America lacks the couture history of European nations, and, as a result, its fashion output has often been seen as more casual and less decadent, compared to collections from French and Italian design houses. That distinction was challenged in the fall of 1950, though, when designers unveiled clothing that had “taken on a quality of unmistakable elegance” which was also “unmistakably American,” according to the Sept. 11, 1950 issue of LIFE. In a photo essay that featured mink-trimmed satin coats, tweed suits and rhinestone buttons, Nina Leen‘s photographs captured American fashion at its finest and most fabulous.
Original caption: “Ermine Collar, rhinestone buttons add formal note to tweed suit (Capri, $135). White plush hat (Sally Victor, $50) goes with street or theater suits.”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Velveteen and fleece are combine in a bright red greatcoat with woolly lining that can worn inside out (Raelson, $110). Velvet in high shades is popular streetwear fabric.”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: ” Expensive Elegance is acheived by combining a tailored tweed town suit (Omar Kiam, $235) with soft black fox circle ($125), pearl broach (Trifari, $20).”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Inexpensive elegance is achieved by dressing up gray flannel sheath (Carolyn Schnurer, $20) with mink scarf (Annis, $30), velvet hat (Madcaps, $5).”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Taffeta and wool costume has dress in plaid to match coat. (Herbert Sondheim, $235). Usually custom-made, evening ensembles like this are now made in all price ranges.”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
As a boy, Allan Grant dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer. When his career path took a different route, the flying industry’s loss became the photography world’s and, specifically, LIFE magazine’s gain.
If any photographer ever captured the lighter side of show business, it was the confident New York native who, as a teen, traded a model airplane that he’d built for a pocket Kodak camera, and never looked back.
A LIFE staffer from 1947 until the late 1960s, Grant covered the entertainment world from the inside. His unique blend of cool appraisal and obvious affection for (most) of his subjects went a long way toward making the stars seem just as quirky and approachable as the rest of us mortals.
But he was hardly a sycophantic “celebrity photographer,” and Grant (1919 – 2008) was perfectly aware of his own skills as a photographer, and a newsman. When asked in an early 1990s interview by another long-time LIFE staffer, John Loengard, what kind of photographer he thought he was, Grant replied with a refreshing directness: “I would say a good one, for starters. I stayed [at LIFE] for a long time. I was very versatile; I did everything.”
That he did. While particularly known for his winning portraits of showbiz royalty as the pictures in this gallery demonstrate when called upon Grant was a perfectly adept chronicler of harder news. His portraits of Marina Oswald made shortly after her husband shot President Kennedy, for example, captured a personal side of that epic, era-defining story that few other media outlets could touch. His pictures of atomic tests and, especially, their aftermath in the early 1950s managed to add a human dimension to an issue that frequently felt, by turns, too clinical and too terrifying for the average citizen to grasp.
But it was, in the end, Grant’s portraits of the stars of the Fifties’ and Sixties’ that showed his real ability to get close to people, and capture something genuine, if fleeting, about the rich and famous in their unguarded moments. Shortly after Grant died in 2008, Dick Stolley, who was LIFE’s Los Angeles bureau chief in the early ’60s and later served as the magazine’s managing editor, pointed out in a statement that Allan Grant was “very handsome and glamorous, two virtues that made him popular in Hollywood.”
