This little girl is talking to Santa Claus, and so may any other girl or boy who telephones Murray Hill 8-2205 in New York between now and Christmas.
Thus reads a photo caption in a December 15, 1947 LIFE magazine story about some holiday subterfuge devised by the famed New York toy store, FAO Schwarz. The clever gambit involved an FAO-produced phone system on which children could dial that number (MU8-2205) and speak directly to Santa himself, laying out their wishes for the holiday: world peace, universal human fellowship, a train set, a bunny, a briefcase.
Here, LIFE.com presents photos by Martha Holmes from that article as well as some other “Awww”-inspiring pictures that never ran in the magazine.
Calling Santa, 1947
Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection
Calling Santa, 1947
Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection
Calling Santa, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Patricia Guinan promises to leave out milk and crackers for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, 1947.” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Calling Santa, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Bann Kernan, who is 7 years old, squirms with delight as she asks Santa for a wrist watch. Moments later she gave the phone to her younger brother, Bennie, 5, who requested a train.” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Calling Santa, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Jo Ann Ward began with aplomb by saying, ‘Hello, Santa Claus. How you feel?'” The three-year-old wanted a doll and a boat.” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Calling Santa, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “‘After making sure he could not hear and be disillusioned,’ Bann Kernan ‘whispered confidingly to the LIFE researcher’ that there is “no Santa Claus,” while brother Bennie remained blissfully unaware.'” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Calling Santa, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Elaine Jung is 6, wants a doll’s house and carriage, also asked Santa to be sure not to forget her baby sister.” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Calling Santa, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Jimmy O’Brien, 4, asked for a bike and a sailboat. When Santa asked where he lived, he said, ‘You know where.'” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Calling Santa, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Christopher Lange, the son of Poland’s U.N. delegate Oscar Lange is nearly 8 years old and a firm believer in Santa Claus. He showed his official background by requesting the badge of the profession, a briefcase, for Christmas. (He also asked for a paint set.)” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Calling Santa, 1947
Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection
F.A.O. Schwarz, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Santa Himself and Mrs. Claus, who sometimes wear red coats to keep in character, answer calls at the Schwarz workshop.” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
F.A.O. Schwarz, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Schwarz’s President, Philip Kirkham, used to play Santa for the benefit of special customers’ children by shouting good cheer up a dumbwaiter shaft.” The first time he did it, employees thought he was ‘a little daft.'” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Calling Santa, 1947
Martha Holmes/ The LIFE Picture Collection
Calling Santa, 1947
Caption from LIFE: “Bann Kernan, 7, calls Santa.” (Martha Holmes / The LIFE Picture Collection)
At nearly every stage of Natalie Wood’s career—the early days as a cute studio-contract moppet; her teenage Method experiments inspired by her work in Rebel Without a Cause; and her emergence as a powerful leading lady who could more than hold her own with Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen—LIFE’s photographers were there, capturing Wood’s talent and beauty as they blossomed over the years.
But not every picture from those many rolls of film could make it to print. Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of the best photos of the late, radiant star which were not originally published in LIFE magazine.
Natalie Wood died, far too young, in 1981. She was just 43 years old. She drowned near Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of California. In 2012, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner reclassified the cause of her death as “drowning and other undetermined factors.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen, 1963.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood in 1945; at age eight she appeared in Miracle on 34th Street.
Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood swung upside down in her backyard as a child, 1945.
Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood practiced as her 16-year-old sister Olga plays a Chopin waltz, 1945.
Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natasha Wood drew a girl’s face on her blackboard.
Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Woods watered the lawn as her mother, Maria Gurdin, supervised, 1945.
Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood sat poolside with a poodle in 1956.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams made dinner in 1965.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood read aloud from Thomas Wolfe’s The Hills Beyond for friends Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams in 1956.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood in character with Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams, 1956.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood (with Nick Adams and a partly hidden Dennis Hopper above), 1956.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood took a call while sitting on her bed at home in 1965.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood with actor friends in Los Angeles in 1965.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Twenty-two-year-old Natalie Wood, 1960, at the Beverly Hills home she shared with husband Robert Wagner.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty posed for a portrait for their movie Splendor in the Grass.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, 1961.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood readied for the Academy Awards in April 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Woods readied for the Academy Awards, April 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Woods readied for the Academy Awards, April 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood received the final touches on her updo with hair spray before the Academy Awards in April 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An assistant helped Natalie Wood into her dress in April 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood smiled beside her date for the 1962 Oscars, Warren Beatty.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen, 1963.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood smoked with Steve McQueen in 1963.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen in 1963.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Far more than a mere plot device heralding George Bailey’s dark night of the soul (and his joyful return to the land of the living), softly falling snow is something of a central character in Frank Capra’s 1946 holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. For this film Capra decided that the cheap “fake snow” so often used on movie sets back in the day simply would not do; he wanted something as close to the real thing as he and his prop department could get.
LIFE photographer Martha Holmes documented the use of an innovative new snow-making process employed during the making of It’s a Wonderful Life—a process that, for the first time, allowed filmmakers to produce and control remarkably realistic onscreen snowfalls, drifts, flurries and landscapes.
The look and feel of holiday movies would, quite simply, never be the same again.
Movie snow in the early decades of film-making was usually white-coated cornflakes, sometimes mixed with shaved gypsum, and they produced so much audible crunching and crackling when actors walked across it that dialog was often over-dubbed afterwards. For It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, who was trained as an engineer, and RKO studio’s special effects wizard, Russell Sherman, developed their own artificial snow, one befitting the hushed beauty of a winter night in the fictional town of Bedford Falls.
Utilizing technology made available after World War II, Sherman’s crew mixed foamite — the material used in fire extinguishers and sometimes marketed under the brand name Phomaide—with sugar and water (or, by some accounts, with soap flakes) to create a substance that could be sprayed virtually anywhere, tucking tiny Bedford Falls under a wintery blanket of white.
The foamite solution was pumped at high pressure through a wind machine to create the look of freshly fallen snow on trees, streets and in drifts against buildings. Some 6,000 gallons of this new pseudo-snow were used in the making of It’s a Wonderful Life, and the RKO Effects Department received a Technical Award from the Motion Picture Academy for the development of the new white stuff. The artificial snow even clung convincingly to clothing and created picture-perfect footprints, while generating nothing like the sound of trod-upon breakfast cereal. This enabled Capra to record the film’s sound live, lending yet another layer of authenticity to the finished movie.
Capra’s vision for an authentic film experience, meanwhile, extended beyond a formula for better manufactured snow. The set for Bedford Falls was also an engineering marvel. Constructed in two months, it was one of the longest sets ever made for an American movie. It covered four acres of the RKO ranch and included 75 stores and buildings; a tree-lined center parkway with 20 fully grown oak trees; a factory district and residential areas. Main Street was 300 yards long, or three full-length city blocks.
What many movie buffs don’t know is that George Bailey’s bleak Christmas Eve was actually shot during a series of 90-degree days in June and July in 1946 on RKO’s ranch in Encino, California. The days were so hot that Capra gave the cast and crew a day off during filming to recover from heat exhaustion. In the famous scene on the bridge, before he saves Clarence the angel from the dark, swirling waters below, a suicidal George Bailey is clearly sweating—although Jimmy Stewart’s wonderful acting convinces us that fear and dread might well be the reason for that.
Stewart once said that of all the films he made over the course of his six-decade career, It’s a Wonderful Life was his favorite. Stewart, who had recently returned from distinguished service in World War II, almost passed on the role of George; it was Lionel Barrymore—who so brilliantly played the villainous, money-mad Mr. Potter in the film—who convinced him to take the part.
