“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” James Thurber’s classic 1939 short story, is a tribute to the sometimes unsettling power of the human imagination. It’s also very, very funny.
The most recent movie adaptation of the Mitty story, from 2013, starred Ben Stiller in the titular role as the archetypal nebbish who retreats into an intensely vivid fantasy world in times of stress. (The first film version of Mitty, starring Danny Kaye, was released in 1947.) In this rendition of the tale, Stiller plays a photo editor at LIFE magazine—still publishing, thanks to the magic of the movies—and much of the film is set in the meticulously recreated offices of the storied weekly. In those offices, meanwhile, hang poster-sized versions of LIFE magazine covers through the years.
The covers are stirring and iconic—and, for the most part, they’re fake.
Or rather, the majority of the LIFE covers one sees in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty were never covers at all. The pictures on the covers in this gallery, for example—the launch of Apollo 11; Jayne Mansfield luxuriating in a swimming pool; a theater audience watching the first-ever 3-D feature-length film—are, indisputably, classic LIFE images. But none of them ever graced the cover of LIFE magazine.
“When we were selecting photos for the LIFE covers in Walter Mitty,” said Jeff Mann, the production designer on the film, “we focused on pictures that would serve the story we were telling, but that would also capture the diversity of what LIFE covered in its prime. We worked really, really hard to select photos that were novel, naïve in the best possible way and that featured significant twentieth-century people, places and events.”
In the end, Mann said, he and his team and Stiller, who is a photography aficionado, felt that the photos they chose to use as covers, from the literally millions of pictures in LIFE’s archive, had to somehow “convey the influence of LIFE magazine, while at the same time helping to move our story along. It was a fabulous problem, and one we had a lot of fun working to solve.”
Here, then, are a number of LIFE covers that never were—including several that, in light of how wonderful they look—perhaps should have been covers, after all.
LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
If there’s one thing humans like to do, it’s label ourselves and one another. Sometimes those labels, applied to vast numbers of people, are obviously laudatory (The Greatest Generation). Sometimes they’re pitying (The Lost Generation). Sometimes they’re duly withering (The Me Generation). And sometimes, at least in the moment, they’re just plain accurate.
In June 1954, LIFE magazine published an article titled “The Luckiest Generation” that, revisited decades later, feels like an almost perfect snapshot of a certain segment of American society at a particular moment in the nation’s history. We’ll let LIFE set the scene:
The morning traffic and parking problems became so critical at the Carlsbad, N.M., high school that school authorities in 1953 were finally forced to a solution: they set aside a special parking area for students only. In Carlsbad, as everywhere else, teenagers are not only driving new cars to school but in many cases are buying them out of their own earnings. These are the children who at birth were called “Depression babies.” They have grown up to become, materially at least, America’s luckiest generation.
Young people 16 to 20 are the beneficiaries of the very economic collapse that brought chaos almost a generation ago. The Depression tumbled the nation’s birth rate to an all-time low in 1933, and today’s teenage group is proportionately a smaller part of the total population than in more than 70 years. Since there are fewer of them, each in the most prosperous time in U.S. history gets a bigger piece of the nation’s economic pie than any previous generation ever got. This means they can almost have their pick of the jobs that are around. . . . To them working has a double attraction: the pay is good and, since their parents are earning more too, they are often able to keep the money for themselves.
A few things to point out here. First, and most disheartening, is the racial makeup of the “teenage group” that LIFE focused on, at least pictorially, in that 1954 article: there are no people of color.
Second, the nature of the boon of the improbable and unprecedented good fortune that befell these kids is not that they’re spoiled rotten, or that every possible creature comfort has been handed to them. Instead, it’s that they have the opportunity to work at virtually any job they choose. “They are often able to keep the money” that they earn.
So, yes, they were lucky and compared to countless generations of youth who came before, all over the world, white working- and middle-class teens in 1950s America were, for the most part, incredibly lucky. But unlike the entitled creatures that most of us would count as the “luckiest” (and the most obnoxious) among us these days, the teens profiled in LIFE in 1954 don’t look or feel especially coddled.
