanced, sensitive depiction of each of the sisters is part of what has led to the book’s remarkable staying power. At the story’s heart is the rebellious Jo, an aspiring writer who resents the notion that she should marry and instead longs to pursue her creative passions; she remains indelible among literary heroines.
Jo’s hunger for life, her principled recalcitrance, and her determination to live on her own terms have resonated across the ages in ways the author could never have anticipated. Alcott has become the godmother of some of modern culture’s most significant voices: Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, J.K. Rowling, and numerous others. It’s rare to find a novel that has spoken so strongly to so many disparate thinkers.
The novel has touched every corner of American culture, inspiring books, movies, plays, operas, and various other sorts of interpretations and adaptations—including Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig’s new movie, with Saoirse Ronan in the role of Jo.
The story is beloved by readers around the world who have embraced Alcott’s deeply moral, emotionally complex tale, and many of whom have traveled to visit Orchard House, the Massachusetts home where she wrote Little Women. Today the house is a museum, a powerful time capsule of 19th-century life, and the fact that it continues to thrive is another testament to Alcott’s long-lasting appeal.
“It’s really about mothers, grandmothers, aunts, teachers, librarians passing this book down to the younger generation,” says Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans and the author of 2018’s Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters. “It’s never been called the great American novel or anything like that, although it should be considered for that. Instead it’s been part of the underground, shadow canon, if you will, for female writers. It’s a book that’s been considered a rite of passage, I think, in growing up for girls. This is a book that will show you what your options are and to help you find yourself.”
If not for her own lineage, family life, and surroundings, Alcott might never have delivered such a compelling portrayal of life in the March household. Jo’s sisters and mother were fictionalized versions of Alcott’s own family. The fictional Mr. March and the real-life Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father, both had progressive attitudes toward women’s education and equality.
“Louisa was, by nature, a fighter whose rebellious spirit pervades Little Women,” says Eve LaPlante, the author of Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother as well as a cousin of Louisa May Alcott’s and a great niece of Louisa’s mother, Abigail. “Louisa hated the limitations placed on her as a girl. She wanted to run; girls weren’t allowed. She wanted an education; only her male friends and cousins got that. She wanted to enlist to fight in the Civil War; women weren’t allowed. She wanted to vote . . . The list goes on. I think all that pain was funneled into Little Women, a cry of the heart fueled by Louisa’s desire to change things, to reform the world.”
Raised with the foundational belief that women were equal to men and just as entitled to speak their minds and follow their hearts, Louisa evangelized her feminist philosophy to anyone she encountered, and imbued that message into her most enduring narrative. Little Women encourages us all to live up to our potential, to pursue our dreams, and to embrace life to the fullest, no matter the obstacles we encounter—and reminds us to always, always hold close the ones we love.
Writing circa 1878 to a reader who had written to her seeking guidance, Alcott responded: “I can only say to you as I do to the many young writers who ask for advice—there is no easy road to successful authorship; it has to be earned by long and patient labor, many disappointments, uncertainties and trials. We all have our own life to pursue, Our own kind of dream to be weaving . . . And we all have the power To make wishes come true, As long as we keep believing.” — From Gina McIntyre’s introduction to Little Women: A Story for Every Generation.
The frontispiece of the first edition of Little Women from 1868 featured an illustration by May Alcott.
Courtesy Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House
The Alcotts in 1865. Louisa is seated on the ground, while her mother, Abigail May Alcott, stands with her eldest daughter, Anna Alcott Pratt, Anna’s son Frederick in the stroller, and Bronson Alcott. This is the only existing image that shows most of the family together.
Courtesy Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House
Screen adaptations of Alcott’s book are numerous. The 1933 film version of Little Women, directed by George Cukor, featured (left to right): Katharine Hepburn as Jo, Joan Bennett as Amy, Frances Dee as Meg, and Jean Parker as Beth.
Snap/Shutterstock
Jo (June Allyson) and Laurie (Peter Lawford) spent time in her attic In the 1949 film version.
Courtesy Everett
In the 1994 film version of Little Women, Winona Ryder starred as Jo, with Gabriel Byrne playing Professor Bhaer.
Joseph Lederer/Di Novi/Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock
Mr Laurence (Michael Gambon) danced with Aunt March (Angela Lansbury) in a 2018 adaptation that aired on PBS.
Pat Mearns now lives in the naval town of Coronado, Calif., five blocks from her sister-in-law Betty. The two met in the 1950s, before Pat married Betty’s brother Arthur. Back then Pat and Betty worked as TWA “hostesses”—what airline attendants were called in those days —and one Christmas Betty asked Pat, on her way to Phoenix, to deliver a present to her brother at nearby Luke Air Force Base. Pat and Arthur spoke on the phone, and Arthur invited her to a party at his base. Arthur came to pick her up, and when she opened the door and they set eyes on each other, her life changed right there.