Handsome, glamorous and supremely talented. Some guys have all the luck.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly waited backstage at the RKO Pantages Theatre during the 28th Annual Academy Awards, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Audrey Hepburn, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin read lines with Shirley MacLaine, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin relaxed with his sons at home, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Angie Dickinson on set of Rio Bravo, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Kirk Douglas, 1949.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Groucho Marx in rehearsal, 1960.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Chico and Harpo Marx, 1959.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Harpo Marx, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Paul Newman had make-up removed on the set of The Battler (TV play), 1955.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Buster Keaton and Donald O’Connor rehearsed for a movie based on Keaton’s life, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Wilder and Gloria Swanson during the filming of Sunset Boulevard, 1949.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
James Dean on location for the movie Giant, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bob Hope, 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Elizabeth Taylor at a party after winning the Oscar for her performance in BUtterfield 8, 1961.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty at the Academy Awards, 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly backstage at the RKO Pantages Theatre during the 28th Annual Academy Awards, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dorothy Dandridge at home, 1954
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dizzy Gillespie during a jam session, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bob Hope (right) and Frank Sinatra rehearsing for The Bob Hope Show, 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Sr., Sammy Davis Jr. and Will Mastin on stage at Ciro’s in West Hollywood, 1955.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Darin in his dressing room, 1959.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ella Fitzgerald, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Actress-model Suzy Parker, 1957.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Edith Piaf was caught in a montage of expressions and gestures while singing during her performance at New York’s Versailles nightclub, 1952.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Shelley Winters in a booth with mirrors, 1949.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marcel Duchamp with Dada artwork, 1953.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
On August 16, 1960, 32-year-old U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger ascended in a helium-balloon-tethered gondola to 102,800 feet (roughly 19 miles) above the Earth … and jumped. His free-fall lasted 4 minutes and 36 seconds. He experienced temperatures approaching minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit. As he fell, Kittinger neared the speed of sound, his pressure-suit-encased body traveling at more than 600 mph before he opened his parachute at around 14,000 feet. To this day, incredibly, he still holds records for highest parachute jump and longest-ever free-fall.
Captain Kittinger’s adventure was chronicled, at the time, in the pages of LIFE. But it was the image that graced the cover of the August 29, 1960, issue of the magazine of a green-clad Kittinger tumbling through the ether above a clean, white blanket of clouds that immediately and forever brought home the sheer audacity of his leapfrom the edge of space.
Today, it’s striking to look back and realize just how powerful a single, still photograph can be, and how many emotions it can stir, so many years after the event.
For Kittinger himself, the memory of his jump, and of his appearance on the cover of LIFE, remains startlingly fresh.
“I was eight years old when LIFE magazine was first published,” Col. Kittinger (Ret. USAF), now 84 years old, told LIFE.com. “I remember, so clearly, that my folks received a copy of LIFE every week. I religiously thumbed through every issue, keeping up with happenings all around the world. The photos were always so remarkable. But I could never have dreamed that one day, I would be on the cover. What an honor that was! To this day, I still get requests from people around the globe, asking for my autograph on that very cover.”
But beyond Kittinger’s recollections, there is the sense of wonder that anyone with even a modicum of imagination can embrace, looking at that picture of a human form hurtling toward the planet’s cloud cover miles below. The one image, snapped by an automatic camera perched in the gondola out of which Kittinger had just stepped, captures so many aspects of human endeavor that it bears repeat viewings. One might even say, repeat encounters.
The jump, after all, undertaken in the name of science, is an emblem of our pursuit of knowledge not as something dry and purely academic, but as adrenalized thrill-ride.
It’s also a snapshot of a life at the moment of supreme fulfillment. Joseph Kittinger dreamed of flying ever since he was a young boy in Florida. That he was the one human in a position to make that leap and that he wanted to make the leap speaks to a confidence and a faith in one’s team (scientists, engineers, fellow pilots) that verges on the awesome. Most of us have trouble falling back into the arms of friends and colleagues during “trust exercises” here on the ground; Kittinger’s trust was absolute and unwavering. His life, literally, depended on that trust being warranted. And it was.
Finally, and simply, the image on the cover of LIFE is just a breathtaking picture. One thinks, inevitably, of Icarus’ fall through an ancient sky while celebrating Kittinger’s far happier fate. That a man had the will to step from that gondola, so many miles above the Earth, with a hope, but absolutely no promise, of having it all end well suggests that as a species we’re perhaps braver than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. Or some of us are, anyway. And as long as some of us are, then the sky is no limit.
