As any parent knows, the only certainty about children is that they’ll constantly surprise you. For instance: a child given the choice between, say, a sweet treat and a notoriously sour, wince-inducing fruit will always, always choose the sweet treat. Right? It stands to reason. After all, what kid doesn’t love candy or chocolate or (better yet) ice cream?
What kid, indeed! Meet young Michael Thomas Roesle. As LIFE told its readers in a Feb. 1948 Miscellany feature in the magazine:
One day when he was 9 months old Michael Thomas Roesle was squirming on his mother’s lap while she tried to serve tea to a neighbor. Inevitably Michael Thomas got his hands on a slice of lemon and popped it into his mouth. A gargantuan pucker swept across his face, wrinkling it like an old prune. But Michael Thomas manfully continued to chew. Then he reached eagerly for another slice. Now his parents, who live in Richmond, Calif., have to keep a bag of lemons handy all the time . . . and Michael Thomas eats them by the dozen. In fact, he picks them over chocolate ice-cream cones 10 times out of 10.
So — here’s to Michael Thomas, and the countless other kids everywhere who manage, simply by being themselves, to confound all expectations and make life so perfectly, marvelously unpredictable.
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Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
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Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
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Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
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Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
When the Great Alaska Earthquake convulsed the south-central region of that vast state on March 27, 1964, the energy released by the upheaval— the largest quake in recorded North American history—was, LIFE magazine reported, “400 times the total [energy] of all nuclear bombs ever exploded” until that time. The event unleashed a colossal 200,000 megatons of energy, destroying buildings and infrastructure in Anchorage and far beyond; raising the land as much as 30 feet in some places; and sparking a major underwater landslide in Prince William Sound, which killed scores of people when the resulting waves slammed into Port Valdez.
When all was said and done, the 9.2-magnitude quake—which struck around 5:30 in the evening on Good Friday—and its many powerful aftershocks caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage; killed more than 130 people (including more than a dozen tsunami-related deaths in Oregon and California) and; in ways literal and figurative, forever altered the Alaskan landscape in places such as Anchorage, Seward and Valdez.
Here, LIFE.com presents photos—many of them never published in LIFE—from the cataclysm’s aftermath.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Anchorage, Alaska, in the aftermath of the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The earthquake split the Turnagain section of Anchorage with a criss-cross of deep fissures in the ground, heaving the smashed homes up at crazy angles.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Aftermath of the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, Alaska.
Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Aftermath of the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, Alaska.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Aftermath of the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, Alaska.
Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Alaskans prayed after the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ben Henry, 10, sat on bowling-game table in the Anchorage American Legion Hall as his sister Genevieve slept by the pins. Everything in their house was destroyed.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
People received medical treatment after the March 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, Alaska.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Alaska earthquake, 1964.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the March 1964 Good Friday earthquake, Alaska.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Relief supplies were unloaded after the March 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, Alaska.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the March 1964 Good Friday earthquake, Alaska.
Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the March 1964 Good Friday earthquake, Alaska.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the March 1964 Good Friday earthquake, Alaska.
Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the March 1964 Good Friday earthquake, Alaska.
Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the March 1964 Good Friday earthquake, Alaska.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the March 1964 Good Friday earthquake, Alaska.
Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the March 1964 Good Friday earthquake, Alaska.
Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In downtown Anchorage, the buildings and the pavement dropped 20 feet, dividing Fourth Avenue into two levels and leaving a weird jumble of signs.
Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
From the cartoons such as Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbesthat have long livened up the daily newspaper to the graphic novels of more recent vintage such as Watchmen and Maus, comics have proven to be a wonderfully expansive form of American art. Comics can provide readers with a quick laugh or a deep journey, and they can enchant young and old alike.
In tribute, LIFE.com offers vintage photos of men, women and children disappearing into the comics. From the young girl waiting outside the Anchorage supermarket to the soldiers on a break in Korea, having a comic in your hand meant that your imagination had a place to go.
Also included in the gallery are images of hearings in 1954 held by the U.S. Senate over whether a certain stripe of violent comics were contributing to juvenile delinquency. The hearings led to the comics industry adopting its own ratings system. Another photo in this gallery shows Henry A. Wallace, who served as Vice President under Franklin Roosevelt from 1941 to 1945, examining the funny pages while dressed in a suit, a reminder of how comics have enjoyed a truly broad appeal.
A sailor read a comic book aboard the USS Doran in 1942.
Thomas McAvoy/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A mother read her children the comics while traveling on the “El Capitan” train between Chicago and Los Angeles, 1945.
Sam Sher/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A young boy read a comic strip while his leash-tethered dog waited forlornly for their walk to continue, 1944.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Former Vice President and Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace read the comics, 1946.
