Page 137 – LIFE

Talk About Office Space: LIFE at the Pentagon’s Early Days

January 30, 2022April 15, 2012 by

The Pentagon has become such a symbol of the U.S. military over the years that it’s easy to forget that the world’s largest office building and home of the Department of Defense is just that, a building, albeit one with some mighty impressive stats, and some sobering history, attached to it.

For example:

Despite having 3,705,793 square feet for offices, concessions, and storage and a gross floor area of 6,636,360 square feet, the Pentagon is designed so that, ideally, it takes at most seven minutes to walk between any two points in the building.

Five-and-a-half million cubic yards of earth and 41,492 concrete piles were necessary for the foundation of the building, as well as 680,000 tons of sand and gravel from Potomac that were processed into 435,000 cubic yards of concrete.

Roughly 200,000 telephone calls are made daily from the Pentagon. (In the pre-cell phone days of the early 1940s, 100,000 miles of telephone cable enough to circle the globe four times helped make all that communication possible.)

Ground was broken for construction on the Pentagon on September 11, 1941—60 years to the day, incidentally, before one of the airliners hijacked by terrorists on 9/11, American Airlines flight 77, slammed into the western side of the building, killing 184 people, 125 of them in the Pentagon itself.

The people who actually worked inside the Pentagon, meanwhile, were initially underwhelmed by the building, LIFE wrote in December 1942. Both employees and visitors “resent the eight and two-fifths miles of barren corridors, the jammed ramps, the pile-up at entrances and exits, the parking and transportation problems, the six overcrowded cafeterias, the staggered working hours.”

Here, LIFE.com presents a series photos most of which never ran in LIFE of the iconic, colossal edifice under construction more than seven decades ago.

Correction: The original version of this story misstated the number of years between the groundbreaking ceremony for the Pentagon and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The attacks were exactly 60 years later, not 70 years later.

Building the Pentagon, 1941.

Thomas D. McAvoy TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Architects and draftsmen work on plans for the Pentagon’s construction in the partially completed building in 1942.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

A massive map provides an overview of the Pentagon highway network. With a complex housing roughly 23,000 workers and 16 parking lots for over 8,000 cars, new roads to accommodate the traffic were a necessary part of the construction.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

In a May 1943 issue, LIFE noted that the exterior of the Pentagon “has a gray limestone façade, although more than half of the building’s substance is sand and gravel dredged from the bottom of the Potomac River.”

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

An officer chats with a worker by one of the large exhaust fans at the Pentagon, 1940.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

A woman occupies a desk in the colossal office space in the “War Building.”

Thomas D. McAvoy TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Workers would ultimately complete seven floors for the Pentagon: five of them above the ground and two beneath.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The Pentagon, 1941.

Myron Davis-TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

When construction began on September 11, 1941, LIFE reported, the groundbreaking took place “only two weeks after the designing [of the structure] commenced.”Building the Pentagon, 1940s

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The Pentagon was built in a mere 16 months for approximately $83 million.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Among the more random facts about the Pentagon: the building contains an estimated 4,200 clocks.

Myron Davis-TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The Pentagon boasts 17.5 miles of hallways.

Myron Davis-TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The Pentagon has 284 rest rooms.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Today the Pentagon is surrounded by 200 acres of lawn.

Thomas D. McAvoy TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Men at work inside the Pentagon, 1941.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The Pentagon’s mail room.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

A serviceman talks to a receptionist in the newly constructed Pentagon in 1941. Building the Pentagon, 1940s

Thomas D. McAvoy TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Sending files via the Pentagon’s pneumatic tube system—an old-school delivery mechanism that, as late as the mid-1980s, was still handling more top-secret information than the Defense Department’s computers.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The official War Office seal on the china used in a private dining room at the Pentagon.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Part of the suite for the highest ranking officer at the Pentagon, circa 1942. As LIFE wrote in a December issue that year, the Secretary of War “has a roomy, carpeted office with comfy overstuffed leather chairs. He sits at the handsome desk which has been inherited by every Secretary of War since Robert Todd Lincoln in 1883. At his right is a direct wire to the White House.”