Today if you visit the Coronado Museum, you can see Pat’s photo on a poster for their current exhibit called The League of Wives. She is one of five women standing in the White House in 1969 with Richard Nixon. The exhibit springs from a book of the same name, by historian Heath Hardage Lee, which features Pat and those same four other women on the cover. The book came out in April 2019, and its movie rights were bought by actress Reese Witherspoon and Fox 2000.
Pat was meeting with President Nixon in 1969 for the same reason she appeared in LIFE magazine that year: she was on a quest to find out what happened to Arthur.
The headline of LIFE’s story in the Nov. 7, 1969 issue captured the grimness of her situation: Waiting Out the War—Wife or Widow?
Arthur Mears, a major, had been nearing 100 missions flown and was due to come home soon from the war in Vietnam when his F-105 jet was shot down in November 1966. He was seen parachuting from his plane, but Pat did not know if her husband was being held as a prisoner of war, or if he was dead. While also raising their two daughters, Missy and Frances, Pat had written every member of Congress, and met with some of them in Washington. She had gone to Paris as a member of the National League of Families of American Prisoners to meet with representatives from North Vietnam. But no one could tell her about Arthur. In the absence of any information, she continued to believe her husband was alive. She told LIFE back then, “I’m sure that if he were gone I would already have a feeling. We had a kind of special relationship. Both of us could function perfectly well on our own. But together we were so good.”
But soon after the article ran, Pat received heartbreaking news—not from the U.S. government, but from a peace activist who had returned from North Vietnam with a list of war dead that was said to include her husband. Pat then flew from her home in Los Angeles to San Francisco to talk to one of the peace activists, but didn’t get much detail beyond confirmation that Arthur’s name was on the list. “That was quite a blow,” says Pat, who is now 87. It wasn’t until 1977—two years after the war ended and eleven years after her husband was shot down—that the U.S. government informed her that Vietnam had returned the remains of 22 soldiers killed during the war, and that Arthur’s was among them. “The children and I had always kept a little hope—maybe they just don’t know where he was, all those miraculous things you think of at times like that,” Pat says. “Families are collateral damage in a war. That’s what I feel like I became.”
Lee, the author of the League of Wives, says that a military family going through what Pat did would be unthinkable today, and while some of that is because of modern technology, it’s also because of women like Pat who had the courage to speak up and demand the truth. Their grassroots campaigns changed the expectation of what is acceptable. “Now you would never have to jump through those hoops,” Lee says. “It was just ridiculous what they had to do to get basic information.”
Pat now recounts her campaign as being borne out of a larger frustration–not just about Arthur, but also the societal strife of an era defined by riots and protests. She wanted to feel like she was doing something to make the world more right. As the years went on she was gratified to see people raising POW-MIA flags, and to see that the soldiers who returned home after captivity were given a proper welcome, despite the unpopularity of the Vietnam War. “We really had an impact,” she says. “That’s sort of surprising, on the good side, that we really had an impact.”
Pat eventually went back into nursing—that had been her profession, before she quit to seek adventure with TWA (“Back then, flying was fun,” Pat says). A pediatric nurse practitioner, she worked for 27 years in Los Angeles area schools before retiring to Coronado.
In August 2018 Pat and Arthur were honored in a ceremony in Coronado’s Star Park. The occasion was the presentation of a copy of a painting titled “The Letter” that showed her two daughters writing to God, requesting the return of their father from the war. The original painting is in the collection of the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The copy that was presented to Pat had previously hung in the office of F. Edward Hebert, a Louisiana congressman and an ally of the POW-MIA movement.
Pat still feels the loss of her husband. “As time goes by, you get used to things,” she says. “Time is not a healer, but it sure takes the blow off.”
Asked if she ever thought about remarrying, she answers, “When you had the very best, you don’t want to settle for anything else. That’s a little smart alecky of me, but that’s the way I feel.”
With one seat empty, Mearns dined with her children Missy, 11 and Frances. nine.
Mears, second from the left, appeared on the cover of the book League of Wives, a broader look at the women who campaigned for information about soldiers who were missing or prisoners of war.
On the surface, the ghost towns in this special new edition of LIFE might seem to have nothing in common—other than that they were abandoned. Some were once royal residences in the Far East, while others were rustic mining camps in the American West. Some were deserted over the course of many years; others died out virtually overnight. A handful were destroyed due to human calamities (asbestos poisoning, nuclear meltdowns, civil war). Others were obliterated by natural disasters (earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions). Though most of these towns have well-documented pasts, a few remain shrouded in mystery, their ancient secrets replaced with modern lore. One fort in India was supposedly cursed by a tantric magician, while an Italian castle was allegedly the site of a mass murder spurred by one man’s obsessive love.