Made for $3.7 million, the movie was a hugely expensive production in the mid-1940s, especially considering its initial box office run only earned $3.3 million. It also happened to be the first and only time Frank Capra produced, financed, directed and co-wrote one of his films.
The disappointing box-office numbers doomed Capra’s production company, and the director soon found himself out of favor with the changing tastes of postwar audiences. But the movie—and its director—gained newfound fame and esteem as later generations were introduced to, and fell in love with, the movie on television.
“It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra once said. “The film has a life of its own now and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I’m like a parent whose kid grows up to be president. I’m proud . . . but it’s the kid who did the work. I didn’t even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it. I just liked the idea.”
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that in notes taken on the set of It’s a Wonderful Life by LIFE’s Helen Robinson—for an article that never ran in the magazine—one throw-away line stands out to contemporary readers. In addition to foamite, “[the whitish mineral] dolomite and asbestos were other old standbys used to dress the set.” That’s right, folks: asbestos was used as a stand-in for snow.
Jimmy Stewart on the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
Jimmy Stewart on the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in downtown Bedford Falls on the set of It’s a Wonderful Life.
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
The innovative artificial snow used for ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ earned a technical award from the Motion Picture Academy.
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
The crew deployed artificial snow on the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
On the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
The crew made artificial snow on the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
On the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
Jimmy Stewart on the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ One of the characteristics of the new artificial snow was that it would stick to hair and clothing.
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
Artificial snow on the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
Director Frank Capra (right, with unidentified man) on the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
On the set of It’s a Wonderful Life.
Martha Holmes (The LIFE Picture Collection)
Downtown Bedford Falls on the set of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
President Franklin Roosevelt declared Dec. 7, 1941—when Japan launched more than 350 fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes against the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii—a “date which will live in infamy.” In fact, that Sunday morning is so seared into America’s memory that the tumult of the critical weeks and months afterward, as the U.S. responded to the attack, is often overlooked. Here, LIFE.com presents photos most of which never ran in LIFE magazine from Hawaii and the mainland, chronicling a nation’s resolute reply to an unprecedented act of war.
Japan’s early morning assault on Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, lasted less than two hours, but took an incredible toll: four battleships sunk, 188 aircraft destroyed, 2,403 Americans killed. For its part, Japan lost 64 men and 29 planes.
At the time of the attack, there were roughly 50,000 troops based at Pearl Harbor. Afterwards the number of soldiers spiked; there were several hundred thousand stationed in Hawaii by 1945. (The number dropped to less than 70,000 by 1946.) “Out of the Pacific skies last week,” LIFE magazine wrote in its Dec. 15, 1941 issue, “World War II came with startling suddenness to America . . . With reckless daring Japan aimed this blow at the citadel of American power in the Pacific.”
The Navy, which was able to salvage an astonishing number of ships damaged or sunk by the Japanese, could not fully salvage the battleship USS Arizona (slides 1 and 3 in the gallery.) Today, the spot where the massive ship went down is the site of the USS Arizona Memorial, which straddles the sunken hull and commemorates the events of that long-ago Sunday. Of the 1,177 Arizona sailors killed that day, 1,102 have the ship as their final resting place.
Like so many vessels that saw action in World War II, the Arizona was built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, founded in 1801. The yard had contributed ships to every American conflict, including the War of 1812, the Civil War and World War I. As the pictures in this gallery attest, it would prove absolutely essential to the war effort during WWII.
As a matter of fact, as the Japanese Navy grew during the 1930s, many ships had already been transferred from Brooklyn to the Pacific to deal with the potential menace. This created room for new ships to be built and as America was faced with the prospect of a global war across continents and on the world’s oceans, construction of and repairs to battle ships, destroyers and other naval vessels grew increasingly urgent.
Within days of the attack the eyes of America were, understandably, focused on Pearl Harbor and the Pacific. But thousands of miles away from the scene of the Japanese assault, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was already ramping up production for what looked to be a long, long war.