Myron Davis-TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

A private kitchen built to serve the highest ranking Pentagon officials and their guests, should they wish to avoid one of the building’s six cafeterias.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Part of the suite for the Secretary of War. LIFE wrote in December 1942: “The only really happy person in the War Department’s whopping new reinforced-concrete ‘home’ is the Army’s civilian chief, Henry L. Stimson.” (Stimson was Secretary of War at the time. This post would later be eliminated when the Army and Navy were split into separate departments; the job of Secretary of Defense was added to ensure cooperation between them.)

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

A man presses a button in the elevator reserved for the highest ranking officer at the Pentagon and his guests. The Pentagon boasts 13 elevators, 19 escalators, and 131 stairwells.

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

From the private washroom that was part of the suite for the Pentagon’s top man. LIFE noted in May 1943: “There is a medicine chest, toilet, and a stall shower but no bathtub.”

Myron Davis TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson: Classic Photos of an American Icon

January 20, 2020April 12, 2012 by

When Jack Roosevelt Robinson stepped onto Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, he not only changed the face of professional baseball in America. In ways subtle and profound ways, he changed the nation itself.

Breaking baseball’s color barrier, Robinson embarked on an odyssey that brought him renown, respect and, by all accounts, an early death, at 53, from the unimaginable stress he suffered, on and off the field, as the first black player in the major leagues.

For most of Jackie Robinson’s long journey, LIFE magazine was there, chronicling his baseball triumphs including Brooklyn’s only World Series title, in 1955, and his life and achievements away from the diamond.

Here, LIFE.com offers a selection of pictures that paint a portrait of a man possessed of rare dignity, competitive fire and grace under pressure .

In 1950, when LIFE covered the filming of the movie version of his life, The Jackie Robinson Story (in which Robinson starred, quite winningly, as himself), the magazine explained the man’s appeal, at the time and for coming generations, like this: “Previous baseball heroes Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Monty Stratton [played by Jimmy Stewart] have had to wait till they were past their prime or dead before movies were made about them, and actors had to be taught laboriously to copy their stances and swings.”

But Jackie Robinson is having his story told by Hollywood while he is still one of the best players in baseball. And Jackie does not need any actor to copy him; he has gone out and played himself. . . . He fitted into his new role as film star with the same easygoing grace and cold determination that have carried him through his whole career. [He plays the part] with the natural charm of a born screen personality.

With the movie completed, “Jackie went back to his spring training and started off the new season in his usual style,” LIFE noted, “batting .455 the first week.”

Robinson’s skills on the diamond and his prodigious athletic gifts in general were never in question. He was UCLA’s first-ever varsity athlete in four sports (baseball, basketball, football and track) and even though he started his major league career relatively late in life, at 28 years old, he brought an electrifying combination of hard-won discipline and explosive talent to the game that thrilled fans, awed his teammates and consistently rattled opponents.

Case in point: One of the most famous of all the pictures ever made of Robinson—in fact, one of the most iconic baseball photographs ever made—illustrates not only the man’s intensity and his will to win, but his wonderfully disruptive energy on the base paths. (See the sixth photo in this gallery.) Captured by LIFE’s Ralph Morse in Game 3 of the 1955 World Series against the Yankees, the image shows Robinson mischievously working to distract catcher Yogi Berra and rattle pitcher Bob Turley. This picture is almost always described as “Jackie Robinson rounding third base,” but the fact that he is provocatively dancing off the bag actually makes the photograph all the more rousing, and so much more representative of his style of play.

Decades later, Morse’s photograph remains one of the signature portraits of a great athlete at his most intensely, passionately competitive.

A footnote to that story is that, incredibly, Jackie Robinson, after years of battling for a World Series title, did not play in the deciding 7th game in 1955. He wasn’t a young man anymore, he was coming off his least-productive season as a Dodger (he hit only .256 with 12 stolen bases and eight home runs in 105 games) and manager Walter Alston benched him. Game 7 was the only World Series game the Dodgers played during his entire career in which Jackie Robinson did not take the field. But Dem Bums won it all that year, the one and only championship they won in all the years they played in Brooklyn.

Finally, though, it was Robinson as both flesh-and-blood man and as a combination of lightning rod, rallying cry and highly publicized symbol that caught the attention, and the admiration, of so many people of every race.