They look secure. They look confident. They look, in some elemental way, independent. They’re learning, day by day, what it means to make one’s way in the world.
In that sense, maybe they were the luckiest generation, after all.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
In an aura of fun and well-being, students danced at weekly Sock Hops in a Carlsbad high school gyn. The music was provided by a 12-piece student band.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cars of Carlsbad High students in their parking lot.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An electrician, Jack Harris, 16, still in school, picked up good pay doing part-time repair jobs.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A young sales girl holding up a blouse to a store customer.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A young investor, David Lenske, 17, having bought four shares of A.T.&T., talked with a banker.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation: 1950s Teenagers
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The prosperous pay-off of after-school jobs brought Mike Sweeney and Harold Riley (right) with Pat Marsh (left) and Nita Wheeler, all 17, to Carlsbad’s Red Barn restaurant, a favorite party spot.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young couples at a formal dance dreamily swaying on the crowded floor of a ballroom lit by a chandelier.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Pay in trade was taken by Margaret High, 17, who worked in a music store and spent her salary on records.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rada Alexander, 19, a bookkeeper, earned $200 a month in a job she got with an auto firm after graduation.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Jere Reid Jr., 17, who bred chinchillas, held one valued at $3,000.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Sonny Thayer, 19, packed for a hunting trip.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Of the three Kennedy brothers John, Robert and Edward who ascended to the national political stage in the 1950s and ’60s, it was arguably the middle brother, Bobby, who best embodied the enormous contradictions at play within that famed American family.
There was, for example, RFK’s fraught relationship with liberals and with American liberalism in general. As the author and historian Sean Wilentz once wrote while reviewing a largely unflattering biography of Kennedy in the New York Times:
Robert F. Kennedy always irked liberals; and they always irked him. . . . Kennedy’s association with the reckless Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s forever tainted his reputation in some reform circles. As his brother’s presidential campaign manager in 1960, and thereafter as attorney general, he struck many liberals as ruthless in the pursuit of power and reluctant in the pursuit of principle, especially regarding civil rights. Kennedy, for his part, regarded his liberal critics as hopeless, sanctimonious losers who put purity above political realism, and who seemed to think that sure-fire defeat was inherently noble.
That Bobby Kennedy was, like his brothers and many of his other relatives, past and present, a titanically driven individual is hardly news. There’s a reason, after all, that he’s still despised today, five decades after his death, by some liberals and most conservatives: he did not fit into a neat, ideological box and then as now neither side knew what to do with a man who refused to act and speak according to their expectations and their rules.
Then there was his relationship with Lyndon Johnson a man who, according to virtually everyone who knew both men, hated Bobby Kennedy with an intensity matched only by RFK’s loathing for his brother’s successor as president.
But Kennedy also had an intellectual and in public, at least an emotional poise that makes most present-day American politicians seem glib and trifling by comparison. (Is there a sitting U.S. senator or representative whom one can picture quoting Herodotus or Sophocles, from memory, as Kennedy so often did?)
Of course, like his brothers especially John Robert Kennedy was also able to immediately and powerfully connect with crowds in a way that most politicians can only envy, and there were certainly people who saw greatness in him and in his future.
“He is one of the half-dozen men in the country today qualified for top political leadership,” one of Lyndon Johnson’s advisers told LIFE writer Robert Ajemian. “He really cares about right and wrong. He cares about people.”
Here, LIFE.com shares photos most of which never ran in LIFE magazine of Kennedy and his extended and immediate family in 1964. The pictures, by LIFE’s George Silk, capture a man who, as Robert Ajemian wrote in the magazine’s July 3, 1964, issue, “had shouldered massive burdens” in the six months since his brother John was gunned down in Dallas the previous November.
A major preoccupation of Bob Kennedy’s in the past six months [Ajemian wrote] has been his family and now it includes his brother’s children, Caroline, who is 6, and John, who is 3. Jackie Kennedy brings them out almost every day to their uncle’s home, Hickory Hill, five miles outside Washington. Bob and [his wife] Ethel spend as much time with them as with their own brood of eight. “They think of it as their own home,” says Jackie Kennedy. “Anything that comes up involving a father, like father’s day at school, I always mention Bobby’s name. Caroline shows him her report cards.”