At its peak during the war, the Brooklyn Navy Yard employed more than 70,000 people, including many women, who for the first time held jobs as welders and ship-fitters. But the size of its workforce wasn’t the yard’s only impressive aspect: to transport materials where they were needed, the Brooklyn Navy Yard employed 11 locomotives with 199 railroad cars. Much of the work at the yard involved making ships ready for the sea by loading them with fuel, food and ammunition.
The Brooklyn yard itself ceased being used by the Navy in 1966. By that time, its work force was down to around 9,000 employees.
LIFE magazine’s response to the attack and its aftermath, meanwhile, offers an illuminating glimpse into the thinking not only of the magazine’s editors, but the nation as a whole late 1941 and early ’42.
“In the face of an attack so clear that no man could argue it,” LIFE declared to its readers in mid-December, “the nation stood absolutely united. Senator [Burton K.] Wheeler, the leader of the Isolationists, spoke for all when he said: ‘The only thing now is to do our best to lick hell out of them.'”
Japan’s daring was matched only by its barefaced duplicity. There was no warning—not even such an ultimatum as Hitler is wont to send as his legions pour across some new border. At the very moment the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s two envoys in Washington were in [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull’s office . . . making their blandest protestations of peaceful intent. Ambassador Nomura and Envoy Kurusu had come with the answer to Hull’s note [of protest to the Japanese delegation in D.C.]. Hull read it through and then, for the first time in many long, patient years, the soft-spoken Secretary lost his temper. Into the teeth of the two Japanese, who for once did not grin, he flung these words: ‘In all my 50 years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.’ How much or how long it would take to lick Japan, no man could say. There will surely be more naval losses and more strong attacks on American islands because Japan has a strategic and tactical advantage at the outset of the war. It will take not only all-out U.S. military might but great persistence and great courage to hurl back attack and win the final victory. Close observers of Japan have said for years that if that country ever found itself in a hopeless corner it was capable of committing national hara-kiri by flinging itself at the throat of its mightiest enemy . . . [On December 7] it took the desperate plunge and told its enemies in effect: ‘If this be hara-kiri, make the most of it.’ The American people got over the first shock of war and began to chart their course with wisdom and resolution. They saw the blitz attack on Pearl Harbor in its true perspective as a heavy blow but not an irretrievable disaster. They took heart as American fighting men from Midway Island to Manila began to create a new saga of ability and heroism. Japan is no less real or dastardly an enemy than Germany. Japan yields to no nation as an aggressor. It was committing aggression against China while Hitler was still a beer-hall orator. The aggressor nations are all equal enemies but, while England and Russia fight Hitler, Japan is America’s own particular adversary.
World War II lasted four more years, until Germany surrendered in May of 1945 and Japan surrendered in September of that year, in the wake of America’s destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The attack on Pearl Harbor, meanwhile, rather than heralding Japan’s greatest victory, turned out to be an act of belligerent folly that, in elemental ways, guaranteed the Land of the Rising Sun’s eventual defeat.
—This photo gallery was edited by Liz Ronk for LIFE.com
The exposed wreckage of the battleship USS Arizona.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A closer look at the USS Arizona’s wreckage in Pearl Harbor.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A damaged battleship in the background days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American bombers flew over Hawaii, December 1941.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Vice Admiral Joseph “Bull” Reeves, Waikiki Beach, December 1941.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A rally at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, December 1941.
George Strock The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A poster at the Brooklyn Navy Yard called for vigilance, December 1941.
George Strock The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Brooklyn Navy Yard by night, 1941.
George Strock The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Naval officer gazed at a cruiser’s propeller at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
George Strock The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A worker on break at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
George Strock The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Intelligent Whale submarine on display, Brooklyn.
George Strock The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A hastily constructed defense bunker, early 1942.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Training with gas masks in Hawaii, early 1942.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
U.S. troops posed in Hawaii in the days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Troops in Hawaii, early 1942.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Men dug a defensive trench in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor, December 1941.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Pearl Harbor troops shored up defenses in Hawaii.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Post-Pearl Harbor training and patrol in Hawaii, early 1942.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young defenders beside a mounted machine gun, Hawaii, December 1941.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A sign pointed the way to Pearl Harbor on Dec. 15, 1941, a week after the attack.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Aboard an American warship, Pearl Harbor, early 1942.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A sailor chalked a message to America’s fighting men from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations on a warship at Pearl Harbor: “Your conduct and action have been splendid. While you have suffered from a treacherous attack, your commander-in-chief has informed me that your courage and stamina remain magnificent. You know you will have your revenge. Recruiting stations are jammed with men eager to join you.”
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Solider in Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An American warship’s crew showed its spirit, Pearl Harbor, early 1942.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
On the morning of January 31, 1961, in south Florida, a 5-year-old chimpanzee dubbed “Ham” by his handlers ate a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, vitamins and half an egg. Then the unassuming 37-pound primate went out and made aeronautic history: Aboard a NASA space capsule, traveling thousands of miles an hour almost 160 miles above the Earth, he became the first chimp in space.
The success of Ham’s flight helped ratchet up even further the already frantic contest for scientific and space supremacy between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and briefly made Ham something of a star. Here, LIFE.com commemorates Ham’s 16-minute suborbital mission with photos taken before, during and after his wild ride. The pictures in this gallery capture an era when technology, ideology and propaganda converged in an era-defining struggle known as the Space Race.
Well before the USSR launched the world’s first artificial satellite, in 1957, and obviously long before the U.S. put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, Americans and Soviets used animals to test the rigors and dangers that humans might face in outer space. Mice, rhesus monkeys, dogs—all sorts of creatures blasted off from the surface of the Earth strapped atop rockets and locked in test planes. Many suffered injury; not a few of them died.
Ham and his cohorts were picked for the Mercury program over other hominids (gorillas and orangutans) because they were smaller and could fit in the Mercury capsule and also because “chimpanzees have physical and mental characteristics similar to man,” as LIFE pointed out in its Feb. 10 1961 issue.
The most famous of the Mercury chimps, due to his landmark January 1961 flight, Ham was not publicly called Ham when he went into space. That name—an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center—was only widely used when he returned safely to earth; NASA reportedly wanted to avoid bad publicity should a named (and thus a known, publicly embraced) animal be killed; all the Mercury chimps were known by numbers.
LIFE’s Ralph Morse—who photographed the Space Race and NASA astronauts for more than a decade—told LIFE.com that even 50 years later, he fondly recalled the astrochimps.
“Ham, especially, was a very friendly fellow,” Morse said. “Those were great assignments, shooting the early years with NASA. You really got the sense that these were incredibly smart people just working their tails off to do something that had never been done before.”
“The training of Ham and other astrochimps,” wrote LIFE, “was a scaled-down version of the human astronauts’. After curing them of jungle diseases and parasites, a special corps of veterinarians … kept track of their skeletal development by periodic X-ray exams, and gave them regular heart, muscle, and ear-nose-and-throat check-ups.”
“All are pre-adolescents,” LIFE wrote of the chimps, “amenable to teaching. All are active, bright, and light in weight — some flunked out of the program by growing to over 50 pounds in weight.” While America relied on chimps and other primates—rhesus monkeys, for example—as suborbital test subjects in the 1950s and early sixties, the Soviets commonly used dogs. (In 1951 and 1952, for example, Soviet rockets carried nine dogs to the edge of space. Three of those dogs died during or immediately following the flights.)
The astrochimps were not trained to “pilot” space capsules, but instead to perform routine tasks during suborbital flights, and to act, in the most elemental way, as test subjects facing little-known physical and psychological perils ahead of their human counterparts in the Mercury program and beyond.
“According to one story, which strict scientists contend is apocryphal,” LIFE wrote, “a veterinarian gave a banana to a chimp before a rocket sled ride. As the animal peeled it, the ride started with a lurch and the monkey got the banana full in the face. The next time the chimp was offered a banana before a sled ride, he took it, peeled it, and smeared it over the veterinarian’s face.”
When Ham finally blasted off from Cape Canaveral, he was well-trained for what lay ahead. “He had a form-fitted couch like the astronauts’. The van which took him to the launching pad was the same van the astronauts will use. The Mercury capsule he rode in was nearly identical to the capsule that will take the astronauts into space, equipped with the same life-support system of oxygen and pressure which will keep the astronauts alive.”
The flight was more demanding than expected.
“Poor Ham,” wrote LIFE, “who was expected to sustain a maximum of 11 Gs, briefly pulled 18” during the flight, “two more than the astronauts have been scheduled for in their training.” Ham, however, seemed to weather it all with aplomb. “[When Ham’s capsule was opened at sea after the flight,” the LIFE report continued, “first a hand was thrust out to shake the anxious vet’s, then Ham stepped out, burping proudly.”
After the flight, Ham lived at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C, and then at the North Carolina Zoo, where he died at age 26 in 1983. His brief pop culture celebrity (he appeared in a film with Evel Knievel, for example) paled beside the significance of his achievement as NASA’s first astrochimp. A short three months after Ham’s 1961 flight, astronaut Alan Shepard piloted the Mercury capsule on his own historic, 15-minute suborbital space flight, and was feted with ticker tape parades in New York and Washington.
“Alan Shepard was a hero, no doubt about that,” Ralph Morse said. “But whenever people call Shepard the first American in space, I like to remind them of a chimpanzee who beat him to it.”
LIFE cover, Feb. 10, 1961. Ham the Chimpanzee in the space capsule after returning from the Mercury Redstone 2 space flight.
Ham the astrochimp after his historic 1961 suborbital flight.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The rocket sled at Holloman Air Force Base, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp in training, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A hug and a pat were exchanged in a moment of fond reassurance.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp in training.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A chimp was strapped into a “couch” rigged with all manner of monitoring equipment during a test prior to Ham’s January 1961 flight.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp in training, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp learned to press buttons in order to reward himself with banana pellets, 1961.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp learned to handle equipment at Holloman Air Force Base, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Astrochimps in training, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp in training at Holloman Air Force Base, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ham, the astrochimp, seemingly mugging for the camera, 1961.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp in training at Holloman Air Force Base, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A chimp and a handler looked at X-rays during Mercury training at Holloman Air Force Base, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Astrochimps and their handlers, Holloman Air Force Base, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp at Holloman Air Force Base, 1961.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An astrochimp at Holloman Air Force Base, 1961.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Astrochimp, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Astrochimps, 1960.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ham the astrochimp, 1961.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ham the astrochimp and his handler, Cape Canaveral, Florida, 1961.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ham the astrochimp, 1961.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ham the astrochimp after his 1961 suborbital flight.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ham the astrochimp was escorted by a human friend after his suborbital space flight, January 1961.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Mercury space capsule carried Ham the astrochimp into space on Jan. 31, 1961. His flight lasted 16 minutes and 39 seconds.
Holiday seasons are about the return of traditions, both within families and across American culture.
One long-running American tradition is the annual Radio City Christmas Spectacular, which was sidelined like so many other stage shows in 2020 but kicks off once again in New York City in 2021. Whether Radio City Hall is across the street (as it was from the old LIFE magazine offices) or a couple thousand miles away, the return of those high kicks is as sure a sign of that the holiday season is upon as as trees in the living room and window displays in department stores.
LIFE took readers deep inside the world of the Rockettes in its Dec. 11, 1964 cover story. Titled “The World’s Most Famous Kick,” the story was rich in behind-the-scenes detail and showed how the dancers prepped for four shows a day, seven days a week, on one of the most famous stages in the world.
The piece, with photos by Art Rickerby. focused on five young dancers who, out of the many hopefuls who had auditioned that year, were talented and driven enough to earn a spot on stage:
Little girls who grow up to be Rockettes are born and raised in places like Milford, Mass., and Niles, Ohio, and Erie, Pa., and they get thrust into dancing classes by their mamas when they are scarcely more than toddlers. As they grow older they hear about the great dance spectacle at the Radio City Music Hall and start to wonder if. . . .
The more enterprising ones write letters asking how one goes about becoming a Rockette. They get polite form replies listing the requirements: they must be high school graduates, between 5-feet 5-inches and 5-feet 8-inches tall, have good figures and be excellent performers in tap, ballet, modern jazz dance and high kicks.
LIFE’s story also shined a spotlight on Russell Markert, a true impresario who directed the Rockettes from the opening of Radio City 1932 to his retirement in 1971:
“Lean back [Markert said in rehearsal] as if you were saying, ‘Hallelujah!’ Got it? You, over there, put some blood in those arms. They look like weak fish. And you, the blonde, don’t be afraid to stick out your butt and never mind twisting the backside it throws you off. Don’t you hear the beat? Here I’ll hum it for you.”
Markert is a brisk and stern taskmaster, first demonstrating a new routine to his girls, then letting them try it, then throwing up his arms in dismay and flinging himself into the group to dance with them. [He] is a kindly man who clucks over his girls, and calls them “my dancing daughters” … [If] anybody falters during a performance, even so slightly that the audience would never notice, he sinks into private pits of black despair.”
Of the first-year Rockettes who were featured in the issue—young women who hailed from small towns in Maine, Ohio, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania—LIFE provided a bracing glimpse into the reality of their lives:
Each more frightened than the other, they decided to join forces in a city that turned to be even more perilous than they had imagined. They paid $300 a month for a shabby two-room apartment in a run-down hotel and nobody told them they were being overcharged. They were snapped at by waitresses and cabbies and pushed and shoved about in the subway. But four times a day they changed into spangles and feathers and make-up and danced before 6,200 patrons who had paid to see them.
More than a half-century after LIFE’s story ran, show goes on. The dancers take the stage at Radio City Music Hall, and the patrons get what they came to see. The performance is a reassuring sign that, come holiday season, tradition is alive and kicking.
The Rockettes, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Rockettes, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Rockettes, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
First-year Rockettes in New York, 1964. From left: Susan Borin, 21; Jane Simpson, 18; Karen Galvin, 18; and Mary Ann de Mare, 19.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
First-year Rockettes in New York, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The original caption from LIFE in 1964 noted, “Taking supper at home, they wolf down franks, beans and low-calorie soda pop. Their work schedule leaves little time for dating.”
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
First-year Rockettes in New York, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE’s original caption from 1964 read: “After their exhausting first day at the Music Hall five roommates find energy for a yelping pillow fight to help them unwind.”
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
First-year Rockette Susan Borin in New York, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
First-year Rockettes in New York, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes rehearsed with director Russell Markert, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes director Russell Markert demonstrated the troupe’s trademark “eye-high” kick at rehearsal, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes rehearsal, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes rehearsal, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE’s caption in 1964 read: Caption from LIFE. “Mary Ann de Mare, 19, winces in pain as she stretches during strenuous warm-up exercises with Sue Borin, 21, prior to rehearsal.”
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes rehearsal, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes rehearsal, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes rehearsal, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
First-year Rockette Sue Borin backstage, 1964.
Art RickerbyLife Pictures/Shutterstock
The Rockettes 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Rockettes, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Rockettes, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes in rehearsal, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rockettes in rehearsal, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE’s original caption read, “Just like a general inspecting his troops, Markert passes along the line straightening feet.”
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Rockettes, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Rockettes performed at Radio City Music Hall, 1964.