“I was in school in Alabama,” Hank Aaron once told LIFE.com, explaining why Jackie Robinson mattered then, and still matters today, “when I heard that he signed with the Dodgers. I was so happy. I wanted to be a ballplayer, and while I knew that what he was doing was a long way from where I was, I also knew someone had to do it before I could get there.”

All these years later, everyone who knows anything about baseball and about America in 1947 remains humbled by what Jackie Robinson endured, what he risked and what he achieved.

Jackie Robinson, 1950.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson held his son, Jackie Jr., as he sat with his wife Rachel on the front steps of their home in 1949.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson relaxed between takes on the set of the 1950 biopic, The Jackie Robinson Story, in which he starred as himself.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Advertisements for The Jackie Robinson Story from the May 15, 1950, issue of LIFE magazine.

Jackie Robinson poses for LIFE’s Allan Grant during filming of The Jackie Robinson Story, 1950.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hoping to distract Yankee catcher Yogi Berra and disrupt the pitcher, Bob Turley, Jackie Robinson dances off of third base during the third game of the 1955 World Series at Ebbets Field.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson slid into home in 1956.

George Sillk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn manager Charlie Dressen and Iraq’s King Faisal II chatted in the dugout in 1952.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson signed autographs and chatted with fans in 1955.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson in action during game with the Giants, 1956

George Sillk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson slashed a base hit during Game 6 of the 1955 World Series.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson rounded first during a game against the Giants in 1956.

George Sillk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In 1956, his final season, Jackie Robinson bluffed for third after stealing second.

George Sillk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson stole home plate in Game 1 of the 1955 World Series after Yogi Berra had just told the pitcher, “Don’t worry about Robinson.”

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Yogi Berra took issue with the umpire’s “safe” call after Jackie Robinson’s electrifying steal of home in Game 1 of the 1955 World Series. Though the Yankees won the game and the Series, for years after, Berra continued to insist that Robinson was out on the play.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson, 1955

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Josephine Baker: An Expat’s Triumphant Return to Broadway

August 9, 2021April 11, 2012 by

No American public figures—not Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, not Louise Brooks, not even the inimitable Louis Armstrong—embodied the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s more perfectly than Josephine Baker, the Missouri native who became a legendary performer in Paris in the ’20s and ’30s.

In fact, for millions of people (Europeans, for the most part, but also others all over the globe) who read about, heard about or saw the “Bronze Venus” on stage or in movies at the height of her career, Baker was the Jazz Age a gorgeous, pyrotechnic talent who, in the words of none other than Ernest Hemingway, “was the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.”

Years after her greatest popularity, but when she was still a beloved singer and dancer in her adopted France and elsewhere in Europe, Baker returned to America specifically, to Broadway in 1951, and was a smash hit decades after she left home for less Puritanical and (largely) less race-conscious realms overseas.

In its April 2, 1951, issue the editors of LIFE reported on Baker’s homecoming thus:

One of the most famous American expatriates of this century came back home a few weeks ago. Josephine Baker, daughter of a Negro washerwoman in St. Louis, had begun a sensational career in Paris nightclubs in 1925 by singing an Ave Maria while clad only in a girdle of bananas. She went on a little less scandalously to become “La Baker,” darling of Paris, a citizen of France and a legend to Americans. Now, at 45, she was back on Broadway, singing love songs in five languages and making the Strand movie theater seem intimate as a boudoir. Swishing her pantalooned gown, she crossed her eyes exuberantly, brought cheers from the packed theater as she shouted, “You make me so hop-py!” She made her managers so happy that they quickly booked her for a U.S. tour at $7,500 a week.

Here, LIFE.com brings back a series of photographs from 1951 by Alfred Eisenstaedt that capture something of the woman’s energy, charisma and near-palpable joie de vivre. There will never be another. . . .

