Page 119 – LIFE

‘Take off the Silk, Put on the Khaki’: America’s First Women Soldiers, 1942

April 18, 2022July 3, 2013 by

In 1942, the idea of women in the military was brand new. The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was founded in May of that year, and the women who first served in the corps were instantly pegged with the now-famous collective moniker, WAACs. (Soon renamed the Woman’s Army Corps, or WAC, it was an official branch of the U.S. Army from 1943-1978.) More than 150,000 American women served in the corps during World War II, and did their jobs so well, and so uncomplainingly, that no less an authority on proper soldiering than Gen. Douglas MacArthur reportedly characterized the WACs as “my best soldiers.”

The role that these women had in the military was limited. As LIFE noted in its Sept. 7 1942 issue, a story on this new phenomenon, ‘The idea behind the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps is simply this: Women can do some of the jobs that men are doing in the Army. By taking over these jobs, they can release men for active or combat duty.”

LIFE described the scene at one of the training centers for this new kind of soldier:

The WAACs who arrived at Fort Des Moines at the end of July were met by Oveta Culp Hobby, a svelte and definite Texas lady who is director of all WAACs. Director Hobby said very simply: “You have taken off silk and put on khaki. You have a debt to democracy and a date with destiny. You may be called upon to give your lives.”

Thought old Army men harumph at the sight of girls trying to act like soldiers, all WAACs get a thorough grounding in basic infantry drill. They have to live with the Army and know its ways. They also have to know how to work in groups, to take and give commands. … Except for the fact that they get no training in forearms and tactics, WAACs are like any other soldiers. Once they enlist, they are in the Army for the duration.

It should be noted that women had been serving as army nurses going back to the Revolutionary War. The creation of the WAAC was but one step on a long march toward expanding roles for women in the military. Today roughly one in every seven soldiers in the U.S. military is a woman.

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

Female soldiers in their first gas-mask drill, Fort Des Moines, Iowa, June 1942.

Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.

Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps members trained with gas masks.

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Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.

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At assembly, a regimental commander inspected the women to see that their hair was above collar and their stocking seams were straight.

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Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.

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The WAACs received the same inoculations against typhoid fever, tetanus, and smallpox that were given to all soldiers.

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Mary Yates, 26, was the wife of a coast artillery captain who was sent to the Philippines.

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Julie Getas, 25, had worked for the Walgreen drugstores in San Francisco.

Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Ruby Braun had worked for a cosmetics company as supervisor of sales in the Los Angeles area before she enlisted in the WAACs.

Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lorna V. Kubli, 28, was working as an office manager in the War Department when she joined the WAACs; she was glad of the chance to get out from behind the desk.

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The proper length for hair was two inches above the collar.

Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.

Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

WAACs washed their own undergarments and stockings, but the heavy clothing was sent out to commercial laundries in Des Moines.

Marie Hansen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The WAACs were supposed to walk with the regulation 30-inch Army stride. Sidewalks were measured off so that WAACs could practice between classes.

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Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.

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WAACs, 1942

Marie Hansen Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The WAACs’ calisthenics routines were designed for flexibility and endurance rather than bulging muscles.

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Softball was the main group sport for these WAACs’.

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Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Iowa, 1942.

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This candidate aimed to do recruiting work after graduation.

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With military snap, WAACs walked through the post saluting passing officers.

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Up Close and Personal With Apollo 11: A LIFE Photographer’s Story

January 20, 2022July 1, 2013 by

No photographer spent more time with the Apollo 11 astronauts especially in the months leading up to the history-making, world-changing July 1969 moon landing than LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse, who chronicled the crew’s public and private lives as rigorously as he’d done for earlier NASA missions. (Morse spent so much time with the Mercury 7, for example, that John Glenn dubbed him “the eighth astronaut.”)

Four and a half decades after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the lunar surface (while Michael Collins orbited above), Morse spoke with LIFE.com about the Apollo 11 crew; their families; and the photographs in this gallery many of which were not published in LIFE that capture, at least in part, the mood and the look of that singular era.

“They all started out as pilots, of course,” Morse said of Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin, Command Module pilot Michael Collins and mission commander Neil Armstrong, “and they decided that they wanted to do something better, something more exciting. They had the desire to look further. To go beyond.”

Morse stressed, though, that the moon landing was the result not of supermen or a few NASA geniuses, but a huge team of smart, imaginative people working incredibly hard, together, toward a single, improbable goal.

“People today tend to forget that the goal of going to the moon was set by President Kennedy less than ten years before [the Apollo 11 mission]. We had rocket technology at that point, of course, but really no technology to get up there, land and then get back. We had to dream it up, and then build it. In only a few years, NASA made a spacecraft that could do that. When you think of it, of how talented and dedicated all of those guys were . . . it’s just incredible.”