Nothing has illuminated America’s failings as harshly as the nation’s handling of racial strife; nothing has more clearly shown us at our best and our bravest as the victories won by the men and women in the great struggles of the Civil Rights Movement.
For generations who have grown up in a country where blatant segregation is (technically, at least) illegal, it’s bizarre to think that well within out nation’s collective living memory Black children once needed armed soldiers to escort them safely to school. But just six decades ago, the president of the United States was compelled to call on combat troops to ensure that nine teenagers in Little Rock, Ark., were protected from the enmity of their classmates and neighbors.
The Little Rock Nine, as the teens came to be known, were Black students who sought to attend Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957. The Supreme Court had ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Three years later, states in the South finally began to face the reality of federally mandated integration. It was historic, and dramatic and for weeks on end, it was profoundly ugly.
Reporters and photographers from across the country traveled to Little Rock, expecting to chronicle the cultural poison unleashed in the South each time strides were made toward full desegregation. In Little Rock, on Sept. 4, 1957 on the first day of school the media recorded the scene as 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, the first of the nine to arrive, was sent off of school grounds by Arkansas National Guardsmen, their rifles raised.
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had ordered this armed intervention by guardsmen under the pretense of preventing bloodshed—a scenario, LIFE noted at the time, that many Arkansans felt was unlikely to come to pass. Still, Faubus’s actions proved a successful, if temporary, roadblock.
A profile of Faubus published in the next week’s issue of LIFE noted that the governor spent several days holed up in his Little Rock mansion. Photographer Grey Villet and correspondent Paul Welch were with Faubus during his “self-imposed confinement,” noting in words and photos the man’s routines, which included answering letters from hundreds of segregationists sending cash and letters of support for his anti-integration resolve.
“The governor gulped tranquilizers and ate bland food to appease a troublesome stomach,” Welch wrote, noting that Faubus really seemed to believe that he was acting only with the best intentions for everyone involved in the standoff.
“A man without a great deal of courage would have taken the easy way out and said to the Negroes, ‘Go in there and get hurt,'” Faubus said. “But I’d rather take the criticism than face the prospect that I’d been negligent and caused someone’s death in this integration thing.”
The federal government, meanwhile, didn’t quite buy the governor’s justification for his actions in “this integration thing.” Interrupting his own vacation, President Dwight Eisenhower met with Faubus; shortly afterward, the Arkansas National Guard was removed from the school grounds.
On the heels of that decision came what LIFE deemed “a historic week of civil strife.”
On Sept. 23, the nine students entered Little Rock Central High School for the first time, ignoring verbal abuse and threats from the crowd outside. When the mob realized the students had successfully entered the school, violence erupted, and seven journalists were attacked including two reporting for LIFE. As the situation deteriorated, school officials, fearing for the students’ safety, dismissed the Little Rock Nine at lunchtime.
The next day, President Eisenhower ordered paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to the school, escorting students to the building and singling out troublemakers bent on disrupting the federal mandate. Over the following days, these troops and members of the Arkansas National Guard Eisenhower had federalized 10,000 guardsman, effectively taking them out from under Faubus’s control kept the situation in hand, their (armed) presence serving to pacify the more belligerent and strident elements in town.
Here, LIFE.com presents the work, much of which never ran in LIFE, of no less than six of the magazine’s photographers from Arkansas: Ed Clark, Francis Miller, Grey Villet, George Silk, Thomas McAvoy and Stan Wayman. Each brought his skills to bear on the events in Little Rock and, later, in Van Buren, Ark., in 1957 and ’58, and thus helped keep the desegregation struggle squarely in the public eye.
Although the Little Rock Nine were finally able to attend classes by late September 1957, the fight wasn’t over: throughout the rest of the school year, they faced ongoing abuse, threats, discrimination and acts of hazing from their white peers and, disgracefully, from equally vicious adults. But when spring 1958 came around, eight of the nine had successfully completed the school year. In an elemental way, they had won.
Vaughn Wallace is a photo editor and historian. Follow him @vaughnwallace.
