Page 63 – LIFE

See the 20 Times John F. Kennedy Appeared on the Cover of LIFE Magazine

January 6, 2021May 26, 2017 by

The first time the then-future president appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine, in 1953, the story was as light as could be: “LIFE Goes Courting With a U.S. Senator.” Over the course of several pages of photographs, the magazine fawned over the Massachusetts Senator the “handsomest” man in that legislature, 36 at the time, and his 23-year-old fiancée Jacqueline Bouvier. “We hardly ever talk politics,” Jackie told the magazine, alongside images of the two playing softball and football.

Over the course of the next decade, LIFE followed the young politician as he did much more than court. From his presidential victory in 1960 to the trials of governing, the events of his time demonstrated why LIFE and the JFK went together so well. Part celebrity report and part serious world news, the coverage captured the Kennedy magic.

But only a little more than half of the times that JFK appeared as the featured image or story on the magazine’s cover during its 37-year-run took place during that Kennedy decade. (When his face appeared on additional covers throughout the magazine’s publication run, it was as an inset or part of collage.) The rest, starting with the Nov. 29, 1963, issue, were different. After Kennedy’s assassination, his legacy endured. He was, as pictured in a 1966 cover that focuses on his brother Robert’s career, an inescapable figure in the background of the political and cultural history that followed.

July 20, 1953

Cover photo by Hy Peskin.

March 11, 1957.

Cover photo by Hank Walker.

April 21, 1958

Cover photo by Nina Leen.

August 24, 1959

Cover photo by Mark Shaw.

March 28, 1960

Cover photo by Stan Wayman.

November 21, 1960

Cover photo by Paul Schutzer.

December 19, 1960

Cover photo by Stanley Tretick.

January 27, 1961.

Cover photo by Leonard McCombe.

June 9, 1961. Cover photo by Paul Schutzer.

LIFE Magazine

August 4, 1961

Cover photo by Karsh.

July 13, 1961

Cover photo by John Dominis.

November 19, 1963

Cover photo by Karsh, Ottawa.

December 6, 1963.

Cover photo by Fred Ward.

October 2, 1964

July 16, 1965

Cover photo by Mark Shaw.

November 5, 1965

Cover painting by James Fosburgh.

November 18, 1966.

Cover photo by Bill Eppridge.

November 25, 1966

LIFE Magazine

Main cover photo by John Dominis, insert by Zintgraff.

LIFE Magazine

August 7, 1970.

Cover photo by Jaques Lowe.

Behind the Scenes With John Wayne, 1969

December 13, 2019May 25, 2017 by

John Wayne embodied a particular kind of American hero. In 1969, in the wake of what LIFE called a “splendid performance” in True Grit, the magazine examined the life of the American icon and reminded readers that, even though the world was changing rapidly, John Wayne was not.

After all, it was a time when audiences could also opt for a newer kind of star (exemplified in Dustin Hoffman, who shared the magazine’s cover with the Western icon). But John Wayne was still making Westerns, still riding horses, still holding onto his vision of right and wrong.

“Writers have a tendency to make me rough and tough, as if I’m ready to punch someone any minute,” the 62-year-old star told LIFE. “I’m not. I haven’t had a fight in many a year. I do see myself as pretty rough, even cruel on occasion, but never mean, never small, never petty.”

In fact, he wouldn’t even take a part to play a character whom he saw as mean or dishonest. If he was going to kill a man on screen, it had to be for a good narrative reason. Though he rued having once said that he didn’t need to act to do his job (the statement was poorly phrased, he explained to the magazine) it was also clearly the case that the John Wayne audiences still loved to watch on screen was, in many ways, the same man LIFE’s cameras captured on set and with his family.

“The reason I hate age,” he said, “is that I love this work so much.”

