Page 58 – LIFE

A Story of America in 100 Photographs

April 18, 2020April 13, 2020 by Bill Syken

The following is from the introduction to the special issue, LIFE: A Story of America in 100 Photographs, which is available here.

A great photograph tells not one story but many, through what it plainly reveals and what it suggests. And great photographers—like great artists, writers, carpenters, farmers, clergy, all—see beyond the limitations of their talent, beyond their resources, to something more. “Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential,” the LIFE photojournalist W. Eugene Smith once observed. “Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.”

Two of Smith’s photographs (Country Doctor, Burning Cross) appear in LIFE, A Story of America in 100 Photographs. Dozens of the others were taken by his colleagues and peers. Indeed, all of the photos in this story have appeared in the magazine or book or website pages of LIFE, which has long been a chronicler of American life. The images trace back to 1850 (soon after the dawn of photography itself, and shortly before the United States was solidified into the Union (as we know it now) and continue, with gorgeous and colorful aplomb, into the 21^st century. They are delivered here throughout the decades, each image augmented by a body of text, a story in words and facts meant to add context and understanding, meant to illuminate more than to guide.

If a single photo—and the sentences nestled beside it—carries so many strands of meaning, then so does a collection of photos, bearing a narrative that is at once available in discreet pieces and as a whole. This collection. This narrative. The U.S. flag adds a 49th star. Moving trucks fill suburban driveways. Route 66 invites travelers west. Disneyland opens. John F. Kennedy and wife Jacqueline attend his inaugural ball. Marines in Vietnam carry off wounded comrades. A busboy kneels by the fallen Robert F. Kennedy.

It has been said that you don’t take a photograph, you simply borrow it, nabbing a bit of history, adding those hints of possibility, so as to stand, looking forward or back, on the threshold.

This special issue, LIFE: A Story of America in 100 Photographs, is available for purchase here.

Shirley Temple celebrated her eighth birthday at 20th Century Fox in 1936, when, in the middle of the Great Depression, she was the biggest box office star in America.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tears streamed down the cheeks of accordion-playing Chief Petty Officer (USN) Graham Jackson as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s flag-draped funeral train left Warm Springs, Ga., April 13, 1945

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

As America began its move westward, Route 66, here shown in Seligman, Arizona in 1947, took on a special romance for those who yearned to strike out for adventure.

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dr. Ernest Ceriani made a house call on foot, Kremmling, Colo., 1948. The generalist was the lone physician serving a Rocky Mountain enclave that covered 400 square miles.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Truck driver Robert Nuher and his family gathered around the television in 1949, at a time when screens first invaded the American living room. A new station had just debuted in the Nuhers’ hometown of Erie, Pa.

Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Five years after the end of World War II, American soldiers were fighting again, the time in Korea. Here Marine Capt. Francis “Ike” Fenton pondered his fate and the fate of his men after being told that his company was nearly out of ammunition, 1950.

David Douglas Duncan

The Golden Gate Bridge, photographed from a helicopter in 1952.

Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

In the years following World War II, Americans flocked to the suburbs. Here moving trucks arrived at a new planned community in Lakewood, Calif. in 1952.

Photo by J.R. Eyerman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Disneyland opened in 1955 in Anaheim, Calif. Built on what had been 160 acres orange groves and walnut trees, Disneyland wasn’t the world’s first theme park, but it quickly became the standard by which others would be measured.

Photo by Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Billie Holiday, a singular jazz vocalist known for recordings of such songs as “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child,” performed at one of the late night jazz sessions hosted by LIFE photographer Gjon Mili. Holiday, raised partly in a Baltimore brothel and partly in a home for troubled girls, endured childhood sexual abuse and later became addicted to alcohol and heroin, before dying at age 44, in 1959.

Photo by Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

A 49th star was added to the American flag when Alaska joined the union, 1958.

Dmitri Kessel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

President John F. Kennedy, after beginning his presidency with a speech that declared “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” celebrated with his wife Jacqueline at his Inaugural Ball.

Photo by Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

U.S. Marines carried their wounded during a firefight near the southern edge of the DMZ, Vietnam, October 1966. Photographer Larry Burrows, whose images brought home to LIFE readers in full color the horrors taking place in Vietnam’s lush countryside, was killed along with three other photographers when their helicopter was shot down over Laos in 1971.

Larry Burrows/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Football’s escalation in the American consciousness took a great leap forward in 1967, when Bart Starr led the Green Bay Packers to a win over the Kansas City Chiefs at the Los Angeles Coliseum in the first Super Bowl.