As for photographing the families of the men who would, ultimately, put all that technology to the test, Morse recalled that, for a photojournalist just doing his job, it wasn’t all that different, at its most elemental level, than other assignments he’d worked over his long, hugely varied career.

“Right away,” he said, laughing, “the kids got used to me being around. You know how kids are; they adapt to things so much better than adults do. After a while, spending so much time with them, it wasn’t awkward or forced having me there. I was the guy who was always there, and always had a camera.

“We were with them all the time,” Morse continued, using we to mean LIFE. “Everywhere they went, we went. There was no such thing as Neil, Mike and Buzz going anywhere, or doing something, where we weren’t there, too.”

Looking at pictures that he took almost a half-century ago and that he hadn’t seen in the decades since brought back vivid memories for Morse.

“The shot of Mike lying on the beach reading,” Morse noted of slide 16, “with a stack of paperbacks under his head, really sort of captures him. It made sense that he’d be the Command Module pilot, orbiting alone above the moon while Neil and Buzz were on the surface. Mike was an extremely capable guy, and yet he was also very comfortable when he was by himself.

“Mike had lots of interests. He painted, took care of the garden, was reading all the time. A perfectly engaging man, but also the sort of person who could spend time by himself, working, and be satisfied.”

The risks of the venture that Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins eagerly embarked upon are almost unfathomable now and went largely unspoken then. For instance, as Morse pointed out, “no one knew whether or not they’d come back from the moon mission unable to have kids. In other words, sterile.”

While there’s absolutely no doubt that the three crew members earned that so-often overused designation, “heroes,” for what they accomplished, and the manner in which they accomplished it, Morse stressed that it was, in fact, the down-to-earth attitude the astronauts brought to their task, and to their lives, that so impressed him.

“These were family guys,” Morse said. “Working men. You could pass them on the street and not give them a second glance. But they were remarkable, remarkable human beings. Their IQs, all of them, were damn high. They worked their tails off to make sure everything was checked and double-checked and triple-checked. They were flying to the moon, for chrissake! But they all led pretty normal lives, for people in such extraordinary circumstances. I was damn lucky to know them, and their families.”

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

Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin chatted over drinks in Houston, March 1969

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Neil Armstrong, pizza chef.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Neil Armstrong and family.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Neil Armstrong played ball with his son, 1969.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Neil Armstrong, March 1969

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins and his wife Pat with their children (from left, Kate, Michael Jr., and Ann), Houston.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Michael Collins and his wife Pat shared breakfast in their Texas home.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Michael Collins and family, Texas, 1969.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins at home.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Michael Collins played in the surf with his son Michael, Jr.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Apollo 11 astronauts, 1969. From left: Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin; Command Module pilot Michael Collins; Mission Commander Neil Armstrong.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Neil Armstrong, 1969.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Michael Collins and his wife Pat at home, 1969.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Home from work after his family had already eaten, Neil Armstrong ate his customary late dinner while reviewing the Wall Street Journal stock market numbers, March 1969.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Apollo 11 astronauts discussed their upcoming moon mission with an engineer from Houston’s Mission Control Center (second from right), Texas, 1969.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Michael Collins with his wife Pat at a beach in Texas.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Apollo 11 astronauts and their families posed with a scale model of the moon.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

August 11, 1969, special edition of LIFE magazine.

All Hail New York Taxis: Gotham Cabs and Cabbies of the 1940s

August 11, 2021June 17, 2013 by

The New York City of most peoples’ imaginations usually looks and sounds like the New York of a few very distinct decades. There’s today’s post-Bloomberg New York City, of course — the bright, weirdly clean (well, it’s clean in parts of Manhattan, at least) largely smoke-free metropolis of complicated bike lanes, pedestrian malls and other “improvements” that, to most people, feel about as New Yark as a wine spritzer at a football game.

Then there’s the Big Apple of the 1970s: the New York of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver; of “Ford to City: Drop Dead” and Blondie, Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls and the Ramones at Max’s Kansas City; of “the Bronx Is Burning” and Son of Sam. The New York, in other words, of the old, scary, late, semi-lamented Times Square of sordid lore.

Finally, there’s New York in what many consider its Golden Age: the New York City of the 1940s and 1950s, when men wore hats, women wore gloves, a dime got you a cup of coffee and — in the popular imagination, anyway — there were doormen standing on every curb, flagging down taxi cabs for dames who looked like Veronica Lake.

Here, in honor of that last vision of Gotham as a noir film set where absolutely everything is seen in deep-shadowed black-and-white, LIFE.com recalls those big, burly taxi cabs of the 1940s, and the rough-looking, distinctive characters who drove them.

