Page 91 – LIFE

LIFE at the Circus: Behind the Scenes With Ringling Brothers, 1949

January 25, 2024October 1, 2014 by

LIFE.com celebrates the legendary entertainment juggernaut that Charles Edward Ringling (Dec. 2, 1863 – Dec. 3, 1926) and several other Ringlings owned and operated through the years: the Ringling Brothers Circus (later the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the “Greatest Show on Earth”). Here are photographs by LIFE’s Nina Leen, chronicling the lives lived behind the scenes by the huge extended family that made up the traveling extravaganza in the late 1940s.

In fact, Charles Edward’s nephew, John Ringling North, was the larger-than-life focus of the LIFE feature for which these photos were originally made. (Very few of the photographs ran in the magazine.)

Of all the marvels, human and animal, which populate the Ringling Bros.’ circus [LIFE wrote], none can match John Ringling North, the man who runs it, in sheer, brassy flamboyance. It is the considered judgment of a large following of friends and enemies that the sustained private performance given by North, a former stock-and-bond salesman who hacked his way through a financial jungle to become president and majority stockholder of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc., is easily as spectacular as any that takes place under the Big Top of The Greatest Show on Earth.

The 1949 article goes on to portray a man of outsize appetites, remarkable talents (“He tap dances, plays the saxophone and cornet, juggles lighted torches and sings songs of his own composition. . .”) and boundless, near-manic energy who somehow was able to put his stamp on a massive pop-culture phenomenon while, if the article is to believed, he rarely slept, constantly boozed it up in his private Pullman train car and galloped around on a stallion named Stonewall’s Pride.

Under the Big Top or outside of it, they just don’t make ’em like that any more.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

NINA LEEN

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 1918 Flu Pandemic: Scenes From a Cataclysm

November 2, 2020October 1, 2014 by

The COVID-19 outbreak has already caused more than 1 million deaths in 2020 and put much of the world into quarantine. The race now is to keep COVID-19 from becoming as devastating as the 1918 flu pandemic (the “Spanish Flu”) that infected an estimated half a billion people around the globe and, by most estimates, killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people—at the time, three to five percent of the world’s population.

In America, in one year the average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years, according to the United States’ National Archives. All told, more than 675,000 men, women and children in the U.S. died of the virus.

Here, we remember what the world looked like as the post-World War I pandemic ran its lethal course before ending, almost as rapidly as it began, in the early summer of 1919.

These Red Cross volunteers fought the flu pandemic, 1918.

Apic

The St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps was on duty during the influenza pandemic, 1918.

Universal History Archive/UIG via Shutterstock

Influenza victims crowded into an emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kans., 1918.

AP Photo National Museum of Health

A patient wore a “flu mask” during the influenza pandemic which followed the First World War.

Topical Press Agency—

Unidentified baseball players wore masks that they thought would keep them from getting the flu, 1918.

Underwood And Underwood/The LIFE Images Collection

A doctor inoculated Mayor Andrew Peters of Boston against the Influenza virus during the pandemic, 1918.

Hulton Archive—

Inspecting Chicago street cleaners for influenza, 1918.

Bettmann/Corbis

Court was held outdoors in a park due to the influenza pandemic, San Francisco, 1918.

Hulton Archive—

Strangers to Reason: LIFE Inside a Psychiatric Hospital, 1938

January 16, 2020September 30, 2014 by

For all of the lighthearted and often downright frivolous material that appeared in LIFE through the years, the magazine could also address, head-on, the thorniest, most resonant issues of the day. Less than two years after its debut, LIFE confronted its readers with a devastating photo essay on an issue that has long bedeviled humanity: namely, how to treat those among us who suffer from debilitating, and often frightening, mental disorders.

Even today, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photographs from the grounds of Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island are remarkable for the way they blend clear-eyed reporting with compassion. But what is perhaps most unsettling about the images is how terribly familiar they look.

The treatment of mental illness in all its confounding varieties and degrees has come a long, long way since the 1930s, and in most countries is now immeasurably more humane, comprehensive and discerning than the brutal approaches of even a few decades ago. Advancements in psychiatric medications alone have helped countless people lead fuller lives than they might have without drugs. And yet . . . the grim, desolate tone of the pictures in this gallery can feel eerily familiar.