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

Josephine Baker performs at New York’s Strand Theater in 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “In a $21,000 gown of Jacques Griffe, she flutters like a moth and sings a Cuban love song, ‘This is Happiness.’ She brought 43 gowns to the U.S. for her tour.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Josephine Baker performs at New York’s Strand Theater in 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “In a Dior dress, and furs which cost $2,600, she sings into mike concealed in her hand-held corsage: ‘Two loves have I … my country and Paree …”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Josephine Baker performs at New York’s Strand Theater in 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Josephine Baker’s four-foot chignon is wound up into three tiers of buns in her dressing room, 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: ” A peck on the nose is given by husband Jo Bouillon after performance. Bouillon, called ‘Mr. Soup’ around theater, leads the orchestra for his wife.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Josephine Baker performs at New York’s Strand Theater in 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE With Bette Davis: Rare and Classic Photos of a Hollywood Legend

August 9, 2021April 4, 2012 by

By the time LIFE magazine put Bette Davis on its cover in January 1939, the 30-year-old actress had already appeared, as a star and in supporting roles, in more than two dozen films and won two Oscars (for 1935’s Dangerous and 1938’s Jezebel). What many fans and most critics (even those who dislike her) consider Davis’ signature work in movies like Dark Victory, The Little Foxes and Now, Voyager was still ahead of her, but there was no question that the Massachusetts native was one of the most electrifying movie stars of any era.

In fact, in its 1939 article, LIFE’s writer Noel F. Busch called Davis’ turn as the rough, vulgar London waitress Mildred Rogers in the 1934 version of Somerset Maugham’s classic, Of Human Bondage, “probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress.”

High praise but anyone who has seen the film knows what Busch meant. For sheer, melodramatic perversity, Davis’ Mildred is one of film’s most riveting, revolting creations: a vicious, self-absorbed viper who also exudes a magnetic and for the film’s protagonist, an addictive carnality.

In the decades since her great work of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and even into the ’60s, Davis has remained one of the seminal figures in Hollywood history. A powerhouse actress she was the first person ever to receive 10 career Academy Award acting nominations Davis was unique in her appearance (those eyes) and in what a New York Times critic once perfectly described as her recognizable, inimitable “tensile” acting. Like James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable and a handful of other legitimately iconic figures, Bette Davis was a spellbinding talent (i.e,. someone with genuine acting chops, rather than merely a gorgeous face or outrageous figure) who was instrumental in defining what it meant to be a screen idol in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

LIFE’s 1939 cover story, meanwhile, featured the actress not as some sort of raving prima donna the image that has, bizarrely, attached to her in the decades since her death in 1989 but as a remarkably grounded, albeit supremely driven, artist. (It also pointed out that “Miss Davis is Warner Bros.’ top box-office star. She is 30 years old, 5 ft. 3 in. tall and weighs 113 lb. without dieting. She conducts herself with more dignity than most stars.”)

That the article’s writer, Busch, was genuinely impressed with Davis especially in light of what passes for talent in Hollywood is abundantly clear throughout. One marvelous example of the tone of the piece:

Since the ability to act is comparatively unnecessary in Hollywood, it is regarded with suspicion. Directors might be interested in a girl who was noted for her love affairs or able to balance a peanut on her nose, because these accomplishments would suggest that she had an interesting personality. Conversely, acting ability [like Davis’] suggests an arty personality and young movie actresses should conceal it more carefully than a craving for cocaine.

Published one month before Dark Victory was released, the article featured a number of portraits by the great LIFE photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt. Here, LIFE.com again publishes several of those Eisenstaedt pictures, as well as a number of equally strong, charming photos that never appeared in the magazine.

Bette Davis at home in Beverly Hills California, 1939

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

With her dog, Popeye, in her lap, Bette Davis is wheeled across her Beverly Hills home’s wide, red-tiled patio in a sun chair by her chauffeur, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis at home in Beverly Hills California, 1939

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “A daily sunbath in a well-shielded enclosure is Bette Davis’ health recipe. At her beautiful Mexican-style, 4-acre Beverly Hills home, she spends most of her time outdoors.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Popeye the Magnificent, a pet Pekingese … follows his mistress down to the patio.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis at home in Beverly Hills California, 1939

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis at home in Beverly Hills, California, 1939

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “The top box-office star of Warner Bros., in blue slacks, skims through the morning newspapers in the playroom of her home. The walls are decorated with Mexican posters.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis at home in Beverly Hills, California, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE With Famous Dads (and Their Sometimes-Famous Kids)

December 19, 2019April 2, 2012 by

The lives of celebrities are different than ordinary lives in many ways, but never do they look more like the rest of us than when they are in the thrall of their children. Here, LIFE.com celebrates fatherhood as practiced by the rich and famous—mostly actors, with the occasional president thrown in. In a few cases (Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Donald Sutherland, for example) the children of these notable figures, also pictured here, achieved their own renown in later life.