Taxi Cabs 1944

William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Let’s Go to the Drive-In Movies!

November 4, 2020June 5, 2013 by

A New Jersey auto-parts store manager named Richard Hollingshead Jr. came up with the idea for a drive-in theater. He received a patent for it on May 16, 1933 and, along with three other investors, cut the ribbon on the world’s first drive-in movie theater in Camden, New Jersey, on June 6, 1933. At the height of their popularity in the 1950s and ’60s, there were roughly 4,000 drive-in theaters across the U.S., but in recent times, the number dropped to a tenth of that.

During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, drive-ins began to see a resurgence. Walmart has converted 160 of its parking lots into drive-ins, and many other locations have being improvised in open spaces around the country. The phenomenon is tailor-made for this difficult summer. At drive-ins, moviegoers can be socially distant in their cars while having a communal experience and enjoying the action on the big screen.

Here, LIFE.com presents images of drive-ins in their original heyday.

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

Drive-In Theater

Cars filling lot at new Rancho Drive-In Theater at dusk before the start of the feature movie, 1948 (Allan Grant/LIFE Picture Collection)

Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon starred in Beach Blanket Bingo, shown at a drive-in movie theater in Florida, 1965.

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Drive-in theater, Chicago, 1951.

Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fly-In-Drive-In Theater, New Jersey, 1949

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A plane settled in the parking lot of this drive-in that also accommodated fly-ins, 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An usher guided a guest at a San Francisco drive-in, 1948.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Drive-in theater, Chicago, 1951.

Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Drive-in theater, Los Angeles, 1949.

J. R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Drive-in theater, San Francisco, 1948.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Drive-in theater, Chicago, 1951.

Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gilmore Island, Los Angeles, 1949.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Drive-in theater, Los Angeles, 1949.

J. R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Drive-in theater, Connecticut, 1955.

Yale Joel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

As a publicity stunt Les Davis (on top of the screen) lived in a tent on top of a drive-in movie screen in Connecticut, 1955.

Yale Joel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rancho Drive-in Theater, San Francisco, 1948.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Joel McCrea movie at the Rancho Drive-in Theater, San Francisco, 1948.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Drive-in theater, San Francisco, 1948.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kids enjoyed one of the four double-seated glider swings in the mini-playground at the Rancho Drive-In Theater, San Francisco, 1948.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hemingway in Cuba, 1952: “The Most Difficult Man I Ever Photographed”

January 17, 2020June 3, 2013 by

That Ernest Hemingway was, for years, the most celebrated writer in America is hardly surprising. After all, if he had written nothing besides, say, The Sun Also Rises, the early collection, In Our Time, and the superlative “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” he would still be an indispensable American writer. The preposterous literary myth that Hemingway himself created and nurtured, meanwhile—that of the brawling, hard-drinking, thrill-seeking sportsman who is also an uncompromising, soulful artist—ensured that generations of writers would not merely revere him, but (often to their abiding detriment) would also try to emulate him.

Incredibly, one of Hemingway’s most highly regarded novels, the short masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, was first published, in its entirety, in a single issue of LIFE magazine in September 1952.

At the time, Hemingway was—if we might employ an apt metaphor for a man who fairly worshiped machismo—the heavyweight champ of American letters. Even if his productivity had waned, and even if the searing brilliance of his early years had, by 1952, been reduced to an occasional flare of the old genius, “Papa” was still a cultural force to be reckoned with.

(A mere two years before, John O’Hara, in a New York Times review of the novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, had gone a bit overboard, calling Hemingway “the most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare.” But such was the shadow he cast.)

The issue of LIFE featuring Old Man and the Sea was an enormous success, selling millions of newsstand copies in a matter of days. The novel itself earned Hemingway his first and only Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and remains among his most widely read works.

And yet, by the early 1950s Hemingway’s private world was one increasingly defined not by protean artistic achievements, but by rivers of booze; bewilderment at his own diminishing powers as a writer; depression and even rage at his failing, once-indomitable health. The larger-than-life figure who prized “grace under pressure” above all other attributes was besieged; in less than a decade, his demons would drive him to suicide by shotgun.

All of this helps explain why, when LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt went to Cuba to photograph Hemingway for the September 1952 issue, he encountered not a gracious, if perhaps prickly, fellow artist and man of letters, but a thoroughly disagreeable, paranoid, booze-sodden lunatic.

Eisenstaedt was able, eventually, to capture a few usable images of the middle-aged man who was soon be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His cover photo of Hemingway, in fact, is something of a classic: a riveting portrait of a no-longer-young, still-formidable literary lion.