But even surrounded by so many loved ones, and so busy with speeches and appearances around the country, the rawness of the loss of his older brother was, it seems, never far away. After a speech in Pittsburgh, a reporter asked Kennedy, “What do you miss most about your brother?”
“Kennedy looked startled,” Ajemian reported, “and stared at the reporter as he sought the exact answer. His face softened and he said, ‘Just that he’s not here.'”
Four months after the LIFE cover story, Robert F. Kennedy was elected as the Democratic U.S. Senator from New York. He served until June 6, 1968, when he was assassinated by a gunman named Sirhan Sirhan, while campaigning in Los Angeles for his party’s presidential nomination. Robert Kennedy was 42, four years younger than John Kennedy was when he was killed.
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
ROBERT KENNEDYRobert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Around Thanksgiving in 1954, LIFE published an odd and endearing article, the latest in a string of curiosities the magazine had shared with its readers over the course of two decades. Now, as another Thanksgiving bears down upon us, we thought we’d revisit that long-ago article—and the pictures that accompanied it—as a holiday gift, of sorts, to today’s readers.
Titled “Gaily Garbed Gobblers,” the piece focused on a “Texas farmwoman’s snug halters [designed to] support her turkeys’ sagging crops and boost their market value.” For the uninitiated, a “crop” is a portion of the alimentary tract—usually found in birds, but also in some animals and even insects—where food can be stored prior to digestion.
As LIFE vividly explained the situation in the magazine’s Nov. 22, 1954, issue:
Pecking away in the barnyard, turkeys fill up their crops with food. . . . But occasionally a bird’s crop grows so enlarged it retains food indefinitely, swells out and sags like a goiter. This defect, called “pendulous crop” and possibly an inherited tendency, detracts from the market value of the bird. Discovering pendulous birds on her turkey farm, Mrs. Wyatt McLaughlin of Lockney, Tex., tried massage and surgery without success. Then she turned to well-established principles of the lingerie trade. Sewing together halters, she fitted them to the birds, found they uplifted the crops gently but firmly, reducing the sag and allowing grain to pass along more easily.
To omnivores, locavores, vegetarians and vegans everywhere: Happy Thanksgiving, and whatever we all choose to eat, here’s hoping that none of us feels overly pendulous afterward.
In November 1990 LIFE magazine published a photograph of a young man named David Kirby his body wasted by AIDS, his gaze locked on something beyond this world surrounded by anguished family members as he took his last breaths. The haunting image of Kirby on his death bed, taken by a journalism student named Therese Frare, quickly became the one photograph most powerfully identified with the HIV/AIDS epidemic that, by then, had seen millions of people infected (many of them unknowingly) around the globe.
Here, LIFE.com shares the deeply moving story behind that picture, along with Frare’s own memories of those harrowing, transformative years.
“I started grad school at Ohio University in Athens in January 1990,” Frare told LIFE.com. “Right away, I began volunteering at the Pater Noster House, an AIDS hospice in Columbus. In March I started taking photos there and got to know the staff and one volunteer, in particular, named Peta who were caring for David and the other patients.”
David Kirby was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. A gay activist in the 1980s, he learned in the late Eighties while he was living in California and estranged from his family that he had contracted HIV. He got in touch with his parents and asked if he could come home; he wanted, he said, to die with his family around him. The Kirbys welcomed their son back.
Peta, for his part, was an extraordinary (and sometimes extraordinarily difficult) character. Born Patrick Church, Peta was “half-Native American and half-White,” Frare says, “a caregiver and a client at Pater Noster, a person who rode the line between genders and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.”
“On the day David died, I was visiting Peta,” Frare told LIFE. “Some of the staff came in to get Peta so he could be with David, and he took me with him. I stayed outside David’s room, minding my own business, when David’s mom came out and told me that the family wanted me to photograph people saying their final goodbyes. I went in and stood quietly in the corner, barely moving, watching and photographing the scene. Afterwards I knew, I absolutely knew, that something truly incredible had unfolded in that room, right in front of me.”
