Page 63 – LIFE

Disturbing Photographs Show Pollution in the Great Lakes Before the Clean Water Act

January 14, 2020April 21, 2017 by

In 1968, two years before the first Earth Day, LIFE magazine dispatched photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to the Great Lakes to capture a crisis.

“Lake Erie, the smallest and shallowest of the five lakes, is also the filthiest; if every sewage pipe were turned off today, it would take 10 years for nature to purify Erie. Ontario is a repository for Buffalo-area filth. Michigan, where 16 billion small fish, called seawives, mysteriously died last year, is a cul-de-sac without an overflow pipe, and if Michigan becomes further polluted, the damage may take 1,000 years to repair,” the magazine explained. “Huron and Superior are still relatively clean, but they are in danger.”

And, statistics aside, the photographs Eisenstaedt produced told the story in lurid browns, oranges and grays, punctuated by the vivid iridescence of the occasional oil slick. As many in the United States were starting to realize, pollution of the American environment seemed to be reaching a point of no return. From that, there was some hope. “For selfish as well as civic reasons, more has been done in the past three years to clean the lakes than in the preceding 30,” the article reported.

Though federal water-protection laws did exist already (the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was 20 years old at that point) they were only just starting to get teeth, and technology that would facilitate a clean-up was improving. In 1972, the law was revamped as the Clean Water Act, and the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency made the lakes a priority. They still are, just as they are still under threat from a variety of sources. Though progress has been made on some fronts—Lake Erie has come back from the “dead—the words of one teenager who wrote to the Secretary of the Interior in the 1960s, and who was subsequently quoted by LIFE, still read as a warning.

“I was truly amazed,” he remarked upon visiting a polluted lakeshore, “that such a great country should not solve this problem before it’s too late.”

Masses of dirty soapsuds glided down Ohio’s Cuyhoga River. Shimmering in sewage, they were bound for Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the Cleveland port, litter was used to build unsightly breakwaters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fred Wittal, shown cleaning a meager perch catch, was the last of the commercial fishermen in his area.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Cuyahoga snaked through Cleveland, carrying a load of detergents, sewage and chemicals to Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This oil melange was waste from U.S. Steel. It is shown on the Grand Calumet River, a Lake Michigan tributary where even worms could no longer survive.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Another problem was natural pollutants such as the red clay delivered by the Big Iron River in Michigan.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the Canadian shore, a slaughterhouse pipe was the best place to try to catch what fish were left.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Detroit River flowed into Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“Beside the deep, clear waters that inspired Longfellow to write “By the shore of Gitche Gumee,” a waterfall of taconite tailings from the Reserve Mining Co.’s plant at Silver Bay, Minn. spilled into Lake Superior at the rate of 20 million tons a year.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Looking like a giant glob of beer foam, pulp wastes from the Hammermill Paper Co. stained Lake Erie’s Pennsylvania shore. The white mess was penned by a dike built of old tires and oil drums, but residue seeped through to foul open waters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In 1968, Lake Erie’s Sterling State Park had been dangerously polluted by septic-tank wastes for eight years, but despite warning signs the state of Michigan still permitted swimming.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White Lake, a five-mile-long catch basin on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, was covered by sewage-fed weeds.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At Green Bay, Wis., paper mill refuse helped turn the municipal beach into a marsh: there had been no swimming there for 25 years.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The beach at Whiting, Ind., 20 miles from Chicago, had been closed for ten years in 1968; Whiting had a problem in common with other lake communities: it had only one sewer system for human refuse and storm waters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lake Michigan’s big polluters were steel mills and refineries, some of which were clustered along the Indiana Harbor ship Canal, an oily caldron running through East Chicago.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A city sewer dumped into a Great Lake.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, nearly raw sewage—71 million gallons a day—gushed into the Niagara River. To the fury of Canadians, it then poured into Lake Ontario.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Rabbit Show

February 10, 2020April 14, 2017 by

The LIFE photo archives are full of mysteries, great and small—and in this case, furry. At some point around 1943, LIFE sent a photographer to cover a Long Island Rabbit Breeders Association show. There are no contact sheets, no notes or captions were saved, and the photographs were never published. All that can be said is that the event was clearly hopping.

However, while these rabbits seem to have been pampered pets bred for show, one possible reason why rabbit breeding might have been pursued at the time was a lot more practical.

“During the wartime era, when meat was rationed, rabbit breeding was promoted by the USDA as an inexpensive way to raise meat for your own family,” says Margo DeMello, anthropologist and president of the House Rabbit Society, who co-authored Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature. “Many breeders sell them as meat and pets, and that was certainly the case in the ’40s, so these rabbits shows would’ve appealed to both audience.”

The history of cuniculture—the agricultural practice of breeding and raising domestic rabbits—of course goes back much further than that. The Romans kept rabbits in walled gardens known as leporaria. Since rabbit meat was thought to be an aphrodisiac and a fertility aid for women, rabbit breeding was a female-dominated industry. “Men would be responsible for larger animals, and women would be responsible for smaller animals that could be raised at home, closer to the children,” says DeMello, whose nine rabbits reside in their own wing of her home with their own private courtyard outside Albuquerque, N.M. (alongside six chihuahuas, three cats and a parrot).

And, though the WWII push for rabbit consumption might unnerve the Easter bunny, breeding rabbits as food does have Easter-time roots. Catholic monks in southern France are believed to have been some of the first people to domesticate rabbits, and are said to have popularized the practice at their monasteries throughout the Middle Ages, at which point the church apparently considered the ancient delicacy of “laurice” rabbit fetuses or newborns more like fish than animal meat, thus allowing them to be eaten during Lent.

1943 Rabbit Show

Marie Hansen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Easter in Jerusalem: LIFE Takes a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1955

March 28, 2024April 13, 2017 by

More than half a century ago, LIFE dispatched photographer Dmitri Kessel to Jerusalem to observe the rituals that took place there as Christians of all stripes gathered to celebrate Easter and Christmas in the places most holy to their tradition. The resulting story, published in 1955 under the headline “Holy Days in the Holy Land,” focused heavily on the Christmas-in-Bethlehem side of things, as befitted its Dec. 26 issue date. But it was an image of Protestants from England and the U.S. at a tomb outside Jerusalem, the first image presented here, that won pride of place as the last photograph in the issue.

Although the rest of Kessel’s Easter photographs were not published at the time, notes filed in the LIFE archives make it possible to learn a good deal about his trip to Jerusalem. It was common practice at the time for a reporter, correspondent or researcher who would go uncredited in the final story to accompany a photographer on his or her trip. That person would file notes to someone at the magazine, who would use them to craft the language that went with the photographs. Those notes would then be filed away, most likely not to be consulted again, but archived for future research. These particular notes were bound for reporter Jane Wilson, who presumably wrote the photo captions that ran in the magazine, via George Caturani of the magazine’s foreign news service, from Mathilde Camacho of the Paris bureau.

“There were so many celebrations and so many ceremonies going on almost simultaneously during the Easter celebrations in Jerusalem, and so many communities involved that it is difficult to know which is the best way to set them down for you,” Camacho began.

She described the goings-on at the Latin Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian church, the Coptic Church, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Abyssinian Church and the Protestant Churches, witnessed during a long weekend of rites and celebration. Though her detailed captions are difficult to pair with the images after so many decades, they provide insight into the meaning of that time in that place for those people.

“Most of the pilgrims were really old,” she notes in the caption for a photograph of three elderly women from Cyprus who had come with a group of about 1,500 Greek Orthodox pilgrims, “and had been saving for years in order to get enough money for the sea fare from Cyprus to Beiruth and then either the air or the bus fare to Jerusalem.”

Those women, like so many others whom Camacho and Kessel met in Jerusalem, saw their voyage to the Holy Land as a crowning experience in a lifetime full of faith. The pomp and ritual seen in these images is, then, an appropriate reflection of both the joy and solemnity of the Easter season.

Original caption: “At Garden Tomb on Easter, Protestants from England and the U.S. hold services with Rev. A. P. Clark of London presiding and Dr. Billy James Hargis of Tulsa, Okla. (left of table) preaching. Many feel this spot outside Jerusalem more truly represents Christ’s tomb than the Holy Sepulcher inside the city.”

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Easter in the Holy Land, 1955.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Inside One of America’s First Retirement Communities, 1970

December 10, 2019April 12, 2017 by

The residents of Youngtown, Ariz., took a tongue-in-cheek approach to naming their town when it was founded around 1960: the town was the first American retirement community, a phrase that LIFE magazine still put within quotation marks, when the magazine’s Paul O’Neil examined life in such towns in the May 15, 1970 issue.

By that point, Youngtown’s ideas had spread to many other places, especially in the Southwest, which was home to Sun City, Ariz. With a population of 14,000 enjoying its three golf courses and “illuminated outdoor shuffleboard courts,” Sun City was thriving. LIFE reported, seven new houses were completed each day.

One of the major draws of Sun City was that, if residents were willing to pack up and move and investing in one of the “low, white-roofed, pastel-tinted” houses in the area, they would have access to clubs and activities for every interest under the desert sun on much less than they might require elsewhere. In 1970, the price of a two-bedroom house there came in at $17,990, and some residents told LIFE that they could live there on $100 a week. As a result, LIFE found that the residents were “surprisingly varied” and included “people from relatively humble walks of life” as well as “retired physicians, engineers, lawyers and Army officers.”

As one resident told LIFE: “It doesn’t matter what you used to be. All that counts is what you do here.”

Sun City, a retirement village in Arizona, 1970.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The mascot of the Pedal Pushers Club travelled in style.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sun City, a retirement village in Arizona, 1970.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sun City emphasized a not-too-strenuous outdoor life.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sun City, a retirement village in Arizona, 1970.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

As darkness descended on Sun City, residents danced away the evening hours.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sun City, a retirement village in Arizona, 1970.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Georgia O’Keeffe, On the Ghost Ranch

November 15, 2020March 31, 2017 by

In 1966, after LIFE photographer John Loengard first shadowed the artist George O’Keeffe at Abiquiu, one of her New Mexico homes, the images he created were put aside by editors, consigned for some future moment when there would be a small spot in the magazine that needed filling.

But it quickly became clear that O’Keeffe demanded more attention. Though O’Keefe—born Nov. 15, 1887 in a Wisconsin farmhouse—had been painting through much of the 1920s and ’30s, she was starting to become a more of a household name outside of the New York art world. (The phrase household name does not do full justice today. She died in 1986, and in 2014 her painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44.4 million, establishing a record-high price for a female artist.)

Back in ’66 Loengard was dispatched back to New Mexico, to the artist’s other home at Ghost Ranch, and the result was a cover story and 13-page photo spread in the March 1, 1968 LIFE magazine.

“She became a celebrity because of her independence, because of the way she engineered her life in such a simple way that she looked like a role model for counterculture lifestyle, and LIFE played that up in those pictures,” said Wanda M. Corn, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum and a Stanford University professor emerita in Art History. The spread “hit a nerve in ’68 with people who wanted to leave urban living and who are beginning to think about sustainable lifestyles that aren’t dependent on modern technology. The hippies are about ready to emerge, the feminists are about ready to emerge this is part of a new public for her. It’s only really late in her life that she becomes famous to people who know nothing about art, when they discovered her through something like LIFE.”

Loengard recalled what it was like to photograph her in 1966 and 1968 at her two homes in New Mexico:

She drove me over to Ghost Ranch for lunch, and I hadn’t taken my cameras out because I wanted her to feel as if what I was interested in was different from other photographers. I wanted it to be something that would interest her. So she started talking about her morning and evening walks and how she would kill rattle snakes on the walks and collect the rattles. She brought them out in tiny match boxes. I said, “Do you mind if I take a picture of the matchboxes?” My manners were impeccable.

I left after lunch and came back at dawn the next morning to go on a morning walk with her. And from there, we got along for three days. She had just finished a picture of clouds, fluffy clouds, and she wanted to know whether I liked it, so we talked about planes and her trip to Indonesia. She had a reputation of being a hermit, but she couldn’t have been more friendly, and I was surprised that she had a very good, wry sense of humor that would come out when she’d remark about New York or the weather. She smiled a great deal, but I only took one photograph of her laughing.

One of the things that interests me now is the picture I took of her holding a favorite rock that she told me she stole from Eliot Porter, a famous nature photographer, on a rafting trip. I think that’s a very striking picture. [The rock] is not the kind of thing you’d think of as inspiring to a painter. Her work in general, was that she just took what interested her, or that she happened to walk by and notice, or that came to her in the mail. It’s the same thing as how she loved to get packages from Neiman Marcus because in those days they were packaged very flamboyantly, with paper flowers that she kept and hung up in her bedroom at Ghost Ranch.

One of the reasons I was eager to photograph her is that I have great admiration for the work of Alfred Stieglitz [a prominent photographer to whom she had been married]. She refused to talk about him, and the only thing she’d talked about was her role as being in charge of making sure laundry was collected and done at the Stieglitz family’s house in the Adirondacks. She was interested to know if I knew about the New York art scene, but once she found out that I didn’t have gossip about the people she knew in the painting scene, she clearly didn’t want to be bothered by all the boys back East.

The pictures were received very well when I got back but it took a year and a half before anyone made a layout because it was thought to be a small story. A year and a half later, [the LIFE editors] decided we should try to do a cover, so I went out to Ghost Ranch again with Dorothy Seiberling, the art editor. The only place I could think of that we hadn’t been was the roof of her house, which you get to by climbing a rustic, wooden ladder, and there she was, halfway climbing down the ladder.

So in the picture [on the cover], she looks like she’s at rest, but she isn’t really. She is sort of coiled.

The photo of Georgia O’Keeffe that graced the cover of the March 1, 1968 issue of LIFE.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe at her home in New Mexico, 1968.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

A pig’s skull adorned a wall in Georgia O’Keeffe’s home.

John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Overhead beams shadowed the wall of a roofless courtyard at Abiquiu, N.M.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe in her studio at Abiquiu.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe rummaged through piles of photographs.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio, 1968.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe had a morning visitor at the ranch.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe picked vegetables at Abiquiu.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

A collection of antlers, skulls and bones on a window sill at Ghost Ranch, artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s home.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe in her garden.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Ghost Ranch, the desert home of artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe at home with her pet chows.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

A chow trotted across the sage-blown patio.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

A basketful of vegetables was readied for use at the ranch.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

A favorite stone and a favorite belt.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

Georgia O’Keeffe in the bedroom at Abiquiu.

John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection

LIFE’s Best Photos of Warren Beatty on the Rise

August 11, 2021March 30, 2017 by

It may be hard to believe these days, but Warren Beatty wasn’t always Hollywood royalty.

But, as LIFE described in a major feature about Beatty that ran in April of 1968, there was a moment when it seemed that his burgeoning career might fade. In 1961, he had broken into the business with a star turn in Splendor in the Grass from filmmaker Elia Kazan with a script by William Inge and, as LIFE pointed out, “you cannot break in much higher than that.” But he had followed that film with movies that were less than spectacular hits, and his reputation as a headstrong on-set personality and a headline-making celebrity serial monogamist (of whom LIFE declared that “the radiance of unquestioned virility pours out” when he smiled) threatened to overshadow his actual work.

All that changed with Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 movie in which he starred with Faye Dunaway.

But it wasn’t just the movie itself that set Beatty right. With low expectations for its success, the studio buried its release in its calendar. The initial response from critics and audiences was middling. It was then that Beatty accomplished the remarkable feat of convincing the public to reconsider. In fact, TIME essentially reviewed the picture twice, first as a “strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap” in August of 1967 and a few months later, in a cover story, as “the sleeper of the decade,” noting that the first review had made a “mistake.”

By the time it was nominated for Best Picture, Beatty was set. Here’s a look back at LIFE best portraits of the star from the 1960s and ’70s.

Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, 1961.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock images

Warren Beatty with Natalie Wood at the 1962 Academy Awards ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warren Beatty, 1967.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Enchanting his audience, Beatty is a gracious award winner at a dinner given by the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which picked Bonnie and Clyde as the best picture of 1967.”

Bob Gomel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warren Beatty at the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures in 1967.

Bob Gomel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warren Beatty at the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures in 1967.

Bob Gomel / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

Warren Beatty, 1967.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warren Beatty on the phone as he campaigns for Sen. George McGovern’s democratic presidential nomination, 1972.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Inside One of America’s First Retirement Communities, 1970

Georgia O’Keeffe, On the Ghost Ranch

LIFE’s Best Photos of Warren Beatty on the Rise

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