But the experience of trying to photograph the 52-year-old writer, as Eisenstaedt recalled years later in an interview with historian Alex Groner, was a stressful and at times even frightening misadventure.

Hemingway, Eisenstaedt wonderingly noted, drank from the moment he awoke until the time he went to bed, with a lackey constantly plying him with booze; obsessed over his virility (sometimes literally pounding his chest, “like King Kong,” to illustrate that, while perhaps diminished, he was still a man to whom attention must be paid); erupted into violent rages over minor slights, both real and imagined; rarely spoke a sentence, to anyone, that wasn’t peppered with obscenities; and generally behaved like a buffoon.

Words and phrases that crop up repeatedly in Eisenstaedt’s reminiscences include “crazy,” “berserk,” “wild,” “insulting,” “drunk,” and “blue in the face.” Eisenstaedt found very few moments when he could take or when Hemingway would allow him to take usable photos. More than once, the gregarious, easy-going Eisie, who by all accounts got along famously with virtually everyone he met, went off by himself to photograph quieter scenes on the island, hoping the writer might calm down enough so that he might make a few worthwhile pictures.

“He was,” Eisenstaedt once said of Hemingway, “the most difficult man I ever photographed.” Coming from a man who was a professional photographer across seven decades—someone who photographed presidents, emperors, socially awkward scientists, testy athletes, egomaniac actors, insecure actresses and once, famously, a scowling and goblin-like Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels— that bald assertion about Hemingway is striking, and sadly revealing. And it’s especially sad in light of the effort that Eisenstaedt evidently put into trying to like Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway was a major writer. Not everything he wrote was great; but some of what he wrote was as good as anything ever written by an American, and a handful of his works are, by common assent, vital and groundbreaking landmarks in world literature.

This gallery serves as both a tribute to Hemingway’s achievements, and a reminder of the haunting truth that when they fall, great men fall very, very far indeed.

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

Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Hemingway chatted with fellow patrons at a cafe he enjoyed frequenting in Cuba, 1952.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Hemingway at home in Cuba, August 1952.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An image from a contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cojimar, in Cuba, provided the inspiration for the fishing village in Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea, August 1952.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An image from a contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE Magazine cover, September 1, 1952

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stars Playing Their Dream Roles: Photos by Bert Stern

January 18, 2022June 2, 2013 by

They don’t make them like they used to. That assertion, although often colored by a rose-tinted nostalgia, seems to hold some genuine truth nowadays, when celebrities are not only a dime a dozen, but are so often seemingly manufactured overnight. In fact, in most cases, it’s difficult to even remember what these people are famous for. But who would think that back in the 1960s, the stars of that defining era stars whom we continue to look back on with wonder would themselves entertain that very same thought?

The images shown here, taken by legendary photographer Bert Stern for a story that ran in the Dec. 20, 1963 issue of LIFE, depict some of the most prominent actors of the day as they take on the roles of their dream performers. The wonderfully playful (yet somehow near-reverent) series of portraits is testament to the fact that each and every generation grows up with its own heroes. Witness the debonair Cary Grant embodying an unlikely, yet totally convincing, impersonation of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, or Paul Newman’s gleeful transformation into the swashbuckling matinee idol, Douglas Fairbanks.

While the movie studios had created idols since the days of silent films, a cover of LIFE magazine could make all the difference. And a photographer with a strong relationship with a magazine wielded a lot of influence. In fact, the ’60s saw the birth of the photographer as hero, and Bert Stern was the archetype of this new figure. Alongside Penn and Avedon, he was one of the most respected and sought-after fashion, portrait and advertising photographers of the era.

Best known for his iconic “Last Sitting” photographs of Marilyn Monroe, taken six short weeks before her death, Stern photographed the world’s most beautiful women Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, Bridget Bardot and some of Hollywood’s most charismatic leading men, like Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton.

But long before he made those iconic images, he was an ideas man, a pioneer in the Golden Age of advertising. In the early 1950s, Stern conceived and executed photographic concepts that, for the first time, made advertising as compelling, refined and beautiful as any editorial page.

By the time the photographs in this gallery were made for LIFE, Stern was at the height of his fame a celebrity in his own right. He made commercials, shot covers for the world’s most prestigious magazines and more. Stern was seemingly capable of anything.

In a revealing 2013 documentary, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, Stern tells his compelling and extraordinary story of his passions and obsessions, his successes and his failings, and the stories behind of some of the most remarkable and iconic images of the age.

Bert Stern is living proof, if ever proof was needed, that they really don’t make them like they used to.

—photo editor Phil Bicker wrote this tribute on the occasion of Stern’s death in 2013.