Photo by Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The 60s were defined by three assassinations: President John F. Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther Kind, and Senator Robert Kennedy, who in 1968 was making his own run at president. After winning the California primary and giving a victory speech at L.A.’s Ambassador hotel, RFK was fatally shot by Sirhan Sirhan. Seventeen-year-old busboy Juan Romero, who had just shaken Kennedy’s hand, registered the shock of a nation.

Photo by Bill Eppridge/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Cats: Companions in Life

January 14, 2022April 3, 2020 by Bill Syken

The following story comes from the introduction to LIFE’s special issue, Cats: Companions in Life.

One morning, some years ago when I was living in New York City, I gathered Kaya into an old blue shawl and carried him eight blocks to the animal clinic to be put to sleep. He had been my cat since I was in the ninth grade. I named him after the Bob Marley album. “Nineteen years is a long time for a domestic short hair,” the vet said, stroking him.

Kaya still had a little life in him at the end. On the walk over to the clinic he batted at my chin from inside his wrap. I talked to him matter-of-factly, telling him about a recent CNN/New York Times poll that had voted him one of the seven best cats in the Northeast. I often told him things like this over the years: my version of coochy-coochy-coo.

Kaya always tolerated the stuff about the polls, though he must have known he wasn’t all that. Not compared to his brother Korduroy, anyway. Korduroy did things you’d tell people about. He would stand in the road near the STOP sign, for example, and when a car pulled up, he’d jump on the hood and peer into the windshield. Kaya would watch this impassively, and he also looked on when Korduroy engaged in elaborate play-fighting games with the neighbor’s German shepherd. Next to Korduroy, a skilled small-game hunter who knocked on our front door by putting a paw into the mail-slot, Kaya seemed a simpleton.

He was docile and deliberate and he purred a lot. He didn’t much go for killing things but he got into sudden, spirited battles with ball-point pens and dangling extension cords. He had white mittens on his front paws, white knee-length stockings on his hind legs, and soft snowy fur around his muzzle, neck, and breast. Otherwise he was cloaked in a hodgepodge of blacks and browns. He had wide, yellow-green eyes. He lay down a lot.

Among me and my immediate family we’ve had maybe a dozen cats over the years—not including the eight kittens that once roamed my parents’ house after Palaleela had her litter—and there is no question that in matters of decency and kindness Kaya was the best of the lot. He let Korduroy eat first. He put up with two-year-olds who tugged his tail. He kept you company. Many cats are keen to human suffering, but none was keener than Kaya. When someone was sad, Kaya always came around. “Mow,” he’d say, and look up at you.

Kaya appreciated good, simple things: being brushed with a fine comb, warm chicken scraps, a scratch behind the ears, weekends on the Cape, a place to sleep at the foot of the bed. How often do we celebrate the life of a cat?

Maybe it was because he didn’t know any tricks that in the last few years of his life, Kaya began to talk. He mewed incessantly. His most common issuance was a loud, plaintive wail that sounded more like a human baby than any animal I’ve heard. “Dude, you’ve got a kid over there?” friends would say during phone conversations. My professional acquaintances knew him too. I’d be interviewing someone, and when Kaya’s voice filled the phone lines I’d sense the person on the other end ignoring it uncomfortably. “I know,” I’d say to Kaya afterward, “it can be hard to be a cat.”

Kaya delivered other sounds besides that trademark yowl. He had a two-beat high-pitched me-ow for when he was playing happily or anticipating food. He gave a short, chirplike mew as a greeting when he walked into a room. His long trilling mew meant he wanted to go out. A low, guttural “reowwl” said he was encountering another cat. An airy half-mew, half-yawn meant he was waking up, and Kaya’s odd, unnerving series of yips told you he sensed a thunderstorm on its way. Whatever Kaya’s agenda, the only sure way to quiet him was to take him onto your lap.

The mewing became a backdrop to my life that did not fade until the very end. When I made the appointment at the clinic, Kaya had been sick for several weeks. Thyroid condition. He slept nearly all the time and he couldn’t keep his medicine down. He stopped jumping up onto the bed at night. He kept to a corner of the apartment, venturing out every few hours to stare into his water dish and take a few half-hearted laps. When his mewing died down, a strange silence settled upon the apartment. Around that time he stopped eating.

It got to me, of course. I tried to tempt him with his favorite foods. Friends came over to tell Kaya good-bye. The night before we went to the clinic I was sitting on the couch—quiet, glum, and staring off. I guess Kaya could tell I was in a rotten way. I looked down when I felt him rubbing weakly against my shins. He peered up at me. “Mow,” he said, and then he slumped back over to the corner to rest.