“Early on,” Frare says of her time at Pater Noster House, “I asked David if he minded me taking pictures, and he said, ‘That’s fine, as long as it’s not for personal profit.’ To this day I don’t take any money for the picture. But David was an activist, and he wanted to get the word out there about how devastating AIDS was to families and communities. Honestly, I think he was a lot more in tune with how important these photos might become.”
Frare pauses, and laughs. “At the time, I was like, Besides, who’s going to see these pictures, anyway?“
By some estimates, as many as one billion people have seen the now-iconic Frare photograph that appeared in LIFE, as it was reproduced in hundreds of newspaper, magazine and TV stories all over the world focusing on the photo itself and (increasingly) on the controversies that surrounded it.
Frare’s photograph of David’s family comforting him in the hour of his death earned accolades, including a World Press Photo Award, when published in LIFE, but it became positively notorious two years later when Benetton used a colorized version of the photo in a provocative ad campaign. Individuals and groups ranging from Roman Catholics (who felt the picture mocked classical imagery of Mary cradling Christ after his crucifixion) to AIDS activists (furious at what they saw as corporate exploitation of death in order to sell T-shirts) voiced outrage. England’s high-profile AIDS charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, called for a ban of the ad, labeling it offensive and unethical, while powerhouse fashion magazines like Elle, Vogue and Marie Claire refused to run it. Calling for a boycott of Benetton, London’s Sunday Times argued that “the only way to stop this madness is to vote with our cash.”
“We never had any reservations about allowing Benetton to use Therese’s photograph in that ad,” David Kirby’s mother, Kay, told LIFE.com. “What I objected to was everybody who put their two cents in about how outrageous they thought it was, when nobody knew anything about us, or about David. My son more or less starved to death at the end,” she said, bluntly, describing one of the grisly side effects of the disease. “We just felt it was time that people saw the truth about AIDS, and if Benetton could help in that effort, fine. That ad was the last chance for people to see David a marker, to show that he was once here, among us.”
David Kirby passed away in April 1990, at the age of 32, not long after Frare began shooting at the hospice. But in an odd and ultimately revelatory twist, it turned out that she spent much more time with Peta, who himself was HIV-positive while caring for David, than she did with David himself. She gained renown for her devastating, compassionate picture of one young man dying of AIDS, but the photographs she made after David Kirby’s death revealed an even more complex and compelling tale.
Frare photographed Peta over the course of two years, until he, too, died of AIDS in the fall of 1992.
“Peta was an incredible person,” Frare says. All these years later, the affection in her voice was palpable. “He was dealing with all sorts of dualities in his life he was half-Native American and half-White, a caregiver and a client at Pater Noster, a person who rode the line between genders, all of that but he was also very, very strong.”
As Peta’s health deteriorated in early 1992 as his HIV-positive status transitioned to AIDS the Kirbys began to care for him, in much the same way that Peta had cared for their son in the final months of his life. Peta had comforted David; spoken to him; held him; tried to relieve his pain and loneliness through simple human contact and the Kirbys resolved to do the same for Peta, to be there for him as his strength and his vitality faded.
Kay Kirby told LIFE.com that she “made up my mind when David was dying and Peta was helping to care for him, that when Peta’s time came and we all knew it would come that we would care for him. There was never any question. We were going to take care of Peta. That was that.
“For a while there,” Kay remembers, “I took care of Peta as often as I could. It was hard, because we couldn’t afford to be there all the time. But Bill would come in on weekends and we did the best we could in the short time we had.”
Kay describes Peta, as his condition worsened in late 1991 and 1992, as a “very difficult patient. He was very clear and vocal about what he wanted, and when he wanted it. But during all the time we cared for him, I can only recall once when he yelled at me. I yelled right back at him he knew I was not going to let him get away with that sort of behavior and we went on from there.”
Bill and Kay Kirby were, in effect, the house parents for the home where Peta spent his last months.
“My husband and I were hurt by the way David was treated in the small country hospital near our home where he spent time after coming back to Ohio,” Kay Kirby said. “Even the person who handed out menus refused to let David hold one [for fear of infection]. She would read out the meals to him from the doorway. We told ourselves that we would help other people with AIDS avoid all that, and we tried to make sure that Peta never went through it.”
