We can only imagine the reasons why Carolyn Swanson forewent the traditional seeing-eye dog in favor of a Persian cat named Baby. Perhaps she was allergic, or afraid, or simply too attached to Baby to consider a canine replacement. Whatever the reason, LIFE Magazine dispatched a photographer to capture their special relationship in 1947, creating a series of photographs that never appeared in the magazine’s pages.
Swanson kept the white cat on a tight leash, lest a squirrel send him running. Baby, in turn, guided her over thresholds and across streets. And his service did not go unrecognized. A clipping from a local newspaper announced that Baby was awarded a medal “for faithful devotion to his blind mistress.” Though the cat posed stoically with his medallion, he seemed to favor a more humble reward: a heaping plate of cat food.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Baby the seeing-eye cat, 1947.
Loran F. Smith The LIFE Picture Collection
Baby poses with his medal of honor, 1947.
Loran F. Smith The LIFE Picture Collection
Baby guided his owner down the street, 1947.
Loran F. Smith The LIFE Picture Collection
Carolyn Swanson and Baby stopped to talk to a neighbor, 1947.
Loran F. Smith The LIFE Picture Collection
Baby the seeing-eye cat led his owner in her home, 1947.
Scotland—what a country, and what a history! In 1947 LIFE profiled its landscape, economy and traditions, touting Scotland’s most celebrated exports—among them whiskey, golf, tweed, herring, ships and bagpipes. LIFE added, “Another major export has been men.” Andrew Carnegie, James Gordon Bennett and Alexander Graham Bell, to name just a few, “left their needy land to win high fame elsewhere.”
Hans Wild’s photos for LIFE, and the hundreds of outtakes never printed, capture the intricate detail of Scottish culture down to the shearing of a wooly sheep and the fingering on a traditional bagpipe melody. Pride, in both national heritage and familial lineage, courses through the images. It was, after all, a matter of serious and legal business, as the magazine laid out clearly: “A person who wears the crest of a clan of which he is not a member may be fined £8 6s 8d.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Competitors for the world championship danced the Reel of Tulloch, Scotland 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ancient Castle Rock and its fortifications (upper right) have looked down on Edinburgh for centuries. The royal residence of Scottish kings beginning in 1004, it was also the scene of witch burnings. The “Royal Mile,” a mile of streets connecting castle and Holyrood Palace, began beyond the castle at the extreme right. Essayist Thomas De Quincey was buried in the cemetery of St. Cuthbert’s Church (lower left).
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Eilean Donan Castle guarded Loch Duich in the western Highlands near Dornie. Under the low cloud (right) lay the Isle of Skye, to which Prince Charlie once fled, disguised as the serving maid of Scottish Heroine Flora Macdonald. The castle was wrecked by British gunfire in 1719 when it was a headquarters for Spanish and Scottish leaders in one of the endless revolts against the English crown.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The key to the Highlands was once this old bridge over the Forth Stirling. For centuries it was the only escape route for clansmen fleeing north.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lord Lyon King of Arms, Thomas Innes of Learney, was supreme judge of all Scottish genealogies and determined precedence and succession of clan chiefs. His full accouterments included an appliquéd tabard, chain of office, Grand Cross of Royal Victorian Order and Baton.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In full dress, a piper of the famed Black Watch regiment piped a pibroch at Perth Barracks.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In Stewart Tartan an Aberdeen lass competed in a championship Highland dancing contest held each year at the Cowal gathering at Dunoon. Other events included piping and the fling.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A four-year-old boy branded the newly sheared sheep with tar, Scotland 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A champion steer stood in a pasture, Scotland 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A newly released prisoner of war brought carcasses (shot the night before) up to shore, Scotland 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
St. Giles Church was where Knox preached. Near it, in a now-vanished yard, he may be buried. Nearby also stood Tollbooth Prison (Scott’s Heart of Midlothian).
