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Celebrate Nurses With a LIFE Cover Story on Nursing in the 1930s

January 31, 2022May 6, 2015 by

National Nurses Week, which begins May 6, recognizes the millions of nurses who make up the backbone of the American healthcare system. And the annual shout-out is more than warranted: A 2014 survey of more than 3,000 nurses found respondents to be stressed out, underslept and — at least in their own estimation — underpaid.

When LIFE featured the profession on its cover in 1938, the career was in a moment of transition. “Once almost any girl could be a nurse,” LIFE explained, “But now, with many state laws to protect the patient, nursing has become an exacting profession.” A candidate needed not only a background in science, but also a combination of “patience, devotion, tact and the reassuring charm that comes only from a fine balance of physical health and adjusted personality.”

Nurses also needed, as they still do, stamina. A typical day in the life of a Roosevelt Hospital School of Nursing student who had been capped — meaning she had successfully completed the probationary period — was described as follows:

Her day begins early. She rises at 6, breakfasts at 6:30, reports to duty at 6:55, has lunch sometime between 12 and 1:30. The rest of the day is consumed with ward duty, two hours of classes, three hours of rest or study. At 7 p.m. she is free to go out on parties, read in the library, dance in the reception room with her fellow nurses or make herself a late supper in the nurses” kitchen.

The photo essay, shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt, was an earnest nod to a group of people responsible not only for the well-being of individual patients, but also the public health of a city and a nation. Their duty, after all, was “to secure the health of future generations.”

Student nurses 1938

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vivid Images of Mexico in 1968

May 5, 2022May 5, 2015 by

In 1968, in advance of the Olympic Games which would take place that summer in Mexico City and draw many international travelers, LIFE dispatched photographer John Dominis to craft a portrait of Mexico. The photographs celebrated the country’s diverse ethnic makeup, its fiestas and its food, as well as its modernizing urban centers. The images were, for many of LIFE’s readers, a first intimate glimpse into life south of the border, and one that presented the richness of the country’s culture.

A fiesta in Guanajuato.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Park dancers in Mexico City.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Plaza singers in Vera Cruz.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Morelia, Mexico, 1968.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Performers in Mexico.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mexico, 1968.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A mariachi band, Mexico.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Incense bearer in Chiapas.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mexico, 1968.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Market, Mexico City.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Market children, San Miguel de Allende.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lily seller, San Cristóbal de las Casas.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fruit stand, Mexico City.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hammock seller, Oaxaca.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Man with balloons, Mexico, 1968.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pinwheel display, Mexico City.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hatful of onions, Vera Cruz.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chamula women participated in a bead and ribbon ceremony called cambio de mayordomo (changing office), Mexico, 1968.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Unloading fowl, Oaxaca.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A woman shelled corn in wicker hampers at a local market.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lunch on the Paseo de la Reforma.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

How LIFE Magazine Covered the Kent State Shootings

January 15, 2020May 4, 2015 by

The bullets National Guardsmen fired into a group of student demonstrators at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, were meant to de-escalate a situation spiraling out of control. Instead, they inspired a host of demonstrations on campuses across the U.S., and left four students dead, one permanently paralyzed and another eight wounded.

The events on that spring day were several days in the making several years, really, taking into account the growing discontent among American students about the war in Vietnam. The week before the confrontation, President Nixon had announced that U.S. combat forces were launching a campaign in eastern Cambodia, to the dismay of many students who opposed the war.

On May 1, several hundred Kent State students attended a peaceful protest during the day, but by nighttime anger had devolved into vandalism and destruction. Over the next several days, rumors circulated that a group of radicals was out to destroy the town. The ROTC headquarters burned, to the cheers of droves of students.

On May 2, fearful that the tensions could not be contained, the mayor asked the governor to call in the National Guard. Despite the Guardsmen’s presence, students held a rally Sunday night and another at noon on Monday. The Guardsmen ordered the crowd to disperse, but it did not. The students threw stones and empty tear gas canisters at the Guardsmen, and the Guardsmen returned fire.

LIFE dedicated its cover to the shooting on May 15, with an image of a wounded student looking skyward. Correspondents interviewed the parents of the dead, two of whom had been protesting and two of whom were passersby caught in the crossfire. Said the father of Allison Krause, who belonged to the former category, “Is this dissent a crime? Is this a reason for killing her?”

An entire spread detailed the final hours of Bill Schroeder, a student who had gone to observe the rally. Schroeder was on an ROTC scholarship, a good student who wrote poetry and hoped to pursue psychology. That night, a statement was issued on the university’s news service: “Schroeder, Wm. K., 19, sophomore, DEAD.”

The words LIFE used to describe the event didn’t equivocate—they condemned:

The upheaval in Kent seemed at its outset to be merely another of the scores of student demonstrations that have rocked U.S. campuses. But before it ended, in senseless and brutal murder at point-blank range, Kent State had become a symbol of the fearful hazards latent in dissent, and in the policies that cause it.

The LIFE Magazine cover depicting Kent State shootings in May 1970.

“Minutes before firing the fatal volleys, embattled Guardsmen knelt and tried to bluff the students into submission by aiming their rifles at them. Then, as students taunted them with jeers and banners and hurled back tear gas cans at them, the troops yielded to regroup–and aim again.”

