New York City has always been a proving ground for entrepreneurs. The Alfred Eisenstadt photograph above, for example, depicts a dog walker in Central Park in 1967—and documents a phenomenon born just a few years before the photo was made.
Here’s how it started: one morning in 1964, a man of Upper East Side gentility awoke at dawn to walk an acquaintance’s dog. By the end of the year he was making more than $500 a week walking other people’s pooches.
Over time, this dog walker, Jim Buck gained many more clients, and in a few years he employed a stable of two dozen assistants walking hundreds of dogs a day.
As the ’60s pressed on, Mr. Buck founded Jim Buck’s School for Dogs—the first of its kind, being one part canine-training, one part exercise and other walking needs—and ran the business for more than 40 years.
Buck closed his school shortly after the new millennium, and retired. His death in July 2013 at the age of 81 was noted with an obituary in The New York Times. But his was a classic American success story: He was an innovator who saw a need, and filled it, and a man who, legend has it, wore through the soles of his shoes every other week.
Olivia Marsh is a filmmaker, writer and history student at New York University.
Dog walkers in Central Park, New York, 1967.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock
In the spring of 1964, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt—who served as a German artilleryman during World War I and saw action in the terrible fighting at Passchendaele—and correspondent Ken Gouldthorpe traveled to Verdun, in northeastern France, where one of the costliest battles of WWI took place five decades earlier. Here, LIFE.com presents Eisenstaedt’s quietly powerful color pictures from Verdun: images of an idyllic landscape that still bears the scars, and seemingly harbors the ghosts, of “the war to end all wars.”
Of all the battle sites along the 350-mile sweep of the Western Front [Gouldthorpe wrote in the June 5, 1964, issue of LIFE], none has come to symbolize the carnage and futility of World War I’s fighting more than the fields and hills of Verdun. Here the Germans tried to bleed the French army to death. . . .Today in an ossuary near Douaumont, even now smelling of death, rest the bones of 130,000 unidentified casualties from both sides: skulls, thighs, and — almost indistinguishable — the hobnailed sole of a soldier’s boot. Th erupting shells of a thousand bombardments killed and dug up and mixed and then reinterred the bodies until they intermingled inseparably beneath the mud. [But] not all the memorials honor unknown soldiers. In the wall of Fort Vaux . . . a couple of poppies from nearby fields decorate a plaque [picture #17 in the gallery] to one French victim of Verdun. It says, simply, “To my son. Since your eyes were closed mine have never ceased to cry.”
The sullen turrets of Verdun’s forts continued to guard one the world’s most deadly battlefields.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In an ossuary near Douaumont rested the bones of 130,000 unidentified casualties from both sides.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, photographed from the air, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
14,000 marble crosses honored Americans” at Verdun.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
At Vaux rested a plaque to one soldier.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
This monument was erected in remembrance of refugees.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Near the crest at Montfaucon, where in 1918 U.S. infantry routed the Germans with bayonets but suffered enormous losses, a village cross held up a shell-shattered Christ.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
At Douaumont a statue of a French soldier lay with 15,000 actual dead.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Verdun, France, 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The title of a 1957 feature on Brazil published in LIFE magazine was: “Growing Pains of a Big Country: Ambitious Brazil Has Great Riches, Fine Prospects — and Big Problems.” The operative word here, of course, is “big,” as Brazil is huge in many ways, not least in geographic size (the 5th largest country on earth) and in population (200 million people).
But enormous troubles—many of which stem, at least in part, from the country’s endemic corruption —have held Brazil back from realizing its phenomenal economic potential. A story with a similar headline could easily be written today. This gallery features color photos made when beautiful, troubled Brazil was enduring “growing pains” not dissimilar to what it has gone through in more recent times.
Rio’s peaks, while beautiful, also strangled traffic. Still, they made a lovely sight at dusk.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1957.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Decrepit engines, such as this 1904 wood burner on the Belem-Braganca run, plagued railroads. The eucalyptus logs they burned gave off the fragrance of cough medicine.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The basin of the Amazon river was home to 3.5 million people, a number of them recently arrived from Japan and Puerto Rico.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Brazil, 1957.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Brazil, 1957.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
This U.S.-built Dam, Peixoto, was constructed by a subsidiary of the U.S.-owned American and Foreign Power Company to serve industrial centers outside Sao Paulo.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Brazil, 1957.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rio, 1957.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Brazil, 1957.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Brazin’s old capital was Salvador, north of Rio in the sugar-growing country. It lost its position to Rio in 1763, after gold was discovered farther South. Salvador is a double city, the lower part (foreground) built along the harbor, and the upper part, with churches, monasteries that date to 17th Century, on a high bluff.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Picking cotton, Brazil, 1957.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
This coffee plantation stood in the terra rosa (purple earth) territory of the state of Parana. The plantation, or fazenda, had its own little village of warehouses, workers’ houses and stores (center), surrounded by symmetrical rows of thousands of coffee trees 5 to 12 feet high. Each of these trees produced about one pound of coffee each year. The country produced almost half the world’s supply.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A new capital was being built in Brasilia by workers who lived in a cluster of 2,000 temporary wooden buildings. Traders from the nearby cities came to sell dry goods and razor blades from suitcases on the streets. There was no finished road to the site and practically all traffic in and out was by plane.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1957.
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
With most pictures—and certainly with most pictures made by professional photographers—we can grasp what’s happening inside the frame the moment we lay eyes on it. If the photograph is in focus, and if the action or subject of the picture is remotely discernible, it takes the eye a mere instant to tell the brain what’s going on.
That’s a couple kissing. There’s a sunset. That’s a baseball player sliding into home.
But some photos capture scenes so unfamiliar so outside the realm of what we usually see, or expect that it can take a while to wrap our minds around what’s depicted. Case in point: This Loomis Dean picture, made on the beach in Santa Monica in 1948. We know, when we first encounter it, that the photograph depicts a beach scene. We know that the central figure in the composition is a human being. But many of us, for a good while, are unable to understand, to really grasp, what’s happening.
The caption “A man flies off of a trampoline” explains how that fellow ended up there, soaring effortlessly (it would seem) through the air. But some of us will see this picture for the first time and, for a fleeting moment, before it all becomes clear, we might think we’re seeing . . . what? A misguided diver about to face-plant in the sand? Icarus falling from the sky?
In the summer of 1948, LIFE photographer Allan Grant set out on a trip from Omaha, Neb., toward Salt Lake City, Utah, traveling west through Nebraska and Wyoming along one of the most storied stretches in America: Route 30, part of the early transcontinental Lincoln Highway.
For reasons lost to time, none of Grant’s marvelous photos from that epic post-war road trip were published in LIFE. Now LIFE offers a series of Grant’s pictures from Nebraska and Wyoming made more than seven decades ago, in tribute to the human desire to get up and go.
Route 30 in Nebraska, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30 in Wyoming, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Motel along Route 30, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30 in Nebraska, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Family sleeping outside by a billboard alongside Route 30 in Wyoming, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scene along Route 30, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scene after driver fell asleep at the wheel on Route 30, Nebraska, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Motel along Route 30, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cars pulling out of a trailer camp onto Route 30, Nebraska, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The 1733 Dance Hall—reportedly 1,733 miles from both Boston and San Francisco—in Kearney, Neb., 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A driver filling a water bag at a gas station alongside Route 30, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, Nebraska, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A couple and their five-month-old daughter heading home to Cheyenne, Wyo., after a visit to Omaha, Neb., 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Motor lodge along Route 30, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Route 30, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Motor lodge along Route 30, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Charles Corwin White, who bicycled from Los Angeles to New York in 1948, was photographed west of Rawlins, Wyo.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In late July 1944, LIFE photographer Ralph Morse was on hand for what he called, in his typed notes from the scene, the “first organized entertainment in Normandy” after D-Day. In his photos of scantily clad women (and men) performing for hundreds of battle-weary troops, Morse chronicled a small, memorable reprieve in the midst of the Allied push south, toward Paris.
(A scan of the note that Morse sent to his editors along with his film is included with this story’s photos.)
A handful of Morse’s photos were published in the Aug. 14, 1944, issue of LIFE but most of the pictures featured in this gallery never appeared. In that Aug. ’44 issue, LIFE described the scene Morse witnessed at a “rest camp” for the troops:
“While the great breakthrough boiled southward [from Normandy toward Paris] a few U.S. soldiers were taking it easy at rest camps behind the lines. At one of the camps the men were entertained by an eager troupe of French vaudevillians called Les Grandes Tournées d’André Fleury.”
Les Grandes Tournées, it seems, had been organized in Paris three years before, while the French capital was under German control. In late May of 1944 the troupe set out for Cherbourg; on June 5, the day before the invasion, they set up in the ancient town of Carteret. When the Germans pulled in the face of the Allied onslaught, the performers were stranded, with little food or money.
So when a U.S. Army Special Service officer asked them to put on a show for American troops, they were happy to comply. “They were charging the Germans and French 30 to 60 francs,” Morse wrote in his notes. “Now they get 25 francs a head from the Special Service funds for each soldier at the showings.”
The money, by all accounts, was well-spent.
“The show is old-type vaudeville and plenty of legs,” Morse went on. “A perfect show for the battle-tired troops resting a few days. The girls not understanding English and the troops not understanding French . . . the remarks and wisecracks are terrific. Its value as medicine for the boys is tops. They are completely relaxed . . . and yell and scream to their hearts’ content.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
An acrobatic dancer performed for U.S. troops lounging in the field at rest camp. The show featured girl dancers and two clowns, one of whom had once performed with Ringling Circus in New York. The girls heavily relied on dancing and pantomime because none of them spoke English.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Stage-door Johnnies talked with French dancers at their dressing tent. Most of dancers were Parisians. For soldiers in the camp, the show’s price of admission was paid by the Army Special Services Fund.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
First organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A French performer in first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
French performers in the first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
French performers in the first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
French performers in the first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
French performers in the first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
French performers in the first organized show for American troops after D-Day, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
French performers in first organized show for American troops after D-Day take a bow, Normandy, July 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