John Wayne during filming of the western movie “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne said that while his screen portrayals are comfortingly alike, not all represent his true self.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne during filming of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne and his moviemaking trophies and awards.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne at home with his son Ethan.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The three youngest of Wayne’s seven children—John Ethan, 7; Marisa, 3; Aissa, 13—share the spotlight with Wayne and Pilar, his third wife.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne during filming of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Horses from “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne during filming of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Off camera Wayne went on horseback to survey the 20,000-acre cattle spread near Phoenix in which he was a partner. `I was broke in 1960,” he said to LIFE. “Now I manage my own money.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the set of “The Undefeated” Wayne, surrounded by extras.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The backrub eased the pain of a shoulder separation suffered in a fall from a horse when his saddle slipped.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne on the set of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wayne slept in the custom-built trailer that followed him from location to location. “The only reason I hate age,’ he said, “is that I love this work so much.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Barbra Streisand at 19: Her Broadway Debut

December 13, 2019April 24, 2017 by

Barbra Streisand can boast of having more platinum-selling albums than any woman, and of winning an Academy Award. All that success was in front of her in the photos presented here. Back then, she was a 19-year-old making her Broadway debut in a lesser-known Harold Rome musical about the garment business, I Can Get It for You Wholesale.

Somehow, she looks as if she knows what’s coming, even if others didn’t. As LIFE magazine reviewed her performance in the May 18, 1962, issue:

“Barbra has a lovely face that goes well with Cry Me a River and other sad ballads that she sings in nightclubs. But for her stage role she makes herself look like a sour persimmon in order to play an overworked office girl who secretly wants to be called pet names instead of being yelled at all day long, ‘Miss Marmelstein!'” It was at least a kinder review than the one she received in the New York Times, which described Streisand as a “natural comedienne” but also “a girl with an oafish expression, a loud irascible voice and an arpeggiated laugh.”

It was Streisand’s role a few years later as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl that would make a more lasting impression on audiences and critics. As TIME reported in its April 10, 1964, cover story on her breakout, “as she sings number after number and grows in the mind, she touches the heart with her awkwardness, her lunging humor, and a bravery that is all the more winning because she seems so vulnerable. People start to nudge one another and say, ‘This girl is beautiful.'”

She had come a long way from her days as an introverted Brooklyn teen and the years before she removed an “a” from her first name, as a feature in TIME magazine explained:

Her recollections of a Brooklyn girlhood are somber. “It was pretty depressing, and I’ve blocked most of it out of my mind,” she says. She never knew her father. He was a school teacher who died of a cerebral hemorrhage when his daughter Barbara Joan was a year old (1943). Her mother spent the next three years lying in bed, crying, and living on her brother’s Army allotment checks until the checks stopped and she took an office job. Barbara spent her days in the hallways of the six-story brick apartment building they lived in, accepting handout snacks from neighbors.

As a slightly older kid, she used to go up on the rooftop, smoke, and think about being the greatest star. Down in the apartment, her mother warned her never to hold hands with a boy. “I never took part in any school activities or anything,” Barbra remembers. “I was never asked out to any of the proms, and I never had a date for New Year’s Eve. I was pretty much of a loner. I was very independent. I never needed anybody, really.”

…When she was 14, she made her first trip out of Brooklyn a subway ride to Manhattan to see The Diary of Anne Frank. “I remember thinking that I could go up on the stage and play any role without any trouble at all,” she says. After school at home, she used to smoke in the bathroom and do cigarette commercials into the mirror, but she never bothered to go out for school plays. “Why go out for an amateurish high school production when you can do the real thing?”

By the time the TIME cover story came out, Streisand’s three albums already made her the world’s best-selling female recording star on LP. And so much more was yet to come.

Nineteen-year-old Barbra Streisand played Miss Marmelstein in the 1962 Broadway play “I Can Get It For You Wholesale.”

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Barbra Streisand, 1962.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elliot Gould, who played the show’s unscrupulous hero, sang to his mother, played by Lilian Roth; Gould and Streisand, who met during the show, were married from 1963 to ’71.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lillian Roth and Elliott Gould in a scene from “I Can Get It for You Wholesale.”

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sheree North and Harold Lang in a scene from “I Can Get It for You Wholesale.”

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Barbra Streisand, 1962.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Disturbing Photographs Show Pollution in the Great Lakes Before the Clean Water Act

January 14, 2020April 21, 2017 by

In 1968, two years before the first Earth Day, LIFE magazine dispatched photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to the Great Lakes to capture a crisis.