Arkansas National Guardsmen prevented African-American students from entering Little Rock Central High School, September 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A convoy of Jeeps from the 101st Airborne headed to Little Rock.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Members of the Arkansas National Guard stood on duty during the integration of Little Rock Central High School, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Members of the Little Rock Nine arrived at school, only to be turned away by Arkansas National Guardsmen, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hazel Bryant followed and jeered at Elizabeth Eckford as Eckford walked from Little Rock’s Central High after Arkansas National Guardsmen barred Eckford from school.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African American students, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, was waved off school grounds by Arkansas National Guardsmen, September, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Elizabeth Eckford and family watched TV, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Members of the Little Rock Nine during legal hearings on their attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, September 1957.
Grey Villet/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Segregationists picketed in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A group of jeering anti-integrationists trailed two black students down a street in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Troops raced to break up a crowd protesting school integration, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Segregationists rousted from an anti-integration protest, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Segregationists rousted from an anti-integration protest, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African-American students arrived at Little Rock Central High under heavy guard by troops from the 101st Airborne, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Paratroopers from the 101st Airborne stood guard outside Little Rock Central High School, September 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Scene in Little Rock, Arkansas, during anti-integration protests in September 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Troops from the 101st Airborne squared off against anti-integrationists, Little Rock, Arkansas, September 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Scene in Little Rock, Arkansas, during anti-integration protests in September 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African-American students escorted by federal troops, Little Rock Central High School, 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Troops from the 101st Airborne patrolled the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Civil Rights leader Daisy Bates gazed through her front window, watching the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division escort the Little Rock Nine from her home to begin their first full day of classes at the formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Thomas McAvoy/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Daisy Bates, an NAACP leader, met with African-American students who had been denied admittance to public schools, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African-American students were refused admission to their high school’s football game, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At a school in Van Buren, Arkansas, African-American students arrived in front of a crowd of journalists and other onlookers, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African-American students arrived at school in Van Buren, Arkansas, the year after the Little Rock Nine integrated Little Rock’s public schools, September 1958.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students entered a previously segregated school, Arkansas, 1958.
The names associated with the creation of that great American musical, West Side Story, comprise a who’s who of theatrical brilliance: Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, William Shakespeare …
Right. Shakespeare. After all, the narrative elements that drive the high-octane action in West Side Story star-crossed lovers from feuding families; young men brawling in the streets; the blinding power of sexual desire are lifted directly from Romeo and Juliet. That Laurents, Sondheim and the rest saw that the major plot devices of a 16th-century tragedy could so seamlessly and entertainingly be transferred to 1950s New York City speaks volumes about the vision of the musical’s creators, and about the consummate genius of the Bard.
The Broadway production of West Side Story opened to largely ecstatic reviews on Sept. 26, 1957. The movie version, which went on to win 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, opened four years later, in 1961, and has been rightfully celebrated ever since as one of the most dynamic, appealing and imaginative American pop-culture creations of the 20th century.
(That’s choreographer Jerome Robbins in the chair, at left, suspended above co-director Robert Wise, seated on the ladder, during filming on the streets of New York City in 1960.)
The film ranks high on more than a few of the American Film Institute’s famed lists “100 Years, 100 Movies”; “100 Years, 100 Songs”; “Greatest Movie Musicals,” of course and is one of those rare Hollywood confections that, decades after its creation, remains critically acclaimed while enjoying the sort of routine, if kindhearted, skewering reserved exclusively for those entertainments that have earned a permanent and prominent place in the hearts of millions.
After all, how many times has the “Jet Song” (When you’re a jet, you’re a jet all the way!) been parodied? Or “Cool” (Boy, boy, crazy boy … keep coolie cool boy)? Or the gang bangers who break into elegant, soaring, Robbins-esque dance numbers at the drop of a hat?