LIFE Magazine

“Retreating to a knoll, the Guardsmen leveled their guns and aimed and fired into the crowd of students. At the fore was a soldier with a .45-caliber service automatic. Witnesses said the shooting stopped when a man in a fatigue cap (under umbrella at rear) ran out and yelled, ‘Cease fire!’ The Guard’s commanding officer estimated that, in all, about 36 shots were fired by his men.”

LIFE Magazine

Pictures across the top depict three of the students killed in the shooting (left to right): Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer and Allison Krause. Photo at left is of Miller’s father. Photos at bottom depict Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway, crying over Miller’s body.

LIFE Magazine

This spread was devoed to Bill Schroeder, one of the four students who killed in the shooting. Schroeder’s friend told LIFE, “Make sure you say one thing if nothing else. Say that Bill was not throwing rocks or shouting at the Guardsmen. It would never have crossed his mind to do that. He was there watching it and making up his own mind about it and they shot him.”

LIFE Magazine

How the Polio Vaccine Trials Relieved a Worried Nation

January 11, 2021April 24, 2015 by

On April 26, 1954, children at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia, held their breaths as needles penetrated the skin of their upper arms. They were the first of nearly two million volunteers in a three-month trial of epidemiologist Jonas Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine, which would be deemed safe for general use just shy of one year later.

The day before the trials were deemed a success, in April 1955, LIFE published a series of photos by Al Fenn of a nation preparing for wide distribution of the vaccine it desperately hoped would be approved. The National Polio Foundation (now called the March of Dimes) had 27 million vaccine shots ready for release, to be administered to all first- and second-grade students and children who had received a placebo during the 1954 trial. Pharmaceutical companies, too, had chosen not to wait for the announcement to begin their own frantic manufacturing process.

During the early 1950s, polio cases in the U.S. had surged to nearly 60,000, with around one third rendering victims paralyzed. Given parents’ heightened fear for their children’s health in recent years, it didn’t take long for Salk to be hailed a hero:

Tributes ranged down from a citation from the President and a proposal that he be given a special Congressional Medal of Honor to offers of farm equipment. Newspapers in several cities were raising Salk funds and a U.S. senator introduced a bill to give him an annual stipend of $10,000. Salk, 40, who lives on a University of Pittsburgh research professor’s salary and hopes to increase the effectiveness of his vaccine from 80% to 100%, said he would take no money for himself but indicated it would be used for further research.

In the years since the vaccine’s development, polio has been all but eradicated throughout most of the world, save for a few countries where vaccination is not universally available and prevention continues to be a struggle.

Polio vaccine production, 1955

Al Fenn The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Special Beauty of the Utah Desert in the 1940s

December 5, 2019April 23, 2015 by

Utah’s national parks and monuments were established a century ago, in the teens and 1920s, but it wasn’t until the mid- 20th century construction of the Interstate Highway System that station wagons began to snake their way through the American West in droves. In 1947, when LIFE dispatched Loomis Dean to photograph the people and animals that called the desert home, it seemed there were still more sheep in the roads than cars.

Dean’s photos, never published in the magazine, capture the future tourist mecca with nary a track in the sand save for the sheep, the shepherds who herded them and the Native Americans who lived there. Though the images are in black and white, it’s hard not to see the rocks as red and the sky, stretching on forever, as blue. There is something quiet about the photos—you can see the wind in the hair of two children on a mule and the blinding sun on a man’s weathered face, but the noise of traffic and industry is miles away.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Utah Desert, 1947

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Meet the Organizers of the Very First Earth Day

April 22, 2021April 22, 2015 by

“It sounds as if the land has gone mad, and in a way some of it has mad at man’s treatment of his environment.” When LIFE Magazine reported on the first Earth Day, which took place on April 22, 1970, it captured the burgeoning energy of a nascent environmental movement and the young men and women driving toward change.

The magazine’s focus was less on the pollution that threatened the planet than on the faces of the movement determined to curtail it. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, had conceived of an environmental campaign that employed tactics, like the teach-in, of the anti-war movement. But he needed a group of budding young activists to organize it from the ground up.

Nelson enlisted Harvard graduate student Denis Hayes as national coordinator. Hayes brought on classmates Andrew Garling, who would coordinate the Northeast, and Stephen Cotton, who would manage the media campaign. Arturo Sandoval, a Chicano activist, joined the team to manage the Western effort, along with Bryce Hamilton to organize high school students and Barbara Reid to coordinate the Midwest.

The paths they took to their cramped Washington, D.C., headquarters varied widely. Reid, who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s campaign and then for the Conservation Foundation, was the only one with solid credentials in the movement. Hayes, who would go on to be a pioneering influence in solar power, grew up in the forests and streams of southwest Washington but focused his prior activism on the Vietnam War, as did Garling. Cotton came up as a student journalist during the civil rights movement, and Sandoval had organized Chicano students and laborers to fight against discrimination.

From a dingy office above a Chinese restaurant, the team orchestrated a history-making event. When the day they’d been working toward finally came, 20 million Americans took to the streets to rally for a more earth-conscious society, and the modern environmental movement was born. As dire as the problems that faced the environment were, Hayes maintained an optimistic outlook. As he told LIFE, “There’s no survival potential in pessimism.”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Earth Day staffers, 1970

John Olson The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Denis Hayes, coordinator of the first Earth Day, 1970.

John Olson The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Earth Day staffers, 1970

John Olson The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Barbara Reid, one of the organizers of the first Earth Day celebration, 1970.

John Olson The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Earth Day staffers, 1970

John Olson The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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