“Lake Erie, the smallest and shallowest of the five lakes, is also the filthiest; if every sewage pipe were turned off today, it would take 10 years for nature to purify Erie. Ontario is a repository for Buffalo-area filth. Michigan, where 16 billion small fish, called seawives, mysteriously died last year, is a cul-de-sac without an overflow pipe, and if Michigan becomes further polluted, the damage may take 1,000 years to repair,” the magazine explained. “Huron and Superior are still relatively clean, but they are in danger.”

And, statistics aside, the photographs Eisenstaedt produced told the story in lurid browns, oranges and grays, punctuated by the vivid iridescence of the occasional oil slick. As many in the United States were starting to realize, pollution of the American environment seemed to be reaching a point of no return. From that, there was some hope. “For selfish as well as civic reasons, more has been done in the past three years to clean the lakes than in the preceding 30,” the article reported.

Though federal water-protection laws did exist already (the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was 20 years old at that point) they were only just starting to get teeth, and technology that would facilitate a clean-up was improving. In 1972, the law was revamped as the Clean Water Act, and the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency made the lakes a priority. They still are, just as they are still under threat from a variety of sources. Though progress has been made on some fronts—Lake Erie has come back from the “dead—the words of one teenager who wrote to the Secretary of the Interior in the 1960s, and who was subsequently quoted by LIFE, still read as a warning.

“I was truly amazed,” he remarked upon visiting a polluted lakeshore, “that such a great country should not solve this problem before it’s too late.”

Masses of dirty soapsuds glided down Ohio’s Cuyhoga River. Shimmering in sewage, they were bound for Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the Cleveland port, litter was used to build unsightly breakwaters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fred Wittal, shown cleaning a meager perch catch, was the last of the commercial fishermen in his area.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Cuyahoga snaked through Cleveland, carrying a load of detergents, sewage and chemicals to Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This oil melange was waste from U.S. Steel. It is shown on the Grand Calumet River, a Lake Michigan tributary where even worms could no longer survive.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Another problem was natural pollutants such as the red clay delivered by the Big Iron River in Michigan.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the Canadian shore, a slaughterhouse pipe was the best place to try to catch what fish were left.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Detroit River flowed into Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“Beside the deep, clear waters that inspired Longfellow to write “By the shore of Gitche Gumee,” a waterfall of taconite tailings from the Reserve Mining Co.’s plant at Silver Bay, Minn. spilled into Lake Superior at the rate of 20 million tons a year.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Looking like a giant glob of beer foam, pulp wastes from the Hammermill Paper Co. stained Lake Erie’s Pennsylvania shore. The white mess was penned by a dike built of old tires and oil drums, but residue seeped through to foul open waters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In 1968, Lake Erie’s Sterling State Park had been dangerously polluted by septic-tank wastes for eight years, but despite warning signs the state of Michigan still permitted swimming.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White Lake, a five-mile-long catch basin on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, was covered by sewage-fed weeds.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At Green Bay, Wis., paper mill refuse helped turn the municipal beach into a marsh: there had been no swimming there for 25 years.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The beach at Whiting, Ind., 20 miles from Chicago, had been closed for ten years in 1968; Whiting had a problem in common with other lake communities: it had only one sewer system for human refuse and storm waters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lake Michigan’s big polluters were steel mills and refineries, some of which were clustered along the Indiana Harbor ship Canal, an oily caldron running through East Chicago.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A city sewer dumped into a Great Lake.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, nearly raw sewage—71 million gallons a day—gushed into the Niagara River. To the fury of Canadians, it then poured into Lake Ontario.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Rabbit Show

February 10, 2020April 14, 2017 by

The LIFE photo archives are full of mysteries, great and small—and in this case, furry. At some point around 1943, LIFE sent a photographer to cover a Long Island Rabbit Breeders Association show. There are no contact sheets, no notes or captions were saved, and the photographs were never published. All that can be said is that the event was clearly hopping.