“I had worked for newspapers for about 12 years already when I went to grad school,” Therese Frare says, “and was very interested in covering AIDS by the time I got to Columbus. Of course, it was difficult to find a community of people with HIV and AIDS willing to be photographed back then, but when I was given the okay to take pictures at Pater Noster I knew I was doing something that was important important to me, at least. I never believed that it would lead to being published in LIFE, or winning awards, or being involved in anything controversial—certainly nothing as epic as the Benetton controversy. In the end, the picture of David became the one image that was seen around the world, but there was so much more that I had tried to document with Peta, and the Kirbys and the other people at Pater Noster. And all of that sort of got lost, and forgotten.”
Lost and forgotten or, at the very least, utterly overshadowed until LIFE.com contacted Frare, and asked her where the photo of David Kirby came from.
“You know, at the time the Benetton ad was running, and the controversy over their use of my picture of David was really raging, I was falling apart,” Frare says. “I was falling to pieces. But Bill Kirby told me something I never forgot. He said, ‘Listen, Therese. Benetton didn’t use us, or exploit us. We used them. Because of them, your photo was seen all over the world, and that’s exactly what David wanted.’ And I just held on to that.”
After the Benetton controversy finally subsided, Therese Frare went on to other work, other photography, freelancing from Seattle for the New York Times, major magazines and other outlets. While the world has become more familiar with HIV and AIDS in the intervening years, Frare’s photograph went a long way toward dispelling some of the fear and, at times, willful ignorance that had accompanied any mention of the disease. Barb Cordle, volunteer director at Pater Noster when David Kirby was there, once said that Frare’s famous photo “has done more to soften people’s hearts on AIDS than any other I have ever seen. You can’t look at that picture and hate a person with AIDS. You just can’t.”
In another of Therese Frare’s photos taken in the final moments of David Kirby’s life, goodbyes were said by his caregiver and friend, Peta; David’s father; and David’s sister, Susan.
Therese Frare
Bill Kirby tried to comfort his dying son, David, 1990.
Therese Frare
A nurse at Pater Noster House in Ohio held David Kirby’s hands not long before he died, spring 1990.
Therese Frare
David Kirby, Ohio, 1990.
Therese Frare
David Kirby’s mother, Kay, held a photograph of her son—taken by Ohio photographer Art Smith—before AIDS took its toll.
Therese Frare
Peta, a volunteer at Pater Noster House in Ohio, cared for a dying David Kirby, 1990.
Therese Frare
Peta lay on a couch in a home rented by Pater Noster House, 1991. After the infamous ad ran, Benetton donated money to Pater Noster, some of which was used to furnish the house where Peta and other patients stayed.
Therese Frare
Peta on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, July 1991. “Peta could be a handful at times,” Therese Frare told LIFE.com, “but there was a great deal of joy in our relationship. He wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met.”
Therese Frare
Peta swam in a lake on the Pine Ridge (Lakota) Indian Reservation in South Dakota, during a trip home with photographer Therese Frare in July 1991.
Therese Frare
Peta at the Pine Ridge (Lakota) Indian Reservation in South Dakota, during a trip home with Therese Frare in July 1991.
Therese Frare
Peta in Ohio, 1991.
Therese Frare
Peta in bed at Pater Noster House, 1992.
Therese Frare
Scene at Pater Noster House, Ohio, 1991.
Therese Frare
Peta at Pater Noster House, 1992.
Therese Frare
Peta with Bill and Kay Kirby at Pater Noster House, 1992. “I made up my mind,” Kay Kirby said, “when David was dying and Peta was helping to care for him, that when Peta’s time came—and we all knew it would come—that we would care for him. There was never any question. We were going to take care of Peta. That was that.”
Therese Frare
Kay Kirby administered medicine to Peta via an IV, 1992.
Therese Frare
Peta and Bill Kirby shared a quiet moment together in Peta’s room, Ohio, 1992.