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Glamis Castle, first built in the 11th century, where Macbeth supposedly murdered Duncan, at the time of this photo housed the 23rd Baron Glamis.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Highland farms like these near Spittal were islets amid bare hills. Spittal (hospital) meant the place where travelers were offered shelter.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A man threw an eight pound weight, Scotland 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scotland, 1947.
Hans Wild The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
“Shy,” “self-effacing” and “introspective.” The words LIFE used to describe Cesar Chavez in 1966 may not sound like the qualities befitting one of America’s most effective labor leaders. But Chavez’s power, at least as LIFE observed in that year, was not to be found in displays of volume or might. It was his quiet leadership and deep commitment to nonviolence that empowered thousands of farm workers to transform their working conditions into something more humane.
This legacy has, in recent years, been both recognized and complicated. In 2014 President Obama declared Chavez’s birthday, March 31, a national holiday. Also that year, author Miriam Pawel published The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, the first comprehensive biography of Chavez, offering a more nuanced view of his leadership. For decades, Chavez had been held up more as hero than human, and Pawel’s thorough excavation of his life injects humanity—blemishes and all—into the narrative.
But when LIFE covered him during the mid-1960s, the prevailing image of Chavez was that of the quiet leader. Chavez, LIFE wrote, did not seek out the spotlight. During a 25-day, 250-mi. march to Sacramento, he “marched in the third row, largely unnoticed.” Neither did he dictate orders. When giving driving directions, one follower observed, “He doesn’t say, “Turn here, go there.” He says, “Now we turn here. Now let’s stop there.””
The son of a migrant farmworker, Chavez was exposed to the plight of laborers from a young age. He left school after seventh grade to work in the fields himself, so his mother would not have to. Addressing the kinds of conditions under which his family lived and worked would become his own life’s work, as he would go on to co-found the National Farm Workers Association with fellow labor leader Dolores Huerta.
In 1965, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee with which the NFWA would soon merge to form the United Farm Workers of America launched what would be a five-year strike against grape growers in California. When LIFE dispatched Arthur Schatz to cover the strike in 1968, Schatz’s lens found the introspective leader the magazine had profiled two years earlier. Standing in solidarity with workers, he physically embodied his own philosophy on the work he did: “In organizing people, you have to get across to them their human worth and the power they have in numbers.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Labor activist Cesar Chavez with grape pickers in support of the United Farm Workers Union, Delano, California, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Grape pickers, Delano, California, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Grape pickers, Delano, California, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Grape pickers, Delano, California, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Labor activist Cesar Chavez (C) talking in field with grape pickers in support of the United Farm Workers Union in Delano, California, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Grape pickers strike in Delano, California, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cesar Chavez, 1968
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Grape pickers strike in Delano, California, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cesar Chavez, 1968
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez with VP Dolores Heurta during the grape pickers’ strike, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dolores Heurta, VP of United Farm Workers, during grape pickers strike, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Grape pickers strike in Delano, California, 1968.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The 1963 fifth grade class at the Emerson School in Maywood, Illinois took the smart approach to viewing an eclipse. Wielding cardboard boxes, the students demonstrated for LIFE’s readers how to safely look at this natural phenomenon.
During an earlier solar eclipse in 1960, hundreds of people had suffered permanent eye damage from looking directly at the sun. With help from the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness, Emerson students avoided the same fate by building Sunscopes, pinhole camera-like contraptions that indirectly project an image of the sun. The magazine offered instructions for those wanting to replicate the project at home:
To build your own, get a carton and cut a hole in one side, big enough to poke your head through. Paste white paper on the inside surface that you will be facing. Then punch a pinhole into the opposite side, high enough so that the little shaft of light will miss your head. For a sharper image you can make a better pinhole by cutting a one inch square hole in the carton, taping a piece of aluminum foil over this hole and then making the pinhole in the foil. Finally, tape the box shut and cover all light leaks with black tape.