However, while these rabbits seem to have been pampered pets bred for show, one possible reason why rabbit breeding might have been pursued at the time was a lot more practical.

“During the wartime era, when meat was rationed, rabbit breeding was promoted by the USDA as an inexpensive way to raise meat for your own family,” says Margo DeMello, anthropologist and president of the House Rabbit Society, who co-authored Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature. “Many breeders sell them as meat and pets, and that was certainly the case in the ’40s, so these rabbits shows would’ve appealed to both audience.”

The history of cuniculture—the agricultural practice of breeding and raising domestic rabbits—of course goes back much further than that. The Romans kept rabbits in walled gardens known as leporaria. Since rabbit meat was thought to be an aphrodisiac and a fertility aid for women, rabbit breeding was a female-dominated industry. “Men would be responsible for larger animals, and women would be responsible for smaller animals that could be raised at home, closer to the children,” says DeMello, whose nine rabbits reside in their own wing of her home with their own private courtyard outside Albuquerque, N.M. (alongside six chihuahuas, three cats and a parrot).

And, though the WWII push for rabbit consumption might unnerve the Easter bunny, breeding rabbits as food does have Easter-time roots. Catholic monks in southern France are believed to have been some of the first people to domesticate rabbits, and are said to have popularized the practice at their monasteries throughout the Middle Ages, at which point the church apparently considered the ancient delicacy of “laurice” rabbit fetuses or newborns more like fish than animal meat, thus allowing them to be eaten during Lent.

1943 Rabbit Show

Marie Hansen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Easter in Jerusalem: LIFE Takes a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1955

March 28, 2024April 13, 2017 by

More than half a century ago, LIFE dispatched photographer Dmitri Kessel to Jerusalem to observe the rituals that took place there as Christians of all stripes gathered to celebrate Easter and Christmas in the places most holy to their tradition. The resulting story, published in 1955 under the headline “Holy Days in the Holy Land,” focused heavily on the Christmas-in-Bethlehem side of things, as befitted its Dec. 26 issue date. But it was an image of Protestants from England and the U.S. at a tomb outside Jerusalem, the first image presented here, that won pride of place as the last photograph in the issue.

Although the rest of Kessel’s Easter photographs were not published at the time, notes filed in the LIFE archives make it possible to learn a good deal about his trip to Jerusalem. It was common practice at the time for a reporter, correspondent or researcher who would go uncredited in the final story to accompany a photographer on his or her trip. That person would file notes to someone at the magazine, who would use them to craft the language that went with the photographs. Those notes would then be filed away, most likely not to be consulted again, but archived for future research. These particular notes were bound for reporter Jane Wilson, who presumably wrote the photo captions that ran in the magazine, via George Caturani of the magazine’s foreign news service, from Mathilde Camacho of the Paris bureau.

“There were so many celebrations and so many ceremonies going on almost simultaneously during the Easter celebrations in Jerusalem, and so many communities involved that it is difficult to know which is the best way to set them down for you,” Camacho began.

She described the goings-on at the Latin Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian church, the Coptic Church, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Abyssinian Church and the Protestant Churches, witnessed during a long weekend of rites and celebration. Though her detailed captions are difficult to pair with the images after so many decades, they provide insight into the meaning of that time in that place for those people.

“Most of the pilgrims were really old,” she notes in the caption for a photograph of three elderly women from Cyprus who had come with a group of about 1,500 Greek Orthodox pilgrims, “and had been saving for years in order to get enough money for the sea fare from Cyprus to Beiruth and then either the air or the bus fare to Jerusalem.”

Those women, like so many others whom Camacho and Kessel met in Jerusalem, saw their voyage to the Holy Land as a crowning experience in a lifetime full of faith. The pomp and ritual seen in these images is, then, an appropriate reflection of both the joy and solemnity of the Easter season.

Original caption: “At Garden Tomb on Easter, Protestants from England and the U.S. hold services with Rev. A. P. Clark of London presiding and Dr. Billy James Hargis of Tulsa, Okla. (left of table) preaching. Many feel this spot outside Jerusalem more truly represents Christ’s tomb than the Holy Sepulcher inside the city.”

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock