Page 55 – LIFE

When Batmania Began

October 21, 2019October 14, 2019 by resolute

The character of Batman first appeared in print in 1939, in an issue of Detective Comics, and through the decades the Caped Crusader has led the paved the path toward today’s superhero-drenched pop culture. The 1989 Batman movie starring Michael Keaton established the first superhero blockbuster franchise, and in 2005 Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins ushered in an era of more serious films that focussed on the private anguish behind the secret identities. In 2019, the intensity got ratcheted up with the movie The Joker, which stars Joaquin Phoenix and tells a new origin story of Batman’s archenemy.

But Batman’s first popular move onto the screen had quite a different tone. If the modern Batman intends to be brooding and adult and decidedly Dark Knight-ish, back then on the TV screens the mood was playfully infantile. And the kids loved it.

Photo by Yale Joel

The star of the original Batman TV series was Adam West, who approached the role with a camp seriousness that suited the anti-authoritarian 60s. His Batman belonged by behind the wheel of a Batmobile with a clearly labelled “Emergency Bat-Turn Lever.”

Batman’s sidekick was Burt Ward’s Robin, who liked to say the word “holy” followed by just about anything. Examples in this compilation video tribute to his catch phrase include “Holy fruit salad,” “Holy fourth amendment,” and “Holy interplanetary yard stick.”

Photo by Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

In the above photo Robin was being attacked by the Mad Hatter, played by David Wayne, who was the villain in four of the series’ 120 episodes. The mannequins represent jurors on whom the Mad Hatter was taking revenge by kidnapping them and taking their hats. The climactic fight scene is the show in a nutshell: the bass line humming, horns accentuating every punch and kick (along with a Bam! or Zok! splashed across the screen). And it is just taken for granted that the hat factory in which the scene takes place included a conveyor belt with giant mechanical blades that whirr and chop..

Photo by Yale Joel

Even back then, Batman fans liked to make themselves over in his image. LIFE’s coverage of Batmania in 1966 went beyond the set to capture the first seeds of the dress-up games that have fans flocking to comic book conventions about the globe. Above, kids in a New York city dance class either don official Batman gear or fly with homemade capes. Below is a rough-looking haircut meant to mimic the lines of Batman’s cowl—and an early sign that what brings joy to the wearer might strike others as going a little too far.

Photo by Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Cool Car Shots

November 15, 2019October 14, 2019 by resolute

In 1972 LIFE magazine went on a road trip with Flip Wilson. Wilson, one of the top TV performers of his day, drove a Rolls Royce with the personalized license plate KILLER, after the never-seen boyfriend of the Geraldine character on his show. On the road trip, a care-free jaunt through the beautiful Southwest, writer P.F. Kluge observed “Flip’s enjoyment of driving is almost palpable. He leans back against the headrest, props a foot on the dashboard, holds his hand in the air, waving at nothing but the breeze.”

Today the piece of personal technology that people are more likely to be infatuated with is their phones. But for much of the 20^th century, the car occupied an exalted place in the American imagination. With the beginning of mass production in 1927 and the spread of suburban living after World War II, cars became the new place that we spent our time, and the expression of both status and style.

Now people care about fuel efficiency more than fins. The push now is toward cars in which people hand the driving over to a computer. But Flip and the people in these photos took joy in being behind the wheel.

This three-wheeler was an experimental model that appeared in a 1945 LIFE story touting the automotive lifestyle in California.

Photo by Nina Leen/]/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The car-hop was another sign of the automotive lifestyle in 1945 California.

Photo by Nina Leen/]/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The LIFE story on the new automotive lifestyle referred to Herbert’s as a “drive-in restaurant.”

Photo by Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

This Messerschmidt from 1953 provides a snug ride.

Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The clothes? Jacques Fath. The tower? Eiffel. The car? A 1947 Delahaye.

TONY LINCK/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

This photo of a man and his Cadillac was from a 1951 story on ranchers who were raking in the bucks.

Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Ice cream cones (melting on the outside but not on the inside) demonstrated advances in air conditioning in 1952.

John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Here’s another kind of cool: Steve McQueen and his Jaguar, 1963.

John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

A boy admired the Cadillac display at auto show in New York, 1956.

Photo by Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

This Lincoln Futura, a concept car, appeared in the Debbie Reynolds movie It Started With a Kiss. A few years later another version of the Futura, with a darker paint job, became the Batmobile in the Batman television show.

Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Press photographers covered the John Kennedy campaign on the back of a Cadillac, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

When College Boxing Packed ‘Em In

November 15, 2019October 14, 2019 by resolute

Not so much now, but once upon a time college boxing was a really big deal, and a high profile NCAA enterprise. When LIFE wanted to document the sport in 1949, the obvious place to go was the University of Wisconsin. The Badgers were the sport’s dominant program, winning eight national titles and hosting seven NCAA tournaments from the years that college boxing was an official sport, from 1932 to 1960. The story never ran in LIFE, so these photos by George Skadding are being shown here for the first time.

Photo by George Skadding

Boxing matches in Madison, held in the school’s basketball arena, routinely drew more than 12,000 fans, with a record 15,200 people attending a bout against Washington State in 1940.

Photo by George Skadding

In these photos, a boxer from Wisconsin takes on a fighter from the University of Idaho. That might sound like a mismatch, given Wisconsin’s aforementioned dominance, and these pictures do show the Badger getting in his licks. But Idaho was another of the sport’s power programs. The Vandals won three national championships in boxing, tied with San Jose State for the second most all-time. Another gem state school, Idaho State, won two national titles as well.

Photo by George Skadding

It can be safely said that Wisconsin’s John Walsh was the greatest college boxing coach. A former Golden Gloves champion himself, Walsh became the Wisconsin coach in 1934, and his boxers won 35 individual titles in addition to their eight team titles. Walsh led the program until 1958, which was just a couple years before college boxing, from an NCAA standpoint, met its demise.

By 1960, Syracuse was the only eastern school to send a team to the national tournament. During the tournament a popular Wisconsin boxer, Charlie Mohr, collapsed in the dressing room and never regained consciousness. He died eight days later. (Already in 1959 a Texas A&M fighter, Curtis Raymond Lyons, had died after a bout.) Sports Illustrated’s report on Mohr’s death was headlined, accurately, “The End of College Boxing.”

The Women’s Work-Home Dilemma, 1947

February 25, 2020October 14, 2019 by resolute

In 1947 LIFE magazine ran a long story titled “The American Woman’s Dilemma.” Women today might immediately recognize the problem: the balance between home and work life. Back then the issue was becoming increasingly relevant because from the 1930s to the 1950s the number of married women in the work force increased from 10 percent to 25 percent, according to the Washington Center For Equitable Growth. Among the reasons they cite for the increase: more work was being done in offices that needed clerical workers, and more women were attending high school. LIFE’s story, shot by Nina Leen, examined the lives of women in and out of the home, and the forces pulling them in conflicting directions.

The photo at the top of the story illustrates one aspect of the dilemma: working mothers who miss time with the children. This was a particularly stark example: the woman identified in the 1947 issue as “Mrs. Joseph Glass” hugs her four-year-old son Joe Jr. on a Friday after she leaves work, at a doll factory. She had not seen her son all week because she and her husband couldn’t afford to hire someone to watch him, and so they had boarded him in another home during the work week. The photo below shows her Mrs. Glass her job—in a doll factory.

Photo by Nina Leen

Photo by Nina Leen

Photo by Nina Leen

The staged photo above left was meant to illustrate the domestic chores a mother of three young children needed to complete in the course of a week. The mother is Marjorie McWeeney, and her weekly tasks included 35 total bedmakings, twenty-one meals, and dishes and cleaning the clothes. The article did not raise the possibility of Mr. McWeeney making the bed or pitching in with the dishes. On the right Ms. McWeeney gets her hair done while keeping four-month-old Mark close by. According to the original story, she hadn’t given thought to what she would do when the children left home.

Photo by Nina Leen

Photo by Nina Leen

The other side of the dilemma: women who have no career risk being bored and unfulfilled, especially after the children have left home. Nina Leen’s photo makes this bridge club look like a circle of hell (actually, it’s Maplewood, N.J.). In 1947 the U.S. had 17,000 formally organized women’s bridge clubs with 2,500,000 members. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that around the time of this story half of all adult women were idle—meaning, they didn’t have a career or children under 18, and they were not elderly.

Photo by Nina Leen

Photo by Nina Leen

Perhaps the detail of the original story that looks most offensive to the modern eye was its talk of a “reducing session” that would be needed for woman who didn’t get enough exercise. This woman above left is reading while standing on a Slendro Massager that was supposed to jiggle the pounds away. One thing is clear: workout clothes have come a long way, baby.

In 1947 advice books abounded for women who felt unsure of their role. The LIFE story quoted mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, who observed to Vogue, “Probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were unrelentingly assessed in terms of his maleness….If from school and lecture room, press and pulpit, he heard the persistent outpouring of a shrill and scolding voice, bidding him remember his biological function.”

Photo by Nina Leen

Bizarre Bicycles

November 21, 2019October 14, 2019 by resolute

In 2010 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, commenting on the movie about his company, The Social Network, criticized the screenwriters for giving him motivations that he found false and, even worse, hokey. The movie suggested that he invented Facebook because of a fictional ex-girlfriend he wanted to impress and a club he couldn’t get into: “They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.” No such confusion exists about the Chicago bicycle repairmen whose inventions were featured in a 1948 issue of LIFE. They unmistakably liked to build things.

The tandem bicycle above, called “The Gangbuster,” featured 13 shotguns, six revolvers, two bayonets and a flare gun. With the gift of hindsight, we can say that neither the Gangbuster of any of these others designs revolutionized the field of bicycle building. This would not have been a surprise to people in 1948, either. But the bikes, which were paraded during a gathering of the Chicago chapter of the National Bicycle Dealers Association, are fascinating in their peculiar ingenuity.

This four-person bicycle was created by Art Rothschild, who bravely took the top position on the bicycle in this photo. He reportedly broke three ribs learning to ride it.

Photo by Wallace Kirkland/This four-person bicycle was created by Art Rothschild, who bravely took the top position on the bicycle in this photo. He reportedly broke three ribs learning to ride it.

The reported issue with the Uno-Wheel is that if the rider braked suddenly, he would spin in the inner circle. Still, it looked cool.

Photo by Wallace Kirkland/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.

This bedstand bike set up its share of one-liners. It “was dreamed up by Joe Steinlauf, who got the idea while lying around in bed one morning,” said the original LIFE story.

Photo by George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Perhaps this is what they mean when they say that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Photo by Wallace Kirkland/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

When Maine Got Its Caribou Back

February 24, 2020October 14, 2019 by resolute

They say you can’t beat mother nature, but every now and then people give it a shot. Every now and then it works—rivers are rerouted, new crops are introduced. So in 1963, Maine figured it would try to get its caribou back.

Caribou were once plentiful in pine tree state, during the early years of the United States, but then because of hunting and disease destroyed the population around the turn of the century.

But in 1963, Maine attempted to restore its population, by working out a trade with Newfoundland. They swung a wildlife swap. Maine sent Canada 320 grouse, and Newfoundland agreed to hand over 24 caribou. These weren’t just any 24 caribou, either. Six were males, but eighteen of group were pregnant females. With all those young ones on the way, the LIFE story about this plan sounded a hopeful note: “Maine hopes its herd will be multiplied come spring.”

The process took some effort.

Caribou being prepared for their journey.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

Caribou being flown to Maine.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

The Caribou were brought to Mount Katahdin in Maine’s Baxter State Park.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

In Maine but before being released into the wild, the caribou attracted the curious.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

The caribou were penned before released so they could be tagged and given penicillin shots.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

Did all these effort succeed? Not really. A recent report on Maine’s state website looked back on the 1963 effort, and Matthew LaRoche, Superintendent of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, wrote of the caribou of the class of ’63: “They dispersed after three or four years and were never seen again.” Maine again tried to bring in caribou from Newfoundland in 1993, but failed once more. The second time around the caribou—a dozen of them were this time—were fitted with radio collars, which means that the defeat was a little more detailed: “They all died or migrated out of the area.”

Caribou didn’t last in Maine, experts believe, because their habitat changed. Old growth forests had been cut down and replaced with new growth forests, and the younger trees didn’t produce the kind of lichen that are a staple of the caribou diet. Also, the whitetail deer population had increased, and those deer which carry a brainworm that doesn’t affect deer but is deadly to moose or caribou. While it is speculated that a caribou replenishment might have succeeded with a bigger initial herd—maybe closer to 100—that’s a big and expensive project. So if caribou are to come back to Maine anytime soon, no one will be buying them a ticket.

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