The tone struck by LIFE, meanwhile, in its introduction to the Pilgrim State article—while employing language that might seem overly simplified to our ears—is at-once earnest and searching:

The day of birth for every human being is the start of a lifelong battle to adapt himself to an ever-changing environment. He is usually victorious and adjusts himself without pain. However, in one case out of 20 he does not adjust himself. In U.S. hospitals, behind walls like [those] shown here, are currently 500,000 men, women and children whose minds have broken in the conflict of life. About the same number, or more, who have lost their equilibrium, are at large. Their doctors say they have mental diseases. Their lawyers call them insane.
Mentally balanced people shun and fear the insane. The general public refuses to face the terrific problem of what should be done for them. Today, though their condition has been much improved, they are still the most neglected, unfortunate group in the world. [This photo essay features] pictures showing the dark world of the insane and what scientists are doing to lead them back to the light of reason.

—This photo gallery edited by Liz Ronk for LIFE.com.

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A female patient became violent.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaed/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A continuous-flow bath was seen as the best method for calming psychiatric patients. With their bodies greased, the patients could remain in the baths for hours, and gradually fall asleep.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A manic-depressive gazed continuously through a barred window.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

‘Career Girl’: A Famed Portrait of a Young Woman’s Life in 1948 New York

December 2, 2022September 28, 2014 by

Of all the photo essays that LIFE magazine published over the decades, a 12-page 1948 feature known simply as “Career Girl” remains among the most moving and, in many ways, one of the most surprising. Chronicling the life and struggles in New York City of a 23-year-old Missourian named Gwyned Filling, the article and especially the essay’s photographs by Leonard McCombe struck a nerve with LIFE’s readers. Seven decades later, McCombe’s pictures have lost none of their startling intimacy, or their empathy.

A 1947 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Gwyned Filling moved to New York with a friend a week after commencement. Less than a year later, LIFE selected her, from more than a thousand other candidates, to serve as an emblem of the modern “career girl” the smart, driven young woman who viewed post-World War II America, and especially its big cities, as a place where opportunities seemed limitless. After all, the nation’s workforce during the critical war years had been transformed by a massive influx of skilled female workers; when the war ended, it was only natural that educated, ambitious women would view the labor landscape as utterly changed for the better.

The article that appeared in the May 3, 1948, issue of LIFE titled “The Private Life of Gwyned Filling” follows Gwyned as she negotiates the frenetic universe of New York City while trying to keep her own personal hopes and career expectations in perspective. She works; she dines out; she stays abreast of the doings of friends and family back home; she dates; she dreams.

The reaction of LIFE’s readers, meanwhile, ranged (perhaps predictably) from outrage and moral indignation at Gwyned’s “unladylike” pursuits to a kind of celebratory relief that LIFE chose to show on its cover “a young woman with a serious, purposeful, intelligent face” rather than “some vacuous-faced female with the molar grin that has come to be regarded in America as a smile.”

A reader from Detroit, on the other hand, opined that if the story “can keep only a few girls in their small-town homes it will have done at least some small service to humanity. Big cities are a menace to the progress of civilization. The people who fling themselves against them to be battered to pieces like moths against a lamp are fools.”

In the end, the enduring value of “The Private Life of Gwyned Filling,” and of McCombe’s quiet, masterful portrait of Gwyned at her happiest, her most determined and her most despairing, is that it serves as an honest record of a certain moment (the late 1940s) in a certain place (New York City) as experienced, to one degree or another, by countless women striving for something beyond what might have been expected of them a mere generation before. The article continued to fascinate years after its publication.

Finally, it’s worth noting that in November 1948 Gwyned married the man, Charles B. Straus, Jr., she is seen dating (and, at times, weeping over) in some of these pictures. They remained married for 54 years they had two kids and several grandkids until Straus died in 2002. Gwyned died in 2005, in Rhode Island. She was 80 years old.

Here are images from the story shot by McCombe, and also some images of her with new husband Charles Straus Jr. shot by LIFE photographer George Silk as they departed on a honeymoon cruise.

Gwyned Filling, alone in a crowd that has gathered to watch a fire in the city, stands on tiptoe and tilts back her head to get a better view, New York City, 1948.

Leonard McCombe/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, May 3, 1948.

Leonard McCombe—LIFE Magazine

LIFE magazine, May 3, 1948.

Photos by Leonard McCombe/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charles Straus Jr. and “career girl” Gwyned Filling aboard ship as they leave for honeymoon cruise, Nov. 1948.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gwyned Filling and husband Charles Straus Jr. standing by rail as Statue of Liberty fades past, November 1948.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charles Straus Jr. and “career girl” Gwyned Filling aboard ship as they leave for honeymoon cruise, November 1948.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Art of Photographing Arnold, the Pig from `Green Acres’

January 16, 2020September 18, 2014 by

Most people who spend time studying the relative intelligence of animals will readily admit that pigs are among the smartest of our mammalian cousins.

One photographer in particular, Vernon Merritt III, might attest to the validity of such an assertion about pigs, if only because he once found himself taking pictures of one of the most famous pigs ever to oink its way through a photo shoot and, if nothing else, came away impressed by the creature’s willingness to please.

The story of Merritt’s portrait session with Arnold of Green Acres fame is succinctly told in the book, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw (Bulfinch Press, 1998). Returning to the States after he was wounded (“shot through the coccyx,” as he put it) while covering the war in Vietnam as a freelancer, Merritt was hired as a staff photographer at LIFE in 1968. Asked specifically about his 1970 photo shoot with the pig, Merritt jokingly acknowledges in What They Saw that, as an Alabama native, he might have been tapped for the assignment because of his own “special understanding of the porcine nature.”

We rented the pig, and he came with his handler, and the pig would do anything you wanted the pig to do. The handler would click one of those little clickers, and every time he did, he’d give the pig a little something to eat. The pig was overwhelmingly cooperative.

“Overwhelmingly cooperative.” How often does one hear that phrase applied to celebrities, human or otherwise, these days? We’re just sayin’. . . .

A pig that played Arnold on the TV show, “Green Acres,” 1970.

Vernon Merritt III The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren: Classic Photos of a Movie Star

December 20, 2019September 18, 2014 by

Powerful, enduring relationships can sometimes develop between photographers and their subjects. Such was definitely the case with LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt and the luminous Italian film star, Sophia Loren. Over the course of their decades-long friendship, Eisenstaedt took countless pictures of the Oscar-winning actress most of which never made it into the pages of LIFE magazine (and many of which were never intended for the magazine).

“Eisie must have shot thousands of pictures of me that no one ever saw,” Loren told LIFE.com, fondly recalling her camera-toting “shadow.” Here, LIFE.com presents a series of Eisenstaedt’s finest portraits of Loren, made at the very height of her international fame.

“When I met Eisie,” Loren recalled, “it was really a love at first sight. He became my shadow. But he never tried to interfere in my life. No, he just kept on shooting and smiling, and was happy just to be with me like I was to be with him! I miss him. He couldn’t do any wrong to me. I trusted him so much. He’s one of those who doesn’t grow on trees, as my friend Cary Grant used to say.”

Asked by LIFE.com about the qualities Eisenstaedt brought out in her that other photographers did not, Loren said: “That I was a girl, joyful for her life, because she accepted anything that came with her work. Just being really, completely happy. Yes.”

Loren appeared on LIFE’s cover seven times through the 1950s and ’60s.

“At that time,” she said, “when LIFE magazine came out every week, it was something very important for a career the best thing that could happen to an actress. It was something unbelievable. Everybody talked about it a story in LIFE magazine, with a cover.”

In the summer of 1964, Eisenstaedt visited Loren and her husband, Carlo Ponti, at the home Ponti had spent years restoring: an opulent, ancient, 50-room villa in Marino, Italy. Several of the pictures he made there are featured in this gallery. And although Loren loved the house—at the time of Eisenstaedt’s visit, she called living there “bliss”—it was sold around the time of Ponti’s death, in 2007.

“This is something I don’t like to live with—sad memories,” she confided. “Life gets very hard when you lose someone so important to you, and you don’t need to be surrounded by the memories all the time, which are so strong and hit you in the most unexpected moments. We had a great, great love. The more I go on without him, the more I miss him. It was a great feeling it was great in life and it was great in our work.”

Asked if she ever tires of fame, Loren broke into a musical laugh.

“Are you kidding? I think it’s wonderful. [Fans] smile at me like I was a member of their own family. It’s a great feeling. In a sense, when I am at home I feel lonely because I miss my husband. But when I am outside, I have great big families around me all the time.”

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

Sophia Loren, 1961

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren, Italy, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren, 1961

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren laughing while exchanging jokes during lunch break on a movie set, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren, 1961

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren, Italy, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren, 1961

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren with her husband Carlo Ponti on a boating trip off of Naples, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren, 1962

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren on her bed in her Italian villa, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren in her Italian villa, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren picking roses at her Italian villa, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren at home, 1964

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren and LIFE’s Eisenstaedt during a boating jaunt off the coast of Naples, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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