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

Rita Hayworth with husband Orson Wells and daughter Rebecca, 1946

Peter Stackpole (LIFE Picture Collection)

Kirk Douglas with son Michael, 1949

Lisa Larsen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Humphrey Bogart and son Stephen in 1952

J.R. Eyerman /Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Charlton Heston lifted his two-month-old son, Fraser, who was portraying the baby Moses during filming of The Ten Commandments in 1955.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Senator John F. Kennedy played peek-a-boo with daughter Caroline in 1958.

Ed Clark/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Desi Arnaz with son Desi Jr. and TV son Richard Keith at a Dodgers game in 1958.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin with his son, Ricci, at home in 1958.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vice President Richard Nixon and daughter Julie at a ballgame, 1958.

Hank Walker Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Tony Curtis and daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in 1959

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Richard Burton and his future stepdaughter, Liza (Liz Taylor and Mike Todd’s daughter), in 1962.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Steve McQueen kissed his daughter Terry goodnight in 1963.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. with his son Mark in 1964.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dustin Hoffman with his daughter Karina, 1969.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jack Nicholson played with his daughter, Jennifer, on the deck of his home overlooking Franklin Canyon, Los Angeles, 1969.

Arthur Schatz/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Donald Sutherland with his son, Kiefer, in 1970.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Robert Redford and his son, David, in Utah in 1970.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden: Giant in the Saddle

August 17, 2021March 31, 2012 by

It’s hardly surprising that racing fans can reel off the names of dozens or even scores of great horses far easier than they can bring to mind, say, ten great jockeys. Here’s one you should know: the late, great Johnny Longden an English-born, Canadian-raised titan who first made a name for himself riding in California and, by the end of his four-decade career, had won the Triple Crown (aboard Count Fleet) and most every important race in the land.

As LIFE magazine put it in a May 1952 issue:

When wizened 42-year-old jockey Johnny Longden booted home his 3,999th winner, the routine of horse racing at California’s Hollywood Park was completely upset. Fans suddenly stopped playing form and, anxious to help Longden get his 400th win, began playing his horses for sentimental reasons. Officials who had planned a big ceremony fidgeted: Longden himself acted coy. “I never give it no thought,” he said. “I know it’s come, just like night and day.” It came seven races later hen, next day, he won No. 4,000, about 1,000 more than any other U.S. jockey.

Famous for getting his horses off to a fast start and keeping them out in front, little (4 ft. 11 in.) Johnny Longden has at one time or another won almost every big race in the country. Despite his age and a fat bank account, he is still the most industrious jockey going, riding six or seven races every day of the week and occasionally flying down to Agua Caliente, Mexico to ride on Sunday. Rising horses, says Longden, is the one thing he really enjoys. And he expects to win 5,000 before he is 50.

In fact, he ended his career with more than 6,000 wins including his very last race, the 1966 San Juan Capistrano Invitational Handicap at Santa Anita Park, where Longden had enjoyed so many of his greatest triumphs.

But Longden wasn’t merely a Hall of Fame rider who competed as a jockey until he was 59; he is also the only man to ride to victory in the Kentucky Derby, and then train a horse that won the Derby, as well, in 1969 with Majestic Prince.

Johnny Longden was, in many ways, one of the major figures in horse racing for decades. He should be remembered, and celebrated, for even longer. This is a start.

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

Johnny Longden, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden, 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden (second from right) with fellow jockeys, Hollywood Park, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden (second from right) with fellow jockeys, Laurel Park, Maryland, 1952.

Mark Kauffman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden (left) and fellow jockey, California, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden, Hollywood Park, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden wins at Hollywood Park, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden at Hollywood Park in 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden poses after his 4,000th career win in 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden and son at the track, 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden and family, 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden with his pet cockateil, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden and family, 1945.

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden (hands in pockets) in 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Longden and friend, 1952.

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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