A final word to the wise from LIFE: “Don’t forget to come out for fresh air.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Fifth-graders at the Emerson School in Maywood, Ill. lined up with their backs to the sun, their eclipse-watching boxes over their heads.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
At work, building the eclipse-viewing contraption.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In their Maywood, Ill. classroom John Travelstead pasted white paper inside box while Eddie Clemmons tried on the head-hole for size.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A student poked a hole in his sunscope.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The teacher explained how a sunscope works.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cutting out a head-sized hole.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Trying on a sunscope.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
These students all tested their sunscopes at once.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Heading outside, bearing sunscopes.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Students with their sunscopes.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Students with their sunscopes.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Students and sunscopes all in a row.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Students and sunscopes all in a row.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
When it comes to four-legged thespians, canines have generally achieved a greater level of fame than their feline rivals. We remember Lassie, Benji and Toto, and more recently Marley and Skip. But cats seem to face a steeper path to Hollywood stardom. Blame it on the lack of good roles.
One role, however—the title character in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1843 short story The Black Cat—offered theatrically inclined kitties a chance to break through. In the story, the cat’s owner plasters him into a wall, along with his murdered wife. Eventually, the animal’s mewing from beyond the grave leads investigators to the woman’s body. The film adaptation, which would appear in the 1962 horror compilation Tales of Terror, adjusted the storyline by weaving in elements of another Poe tale.
Exactly 152 cats showed up for the audition, all of them “considerably less nervous than their owners.” Several were disqualified thanks to white paws or noses, but even for those left in the running, the day left dreams largely dashed. The lead role, it turned out, had already been filled by “a well-known professional cat.” Seven lucky extras, selected on account of having the meanest looking faces, were chosen as understudies.
Their owners, whose ambitions for their pets might just have exceeded those of the pets themselves, couldn’t help but let superstition get the best of them. Although they acted naturally around their own cats, “many took pains not to let any strange black cats cross their paths.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Black Cat Audition, 1961
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
More than 100 million viewers (in more than 60% of U.S. households) tuned in to CBS on the evening of March 31, 1957 to watch Julie Andrews played the title role in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s TV adaptation of Cinderella—the only musical the pair ever wrote for television.
Most saw the show in black and white; only a small percentage of viewers had color receivers. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella served as a vehicle for Andrews, who was just coming off a stint on Broadway in My Fair Lady. Though TV musicals were common during the 1950s, they were mostly adapted from stage musicals. Cinderella, on the contrary, skipped the stage and went straight to TV.
The 90-minute program, LIFE wrote soon afterward, told “the story of a slightly sophisticated, uncindery Cinderella whose evil stepfolk are clowns and whose magical life is filled with music.” A review in TIME praised Andrews’ performance (she “fitted the heroine’s role as if it were a glass slipper”) and Rodgers’ music (“the hero of the evening”) but panned Hammerstein’s script (“which kept shifting uneasily between the sentimental and the sophisticated, and making each seem lamer than the other”).
Andrews received an Emmy nomination for her performance and continued to star onstage and on the small screen until 1964’s Mary Poppins launched her film career. Andrews saw a similarity in Cinderella and in her earlier turn as Eliza Dolittle. My Fair Lady, Andrews said in an interview, is “the best Cinderella story, really.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Julie Andrews as Cinderella, 1957.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Julie Andrews and Jon Cypher rehearsed music for the TV production of Cinderella.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dancers waited to perform a grand waltz while a technician listened for the cue to start.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Watching the star: Members of the cast gathered around a monitor as Julie Andrews sang A Lovely Night, a musical recapitulation of the royal ball.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The 1957 TV adaptation of Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The 1957 TV adaptation of Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The 1957 TV adaptation of Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Authors Oscar Hammerstein II (left) and Richard Rodgers watched the show.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The 1957 TV adaptation of Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After the show Julie Andrews toasted to the rest of the cast and drank from her glass slipper.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