Despite their considerable differences, many of these once-thriving communities have histories that seem ripped out of adventure yarns. And now told in the thrilling edition of LIFE that’s available here. Here, you’ll find wandering ghosts, vengeful barons, and lost fortunes galore. Above all, these places share a haunted, melancholy beauty: Their desolate streets, decaying houses, and crumbling castles seem to echo with voices from the distant past. “Certain twilights, certain places, try to tell us something,” wrote the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, “or they say something that we ought not to have lost.” In the end, these eerie ruins are a reminder that nothing lasts forever…and that every town will eventually be left to the ghosts.
— J.I. Baker
Cover photo by MisterStock/Shutterstock
A real estate folly, the Turkish Burj Al Babas village was built in 2014 but left abandoned in bankruptcy. Photo by Esin Deniz/iStock/Shutterstock
A tree grew through the remains of this abandoned car in the former mining town of Virginia City, Nevada. Photo by Steve Heap/Shutterstock
At attempt at a Las Vegas-style town in Consonno in northern Italy went sour when 1976 landslides cut off road access. A 2007 rave destroyed some of the town’s surviving buildings. Photo by Andrea Pucci/Moment Open/Shutterstock
Volcanic eruptions in 1995 and ’97 devastated the Monserrat town of Plymouth, which remains largely abandoned. Christopher Pillitz/The Image Bank/Shutterstock
The volcanic activity has left the southern part of Monserrat largely abandoned. Photo by Christopher Pillitz/Photonica/Shutterstock
Once home to cowboys, tourists now haunt the Calico Ghost Town in Barstow, Calif. Photo By Education Images/Universal Images Group/Shutterstock
This tree grew around the head of a Buddha in the ruins of Ayutthaya, Thailand, which was destroyed in battle in 1767. Photo by Samuli Vainionpää/Moment Open/Shutterstock
This church in the Bokor Hill Station in Cambodia was originally used by French colonial elites, and later the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, before falling into ruin. Fujimin/Shutterstock
Thanksgiving is a call to home that not everyone is a position to answer. That’s true for many people for a variety of circumstances (distance, personal health, family strife) and is certainly true for men and women serving in the military overseas or far from home. So it was in November 1942 for the U.S. soldiers who had been sent to Europe to beat back the forces of fascism during World War II.
England showed its appreciation to its American allies by opening Westminster Abbey for a Thanksgiving service. This was an unprecedented gesture. Founded in 960 A.D. by Benedictine monks and, since the 1500s, home to the Church of England, Westminster Abbey has been the site of numerous coronations and Royal weddings. But it had had never hosted a secular service until that day. A reported 3,500 soldiers filled the room, and the service included performances of The Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful.
The photos below show both the Westminster service and a feast afterward, held at an air force station and shared with local children. All around England on that day, Americans and their British hosts shared holiday celebrations. The irony is obvious, as the original Thanksgiving had its seed with pilgrims who had crossed the Atlantic to get away from England.
But with the world at war, with the Americans and the British fighting side by side, a spirit was kindled and embraced. This Thanksgiving, Nov. 26, 1942, showed how the holiday’s meaning can expand to accommodate all kinds of gratitude, and bring all kinds of people together.
Pies, that staple of holiday meals, have proved highly adaptable over their long history. The original versions of the pie, which traced back to Egypt, commonly had meat fillings. The crusts were thick and carried more of the heft of the dish. Sometimes the legs of game birds were left hanging over the edge, to be used as handles. Those early-version pies were also long and thin, rather than the circular shape that sets our mouths watering today.
In America pumpkin pies and pecan pies may grace autumn feasts, peach and cherry pies may cap off summer barbecues, and the pie, in its many varieties, pops up in all sorts of places. The 35-pound game pies at the DuPont family reunion of 1950 invoke that early extravagance—American aristocrats dining in the manner of old European royalty. Yet the pie, in fruit form, shows up naturally in more quaint and rural settings. The church social. The town meeting. The boarding house. The roadside restaurant. Places that are as American as, well, apple pie.
Many of the images in this gallery are as homespun as it gets. And some of the pictures are hilarious. The cream pie is the sweet symbol of an era of vaudevillian slapstick.
Most novel deployment of a pie in a LIFE photograph? That distinction goes to Dean Martin and Peggy Lee, in the photo that closes the gallery.
Caterer William Newman brought 35-pound game pies to a DuPont family reunion in 1950. He had also served the DuPont reunion 50 years earlier.
With his distinctive facial features, comedian Bob Hope remained recognizable after taking a direct hit from a cream pie in 1962, with Soupy Sales and Shirley MacLaine alongside him at a benefit performance in Los Angeles.