Here, LIFE.com presents a series of photos by Gjon Mili made on the set of West Side Story. Some of these pictures ran in LIFE, while many more were not published in the magazine: but what comes across in every frame is the energy and the dedication of the men and women who were bringing a story that had already conquered Broadway to the big screen. Here, quite literally, is a classic in the making.
Original caption: “Bernardo (George Chakiris, center) leads gang, the Sharks, in a finger-snapping, crouching invasion of the turf of their rivals, the Jets.”
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Sharks, bedeviled by the tormenting of the Jets, cook up some dirty tricks. Here they pour yellow paint down on a quartet of dejected Jets. Both gangs are itching for an all-out street fight.”
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
George Chakiris as Bernardo leads two other Sharks into Jets territory.
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
On the set of West Side Story.
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Russ Tamblyn (yellow jacket) as Riff, leader of the Jets, in a scene from West Side Story.
Boys are thrilled and afraid as they ride an elevator for the first time. A woman worries as her astronaut husband soars through space. A man—Bob Hope—is letting an audience know he about to try his hardest to make them laugh.
Here, LIFE.com pulls from its archives a series of expressions—from people and, in a few cases, animals—that are both wordless and deeply rich. It’s a reminder that while communications by computer or phone call are certainly convenient, there is no quicker way to understand what a person is feeling than by looking them in the eye.
Bob Hope, 1941
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Donald the dog-loving duck plays with his (seemingly embarrassed) friend, Trigger, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, 1949.
Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mrs. Leland S. McCleery watches her Michigan Wolverines lose to the Wisconsin Badgers, 1959.
Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An intensely concerned Dr. Ernest Ceriani holds a bandage on the eye of a young girl whose head he has just stitched up after she was kicked by a horse, Colorado, 1948.
W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A frightened 15-year-old German Luftwaffe anti-aircraft crew member weeps after being taken prisoner by American forces during the drive into Germany in 1945.
John Florea Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A serene Marilyn Monroe on the patio outside of her Los Angeles home, 1953.
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Child star Margaret O’Brien, 1945
Bob Landry Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rene Carpenter, the wife of NASA astronaut Scott Carpenter, watches his orbital flight on TV in 1962.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Yorkshire hogs appear to smirk as they share the shade on a hot summer day in 1951.
Wallace Kirkland Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sophia Loren, 1957.
Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A kitten emerges, undaunted, from a pot of milk, 1940.
Nina Leen Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A less-than-happy Amer4ican taxpayer at an IRA information center in New York City, 1944
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dazed U.S. Army Corporal Roy Day Jr., photographed after surviving a massacre by North Korean troops of 26 of his American fellow-prisoners. Day played dead after all of the prisoners were shot and left on a hillside in Korean, 1950.
Hank Walker Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Actress Jeanne Moreau weeps in a scene from the film, Five Branded Women, 1960.
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two boys hold their breath, amazed, on their first elevator ride, 1948.
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gen. Douglas MacArthur roars orders from the bridge of the flagship USS Mount McKinley during an assault on the Inchon beachheads during the Korean War, 1950.
Carl Mydans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Winston Churchill, inscrutable during an election campaign, 1951.Winston Churchill, 1951
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A tough sergeant bawls orders from the corner of his mouth, 1952.
Cornell Capa Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A mother nurses her child, Israel, 1960.
Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Shirley MacLaine and her daughter Sachi Parker playfully pout, 1959.
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Pediatrician Dr. Ralph Shugart confers with a worried mother of a baby that has been crying for hours, 1963. He decided to give them both a sedative.
Leonard McCombe Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A woman laughs uproariously as she undergoes a “head-tapping session,” part of a sensory awareness class in an encounter group at the Esalen Institute in 1970.
Arthur Schatz Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A jubilant Ronald Reagan celebrates victory during California’s gubernatorial primary, 1966.
John Loengard Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Comedian Ed Wynn looks horrified at the idea of killing worms in the Broadway show, Hooray for What!
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A North Korean soldier contemptuously sticks out his tongue at LIFE photographer Joe Scherschel on the second day of cease-fire talks during the Korean War, 1951.
Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