Walter B. Lane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Turkish soldier looked at an American comic book with a Korean girl during the Korean War, 1951.
Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A boy escaped from his haircut, Garden City, New York, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Religious comic books, 1943.
Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Private Ernest Dandou read a comic book at paratrooper camp, Georgia, 1944.
Frank Schersche/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A young girl read a comic book at an Anchorage, Alaska, supermarket in 1958.
Dmitri Kessel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Actress Buff Cobb (one-time wife of journalist Mike Wallace) read comic books at home in 1946.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two Dutch children read comic books, Netherlands, 1953.
Nat Farbman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Comic book artist Bob Kane, who created Batman, posed with his iconic illustrations, 1966.
Yale Joel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency focused on the “dangers” posed by comic books.
Yale Joel/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency focused on the “dangers” posed by comic books.
Yale Joel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Boys shopped for comic books, Des Moines, Iowa, 1945.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Cartoonist Chester Gould sat on a wall beside a cemetery where he “buried” vanquished villains from his “Dick Tracy” comic strip, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
These boys read comic books during a speech by Dwight Eisenhower in Montana, 1952.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Turkish boy (center) rented out comic books to local children to support his family in the Philippines in 1945.
Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American troops read comic books during the Korean War, 1951.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Lieutenant Frank Hensley read a comic book after loading cargo on plane, 1950.
Joseph Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A father readsthe Sunday comics to his daughter, 1946.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Reading a comic book while traveling on a Pullman car, 1945.
Even in America, where poetry is largely looked upon as an elitist indulgence rather than a cultural force to be reckoned with, Robert Frost’s works—or parts of his works—are familiar to vast numbers of people. They might not know that the words were first penned by the Bard of New England, but men and women who haven’t cracked a volume of poetry in decades still recognize Frost’s most memorable lines and, above all, his inimitable images:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
— From “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
— From “Mending Wall”
Then there’s the famously short, sharp “Fire and Ice,” first published in December 1920:
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry—one of a very small handful of writers to have won so many—and remains, a full half-century after his death in 1963, one of the most celebrated and popular American literary voices of the 20th century. Here, LIFE.com pays tribute to the man (b. March 26, 1874, in San Francisco) and the artist with a series of photos made by Howard Sochurek in England in 1957.
When 83-year-old Robert Frost went to England this summer [LIFE told its readers] it was officially to receive that country’s highest scholastic acclaim, honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. Unofficially, it was a fine opportunity for the famous American poet to “round off his life,” as he put it, and revisit the peaceful haunts of Gloucestershire where he had lived as a younger man. In 1912, unknown as a poet in the U.S., Frost had begun a two-and-a-half-year sojourn in England and his first two books, “A Boy’s Will” and “North of Boston”, were published by an English firm. Accompanying him on his nostalgic return was LIFE’s Howard Sochurek, who caught the poet reminiscing in scenes that inspired at least eight of his later works. Back in the U.S. now, Frost regards his trip as “one of the biggest adventures of my life.”
Frost’s life was marked by enormous loss: only two of his and his wife Elinor’s six children outlived him. Elinor died in 1938. Frost himself suffered from depression, as did several other members of his family. And yet he left behind a body of work as clear-eyed and as uplifting as that of any American writer before him, or since.
In an English field where ‘Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought’ (from ‘My Butterfly’), Frost recalled another day.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
“In ‘the thick old thatch, Where summer birds had been given hatch” (from ‘The Thatch’), Frost looked from the cottage in Dymock where his friend, poet Wilfrid Gibson, lived in 1914.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Malvern Hills, in England, where Robert Frost once lived.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Frost, who once wrote, ‘I never heard of a house that throve . . . where the chimney started above the stove,’ examined the stove of his old kitchen at Little Iddens, Gloucestershire
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Malvern Hills, England, where Robert Frost once lived.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Nature lover Frost, who once farmed “a pasture where the boulders lie/As touching as a basket full of eggs,” stooped suddenly in this English pasture to grasp a stone and throw it.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Past the tree which could have been model for his line “Tree at my window, window tree . . . ,” Frost gazed sadly in the direction of the cottage, now in ruins, where he wrote it.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Malvern Hills, where Robert Frost once lived.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Frost in 1957, during a visit to the English countryside where he once lived.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Frost in an English meadow, 1957.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In November 1946, LIFE magazine introduced its readers to a pair of furry British acrobats named Junior and Mr. Walker — rabbits residing in Barking, outside of London. Asked why the two bunnies made their way through the world upended, padding about on their forefeet — instead of hopping on all fours, like virtually all other Leporidae — their owner, a butcher named Reginald Freeman, explained that they had been doing it since they were born.