The next morning I carried him in the crook of my arm. I talked to him as if nothing were wrong. At the clinic I set him on a table in a small greenish room and stroked him until I could feel a faint purr in his breast. The vet was there too, and Kaya, with what seemed like great effort, gave a final, soft meow.

His life was gentle, I tell people, and you could have learned from him.

The special issue Cats: Companions in Life is available for purchase here.

Yevgen Romanenko/Moment/Shutterstock

Kittens can sleep up to 20 hours a day, but this one woke all the way up to smile for the camera.

jdross75/Shutterstock

This fluffy cat was in a playful mood; feline personalities begin to emerge at around five weeks, which is when they begin to be weaned.

Evdoha_spb/Shutterstock

Ancient Egyptians honored cats by preserving them as mummies.

Daniel Simon/Gamma-Rapho/Shutterstock

A Bengal cat named Tobysden Pyrrha posed for a studio portrait after participating in the 2018 GCCF Supreme Cat Show in Birmingham, England.

Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage/Shutterstock

This boy, a Dutch billiards prodigy, fed cream to his cat in 1953.

Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Brownie drank milk straight from the cow as Blackie waited his turn at a dairy farm in Fresno, Calif., in 1953.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

It looks like this dog, cat and mouse were considering acting out the food chain, but this was in fact a friendly gathering of the household pets of the Lyng family in Denmark, 1955.

Jytte Bjerregaard Muller/The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

This Siamese cat escaped up a pole in Carlsbad, N.M. in 1962, and hoped the cocker spaniel in pursuit would obey the sign.

Bettmann/Shutterstock

Sometimes cats and dogs do get along.

Chris Swanda/EyeEm/Shutterstock

Diana wrote in her diary at the desk in her sitting room in Kensington Palace.

DenisNata/Shutterstock

Oscar, a hospice cat, who had an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients were going to die, walked past an activity room at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, R.I. David Dosa profiled Oscar in his 2011 book, “Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.

Stew Milne/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Scarlett the cat, whose eyes were singed shut after saving her kittens during a building fire, snuggled with her new owner, writer Karen Wellen in 1997; Scarlett’s eyes healed.

Taro Yamasaki/The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

The Influenza Outbreak of 1957

March 18, 2020March 18, 2020 by Bill Syken

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.

Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

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.

Edward Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

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.

Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The production of the flu vaccine.

Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Crates of flu vaccine were rushed by helicopter from Cyanamid’s Lederle Labs to New York.

Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Surgeon General Dr. Leroy E. Burney (center) spoke during the influenza epidemic.

Edward Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

In October 1957 the flu landed at the Dixon State School in Illinois, which worked with children who were intellectually disabled.

Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Doctors treated influenza patients at the Dixon State School.

Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

This sign announced restrictions to visitors at the Dixon State School.

Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Little Women: Quietly Revolutionary

February 19, 2020January 15, 2020 by resolute

By Gina McIntyre

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 photos in this gallery are a sampling from the print edition of LIFE’s tribute to this touchstone of American literature.

Little Women: A Story for Every Generation

Columbia Pictures/Entertainment Pictures/Alamy

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.

© PBS/BBC/Courtesy Everett

Emma Watson, playing Meg, received guidance from director/writer Greta Gerwig during the filming of the 2019 version of Little Women.

Wilson Webb/Sony Pictures/PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

Florence Pugh, as Amy, burned Jo’s manuscript in a fit of rage in the 2019 film version of Little Women.

Wilson Webb/Sony Pictures/PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

Saoirse Ronan as Jo and Timothee Chalamet as Laurie in the 2019 version of Little Women.

Wilson Webb/Sony Pictures/PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

Orchard House, the childhood home of Louisa May Alcott in Concord, Mass., served as the setting for Little Women.

Andrew O’Brien/Alamy

Louisa’s writing desk, built by her father, has a prominent place in her room at Orchard House, Concord, Mass.

Courtesy Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House

50 Years Later: A Wife’s War at Home

April 15, 2020November 4, 2019 by resolute

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.

Photo by Vernon Merritt III/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Mearns hosted a gathering for families of missing soldiers in 1969.

Photo by Vernon Merritt III/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Mearns walked with her children. “Families are collateral damage in a war,” she says.

Photo by Vernon Merritt III/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

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.

Ghost Towns: The Places That Time Forgot

October 28, 2021October 23, 2019 by resolute

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

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