“On the evening of May 20,” begins an article in the June 16, 1941, issue of LIFE magazine, “members of the Young Women’s Republican Club of Milford, Conn., explored the pleasures of tobacco, poker, the strip tease and such other masculine enjoyments as had frequently cost them the evening companionship of husbands, sons and brothers.”
Thus the storied weekly and photographer Nina Leen chronicled the shenanigans that erupted when a group of GOP women got together for an old-fashioned “smoker” (noun: an informal social gathering for men only) on one long, memorable night in southern New England.
Republican women in Connecticut enjoyed a good old-fashioned bacchanal in 1941.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE’s original story made a point of noting that during poker Joan Thornwaite (left) “chewed her cigar fitfully” and “failed to get sick.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The evening had the potential to get genuinely wild, with LIFE reporting that “spiked punch is dished out to the [night’s performers] and local reporters.” Alas, “no one got tight.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Young Women’s Republican Club of Milford, Conn., 1941.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Performers scheduled for later in the evening savored their corncob pipes in a dressing room. LIFE noted the corncobs would likely be a one-time enjoyment: “It wouldn’t do in Milford.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Perhaps the most provocative part of the evening involved that perennial staple (in myth, if not in fact) of male get-togethers: the strip tease. It began with “peeling inconsequential garments” after which the ladies reemerged “in kimonos.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE described the “Hefty Ballet” as “a choreographic burlesque devised by a local instructor.” No explanation was given as to why the women imagined that men at a smoker customarily enjoyed a bit of ballet with their booze, cigars and strippers.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE deemed the tap dance executed by Miss Connie Mohr the “best act technically in show.”
Nina Leen/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Between numbers, tap dancer Mohr got a light from “elocutionist” Kathryn Keller. LIFE characterized the encounter thus: “Butt meets butt on backstage stairs.”
Nina Leen/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Before the women could stage a comic wrestling match, they had to get into costume— an affair that included women stuffing themselves “full of muscles.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Properly attired for their wrestling match, it was time to begin. This photograph captured the moment that the “[g]rapplers come to grips.”
Nina Leen/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE on the battle: “Huffing and puffing, they punish the mat.” Joan Thornwaite (back to camera) “won by tickling in five minutes.” Note: Her opponent’s mustache was attached to her face with chewing gum.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
One man was allowed to attend the smoker; women stood on him as they “beat their chests in triumph.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
As the game went into the night, the ash trays overflowed and the air got positively “blue.” Reasoning that “if men can take it, so can we,” the women continued.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dawn found the hall filled only with litter: “Porters agreed they hadn’t seen so many butts since [the] State Firemen’s Convention in 1938.” And where were the men? LIFE reported they were “flabbergasted” by the smoker and many “spent the evening playing bingo with abstainers and Democrats at another hall nearby.”
![The evening had the potential to get genuinely wild, with LIFE reporting that "spiked punch is dished out to the [night's performers] and local reporters." Alas, "no one got tight."](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/10/republican-womens-smoker-03-1024x836.jpg "The evening had the potential to get genuinely wild, with LIFE reporting that \"spiked punch is dished out to the [night's performers] and local reporters.\" Alas, \"no one got tight.\"")
![Properly attired for their wrestling match, it is time to begin. This photograph captures the moment that the "[g]rapplers come to grips."](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/10/republican-womens-smoker-11-823x1024.jpg "Properly attired for their wrestling match, it was time to begin. This photograph captured the moment that the \"[g]rapplers come to grips.\"")
![Dawn found the hall filled only with litter: "Porters agreed they hadn't seen so many butts since [the] State Firemen's Convention in 1938." And where were the men? LIFE reports they were "flabbergasted" by the smoker and many "spent the evening playing bingo with abstainers and Democrats at another hall nearby."](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/10/republican-womens-smoker-15-1024x815.jpg "Dawn found the hall filled only with litter: \"Porters agreed they hadn't seen so many butts since [the] State Firemen's Convention in 1938.\" And where were the men? LIFE reported they were \"flabbergasted\" by the smoker and many \"spent the evening playing bingo with abstainers and Democrats at another hall nearby.\"")