“Mr. Walker, the elder rabbit,” LIFE wrote, “started off on his forefeet. Junior, a female, at first experimented with the more conventional four-legged method but after watching Mr. Walker for a while switched to his two-legged style.”
That’s all well and good. But still, why did they do it? Why did they act in this strange — albeit fascinating — un-rabbitlike manner?
“Mr. Freeman asked a veterinarian about all this,” the article concluded, “and was told the rabbits’ spinal muscles were underdeveloped and they walked on two legs because it was easier.”
Whether the critters’ spinal muscles were undeveloped because they moved through the world upside-down, or because both were born with underdeveloped back muscles (a highly unlikely coincidence), LIFE neglected to clarify.
Finally: It’s worth noting that the photographs of Mr. Walker and Junior (and Mr. Freeman, of course) were made by George Rodger, one the 20th century’s greatest photojournalists and a founding member of Magnum Photos. Which just goes to show — a good photographer really can shoot anything.
British Rabbits, Junior and Mr. Walker
George Rodger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
British Rabbits, Junior and Mr. Walker
George Rodger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
British Rabbits, Junior and Mr. Walker
George Rodger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
British Rabbits, Junior and Mr. Walker
George Rodger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
British Rabbits, Junior and Mr. Walker
George Rodger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
For some, the phrase “Dust Bowl” conjures a place: the Great Plains, but a Great Plains of abandoned homes, ruined lives, dead and dying crops and sand, sand, sand.
For others, the phrase denotes not a region but an era: the mid- to late-1930s in America, when countless farms were lost. Dust storms raced across thousands of miles of once-fertile land, so huge and unremitting that they often blotted out the sun. Millions of American men, women and children took to the road, leaving behind everything they knew and everything they’d built, heading west, seeking work, food, shelter, new lives, new hope.
These families, immortalized in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and in the unflinching photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others, were almost universally known as “Okies,” whether or not they actually hailed from the devastated state of Oklahoma. The great, ragged migration away from half-buried farms and toward California and other vague “promised lands” is one of the defining catastrophes of the Great Depression. To this day, the very term Okie conjures images of gaunt men, grim women and doomed children dressed in tattered clothes, traveling by foot or jalopy across a landscape that seems perpetually dry, flat and ruined.
But just as entire families in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Nebraska and other states abandoned their homes in search of a new start, countless other farmers held their own, suffering through the very worst of the Dust Bowl years, battling for every ear of corn, every grain of wheat, every leaf of lettuce on farms they had worked, in some cases, for generations.
Here, LIFE.com offers a series of revealing photos by the great Alfred Eisenstaedt. These pictures don’t follow “Okies” as they leave their world behind. Instead, Eisenstaedt’s photos chronicle the hardscrabble existence of Oklahoma farmers who stayed: families who fought to keep their livelihoods and their homesteads during those lean, unforgiving years after the Dust Bowl according to the history books, at least came to an end.
—Photo gallery edited by Liz Ronk for LIFE.com.
Oklahoma farmer, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Oklahoma farmer and his family, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Oklahoma farming family, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sagebush and sand surrounded Oklahoma farmer John Barnett’s house and farm buildings. There was no topsoil left on the 160 acres. He grew rye and fodder in sandy loam.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In Oklahoma in 1942, agriculturists worked on the region’s catastrophic erosion problem.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Abandoned farm, Oklahoma, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Harvesters hitchhiked to a wheat harvesting, Oklahoma, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Oklahoma, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Farmer and sons, Oklahoma, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Oklahoma farm, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Farmer John Barnett and his sons worked their farm, Oklahoma, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Oklahoma, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Farmer John Barnett’s wife, Venus, worked in her vegetable garden after a second planting, Oklahoma, 1942. A windstorm earlier in the year blew the first seedlings away.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John Barnett fed livestock on his farm, Oklahoma, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Oklahoma farmer John Barnett’s daughter Delphaline, 17, wore bright-colored slacks around the farm. She and her two brothers went to a rural school where there were only four other pupils.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Farmer John Barnett and his family stuck to their land near Woodward. Their 21 dairy cattle yielded a scant seven gallons per milking. Mrs. Barnett took care of a vegetable garden that was always blowing away. The children, Delphaline, 17 (top), Lincoln, 11 (right), and Leonard, 9, did plenty of chores. On Sundays the Barnetts ate jack rabbit.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mrs. Venus Barnett and son Lincoln in their farmhouse, Oklahoma, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock