Page 110 – LIFE

LIFE at Daytona: Motorcycle Madness on the Florida Sands

August 23, 2021January 21, 2014 by

For years, from its inception in 1937 until the early ’60s, the prestigious Daytona 200 motorcycle race wasn’t merely run at Daytona Beach. Along with other high-speed, high-risk clashes, the 200 was run on Daytona Beach.

In 1948, LIFE magazine covered the races, both amateur and pro, at Daytona (the Road Course opened in 1936) and reported, in its April 19 issue, that “for four days last month the resort city of Daytona Beach could hardly have been noisier or in more danger if it had been under bombardment.”

Here, seven decades later, LIFE.com opens a window on that long, loud weekend that thrilled racing fans; slightly scandalized one very popular weekly magazine’s editors; and, as if proof was needed that the young sport was still in the hands of rebels and scofflaws, saw two people killed and 30 more injured in the midst of all the high-octane fun.

The 1948 event, which attracted “375 helmeted daredevils and plenty of non-racing hell-raisers,” was marred not only by deaths and injuries but, as LIFE duly noted, by classic knuckleheadism. “Because the antics of an unruly minority reflect on the dignity of motorcycling,” the magazine observed, “the American Motorcycle Association may hire special police at future races. One duty will be to restrain sophomoric cyclists who amused themselves this year by tossing firecrackers into the crowd.”

Ultimately, as LIFE tersely reported, “155 motorcycles started, only 45 finished. Winning rider, Floyd Emde, averaged 84 mph, got $2,000.” What LIFE failed to mention is that Emde (who was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998) won by the sliver-thin margin of 12 seconds; 1948 was the first time a rider led the race from flag to flag; and it was the last time an Indian Motorcycle won the 200.

Daytona 200 weekend, 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Motorcycles in Daytona

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach, Florida, March 1948.

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Motorcycles Race in Florida 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200, 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach, Florida, March 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 weekend, 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach, Florida, March 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 Motorcycle Race in Florida

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fans watching the races at Daytona

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach, March 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Racer Steers his motorcycle

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 Weekend, 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 Winner Floyd Emde

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Motorcycle Club Daytona 200

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Academy Awards: Film Stars With Their Oscars

April 19, 2021January 20, 2014 by

Being an Oscar winner is the ultimate in status, but the Oscar award is also physical thing in itself—one that that stands 13-and-a-half inches high, weighs eight-and-a-half pounds and presents a question to its owner. That question: what are you going to do with me?

The first and most obvious answer is to pose for pictures together. Every winner does that—though some hold the statuette professionally, while others cuddle with it as if it was a puppy. But what then? In these photos, Elizabeth Taylor takes hers to the party, Vivien Leigh places hers on the mantlepiece, Joan Fontaine sets hers up on a workdesk, and Jimmy Stewart totes his along to the family hardware store, where he casually sets it on a display case while he catches up with an old friend.

Even after the awards are handed out, the show goes on.

Vivien Leigh placed the Oscar she won for her role as Scarlett in Gone With The Wind on her mantlepiece at home, 1940.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Luise Rainer, the first woman to win two Oscars, held her Best Actress award for her performance in The Great Ziegfeld during the 1937 Academy Awards ceremony.

Rex Hardy Jr./Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joan Fontaine did the household bookkeeping next to the Oscar she won for her role in Hitchcok’s Suspicion, 1942.

Bob Landry/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor at a Hollywood party with the Oscar she won for her role in Butterfield, 1961.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly with the Oscar she won for her role in The Country Girl, 1955. William Holden, her co-star in the movie, stood behind her.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Audrey Hepburn with the Oscar she won for Roman Holiday, 1954.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joanne Woodward smiled radiantly while holding her Best Actress Oscar for her role in Three Faces of Eve, 1958.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Best Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress winners Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed (both for From Here to Eternity) and their Oscars, 1954.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Academy Awards: Classic Film Stars With Their Oscars

Walter Sanders—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gloria Grahame with her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful, 1953.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando (right) with his Oscar for On the Waterfront, 1955.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Onstage presenters seen from the wings during the 1950 Academy Awards.

Ida Wyman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart, back from WWII, talked with the oldest employee of his family’s hardware store in Pennsylvania, George Little; nearby is a table of various mementos, including Stewart’s Best Actor Oscar for The Philadelphia Story.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joan Crawford with her Best Actress Oscar for Mildred Pierce, 1946.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

See the LIFE Version of the Swimsuit Issue

August 5, 2021January 19, 2014 by

Every February, in the very depths of winter, Sports Illustrated unveils its storied swimsuit issue. And when that issue comes out, the media print, online, TV, radio, semaphore, you name it, takes notice. There are, one can state with a certain degree of confidence, several reasons for the attention that the swimsuit issue garners:

First: It seems the women are quite attractive.

Second: The bathing suits, while barely there, evidently appeal to a number of people perhaps even to women.

Third: The swimsuit issue has a surprisingly long history especially in the magazine world where, with a few notable exceptions, franchises come and go with dismaying rapidity.

Finally: There are the women. Wait . . . perhaps we mentioned that already?

Here, in tribute to SI’s swimsuit issue, and in recognition that in its own way LIFE magazine also took pains to chronicle youthful frolics in sand and surf, LIFE.com presents a series of photos made by Co Rentmeester in California in 1970.

There’s a certain innocence about these pictures that signals, right away, that they were made long, long ago. Sure, it’s California in the post-Manson, post-Altamont years, when the California Dream was souring and the airy promises of the Sixties were fading. But even the onslaught of hard drugs and pseudo-revolutionary nihilism that subsumed much of the counterculture in the early “70s could not entirely wipe away what had always drawn people to the Golden State. Namely, an uncomplicated joy in the pleasures of sunshine, sensuality and the illusion of eternal youth.

And if the California Dream really is just that: a dream? Well, honestly who cares?

CALIFORNIA GIRLS

Co Rentmeester / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

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Co Rentmeester / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

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Co Rentmeester / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

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Co Rentmeester / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

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Co Rentmeester / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

California, 1970.

Co Rentmeester / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders: Rare and Classic Photos

December 10, 2019January 19, 2014 by

It’s mid-spring, 1961. In the kitchen of a safe house in Montgomery, Ala., Martin Luther King Jr. is tense. In the house with the 32-year-old civil rights leader are 17 students—fresh-faced college kids who, moved by King’s message of racial equality, are putting their lives at risk. These are the groundbreaking practitioners of nonviolent civil disobedience known as the Freedom Riders, and over the past two harrowing weeks, as they’ve traveled across the state on integrated buses, their numbers have diminished at every stop in the face of arrests, mob beatings, and even fire-bombings.

Right there along with the riders, capturing the mood of the movement as it swung between exhilarated and exhausted, thrilled and terrified, was 26-year-old LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer. He had covered the landmark Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom march and rally in Washington, D.C., four years earlier and had witnessed firsthand the courage and determination Dr. King inspired in his followers. Filed along with Schutzer’s Pilgrimage photos in LIFE’s archives are notes from the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, Henry Suydam Jr., citing the energy and excitement that swirled around King: “At the end of the ceremonies, a couple of hundred people pressed feverishly on Reverend King seeking pictures, autographs, handshakes, or just a close look. The jam got so heavy that he had to be escorted to safety by police.”

Here, decades after the Freedom Riders put their lives on the line for dignity and equal rights, LIFE.com presents photos from that heady era in U.S. history, most of which never ran in LIFE magazine. Here are pictures, from the rides and the safe houses, charting a pivotal moment in the journey of Dr. King himself and in the nation-changing movement he led, from the monuments of Washington to the highways, rural roads, churches and bus depots of the Jim Crow American South.

Julia Aaron and David Dennis, along with 25 other freedom riders and several members of the National Guard, travelled from Montgomery, Ala., to Jackson, Miss.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Just shy of the Mississippi-Alabama border, members of the Alabama National Guard surrounded a bus carrying freedom riders.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A freedom rider and member of the National Guard on a bus in the Deep South.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The view from a bus window on a freedom ride.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders peered from bus windows during a stop.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A congregation in Alabama prayed for the safety of freedom riders.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders sang at the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., as a white mob gathered outside.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A weary Martin Luther King Jr. sat at the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., as a white mob surrounded the building.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders tried to rest at the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., as a white mob gathered outside.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

After U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy intervened, forcing Alabama Governor John Patterson to declare martial law and send in the National Guard, the white mob outside First Baptist Church finally broke up. Before dawn on May 22, 1961, the Guard moved the congregation out.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders rescued from First Baptist Church relaxed at a safe house in Montgomery, Ala.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders rescued from First Baptist Church (including future U.S. Rep. John Lewis, with bandaged head) relaxed at a safe house in Montgomery, Ala.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders, along with Martin Luther King Jr., relaxed at a safe house in Montgomery, Ala.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At a safe house in Montgomery, Ala., freedom riders relaxed after being rescued from First Baptist Church.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At a safe house in Montgomery, Ala., freedom riders prayed after being rescued from First Baptist Church.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders waited to board a bus to Jackson, Miss.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged freedom riders as they boarded a bus for Jackson, Miss.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders and members of the National Guard on a bus in the Deep South.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom riders on a bus in the Deep South.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White segregationists hurled stones at a bus carrying freedom riders in Mississippi.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young freedom rider on a bus in the Deep South.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Little Tough Guys: Faces of the Young America Football League, 1939

August 11, 2021January 15, 2014 by

In 1939 LIFE noticed that youngsters around the country were, in increasing numbers, playing football under the aegis of organized leagues. But one Colorado league, in particular, caught the eye of LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. As the magazine told its readers in its Oct. 9, 1939, issue:

In Denver this fall, the daydreams of some 550 youngsters, 8 to 18 years old, are coming true. These schoolboys are all members of a non-school organization called the Young America League, which is teaching them to play regular eleven-man football. It is much more fun than scrimmaging in a backyard. When they play for the League, they have their own brightly colored uniforms. Regular coaches teach them to block and tackle. Every Saturday they play regular games, and sometimes 4,000 people come to watch them. With such experience, they figure, they are sure to be great football heroes when they go to college.

The League was started in 1927 when a distracted Denverite named Frederic Adams was entertaining two young nephews. He created an athletic club and arranged for the kids to play football. An essential feature was that every boy, regardless of ability, would have a chance to play. The idea spread and branch clubs were formed. Today the League claims to have the world’s youngest organized football players.

The kids also love the initiation. A candidate swears to be a good student and not bully the girls. Then he must say: “I promise to remember that what matters most is courage; that it is no disgrace to be beaten; but that the great disgrace is to turn yellow.”

Courage is a good thing. Not bullying girls — or boys, or anyone — is a good thing. Being a good student is, generally speaking, a good thing. Sounds like the Young America League might have been on to something.

Young America League Football, 1939

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tearful Photos from the Day Marilyn Divorced DiMaggio in 1954

December 18, 2019January 14, 2014 by

Marilyn Monroe and baseball legend Joe DiMaggio wed in 1954 (second marriages for both), and were divorced nine months later. That the union was doomed from the beginning was, perhaps, easy to foresee. But even if the marriage was not a happy one for either of the two famous partners, there seems to be little doubt that there really was genuine affection there at the start and at the end. In fact, after Monroe’s divorce from her third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, was finalized in 1961, DiMaggio came back into her life and, by all accounts, desperately tried to bring some stability and calm to an existence that was veering dangerously out of control.

He tried to get her away from people who, to his mind, were nothing but trouble (including, it seems, the Kennedys), and even proposed to her, asking her to marry him again. It’s awful, now, to think that if Marilyn had been given a little more time, DiMaggio could have been just the person to pull her back from the brink of depression, drugs, disastrous affairs with married men. In other words, he might have saved her life.

But a year and a half after her marriage to Miller ended, Marilyn all of 36 years old was dead. DiMaggio, it seems, could not protect her from whatever demons drove her. He was only in his 40s when Marilyn died on August 5, 1962, but he never married again.

Here, LIFE.com presents pictures from October 6, 1954, when Marilyn stepped out of the house on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills to announce she was seeking a divorce from DiMaggio on the grounds of “mental cruelty.” DiMaggio had initially been drawn (like a few hundred million other men) to Marilyn’s “sex goddess” persona but he was never comfortable with her flaunting it, and was something of a self-admitted control freak. Neither DiMaggio nor Monroe could possibly have been content or satisfied in a marriage in which two such divergent personalities held sway.

The photographs here are not pleasant. They’re not easy to look at. There’s real pain in Marilyn’s face, posture and demeanor.

Still, these pictures tell a small but integral part of the Marilyn Monroe story, and capture the star at a pivotal point in her fraught life. She would marry again. She would make more movies in the coming years, including several classics. But deeper and more enduring pain was also in her future.

Of the October 1954 divorce filing, meanwhile, LIFE told its readers:

Even for Hollywood, where unhappy endings for the real love stories come with almost unseemly haste, this ending seemed abrupt. It was only last January that the press was mobbing the San Francisco city hall, waiting for Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to emerge as newlywed man and wife. Now the press was gathered again in front of the DiMaggio home in Beverly Hills, waiting for Joe and Marilyn to come out as newly-separated man and wife.

Nobody had been surprised when they got married—they had been going with each other for two years. Nobody doubted their love they had smiled happily through their married life. And almost nobody professed surprised when they broke up. The conflict in their two careers seemed inevitable.

Marilyn Monroe divorce announcement 1954

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe at the time she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Hills, October 1954.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe and her lawyer, Jerry Giesler, at the time she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Hills, October 1954.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe at the time she filed for divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Hills, October 1954.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The contact sheet of George Silk’s photos from the press conference announcing Marilyn Monroe’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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