CULTURE
LIFE (circa 1950)
By Scott Jacobs
Because I enjoy the meandering sport of junkin’, I take great pleasure in discovering at some little roadside attraction an obscure memento from the past that probably means something only to me.
My latest find in an antique mall in Lafayette, Oregon, was a collection of LIFE magazines organized by date from the first issue in 1936 until 1964 when it’s popularity started to fade. Among them was the weekly issue from my birthday March 27, 1950, available for the simple sum of $20 – 100 times the original newsstand price.
The cover features “blond, blue-eyed” Anne Bromley basking on an exotic tropical beach. This is the second time she appeared on the cover of LIFE, the editors note, having previously graced the cover in 1945 as Ann Brewster “portrayed with other girls, jumping up and down on a bed during a house party given by Dress Designer Tina Lesar.”
Now
married to John Bromley, Jr., heir to the Bromley family fortune in Philadelphia,
she is hosting this week’s “Life Goes on a Mystery Flight”
in which “forty adventurous travelers pay $125 apiece to fly to an unknown
destination.”
To make a short story shorter – LIFE was, after all, a picture magazine – Mrs. Bromley escorted her guests to Billy Butlin’s Vacation Village on Grand Bahama Island where they went spear fishing, sunning and cocktail partying, bought native straw hats and warded off sunburn with Butlin’s famed “Orange Skin Food Cream.”
Also in this issue, LIFE went deep into the grottos
under St. Peter’s in Rome in search of the bones of St. Peter. In one
of its famed pictorials, the 
magazine
presents a lavish array of color photographs from a pagan burial ground on
Vatican Hill covered over since the famed basilica was constructed in 1626.
Although the magazine states an announcement on the authenticity of the bones
is imminent, it was not until two decades later in 1968 that Pope Paul VI
declared St. Peter’s remains had indeed been found under the church
(albeit in another gravesite.)
My abiding interest in politics led me to a photo essay in the news section titled “Politicking Starts Early in the South.” Oh, for the good old days of politics when "early" meant March in an election year – not March the year before.
The
photos recall a simpler time when, in Hugo, Oklahoma, Democrat Mike Monroney
rides a donkey-led chariot in a parade just ahead of his senatorial opponent
Bill Alexander sitting astride an elephant. In Florida, a young Claude 
Pepper
clambers aboard a locomotive while in Alabama, Gordon Persons, running for
governor against 14 opponents, takes to the air in a helicopter to draw attention
to his campaign.
The Picture of The Week in March 1950 is of automobile tycoon Dallas Winslow leading a parade of 210 Ford sedans down a street in Springfield, Ohio, where he owns a lawnmower factory. In celebration of his company’s success, he gave each employee a free car plus $25,000 in free gasoline, enough money at the time to keep them all on the road for a year.
On other fronts, a 31-year-old evangelist named
Billy Graham is shown 
wowing
crowds in South Carolina that “haven’t been seen since the great
days of Billy 
Sunday.”
A mournful basset hound named Morgan is about to become our first “Television
Dog Star” and Mme. Jane Sylvain is 
shown
lifting the skirt of a 6-year-old to show her undies to the world in “Paris
Couture in Miniature.”
Fashion being a big part of the Fifties, that
story was only the first of two features on the topic. The other, a report
that “Nylon: The Practical Fabric” 
has
gone glamorous. “One of the big pieces of fashion news last year was
that nylon has graduated from the underwear-stocking stage and was being used
in dresses which could be washed and dried in an hour and required no ironing,”
the magazine reported. “Wash-weary women snapped them up but complained
that they were too tightly woven, therefore too stiff and hot . . . This year
their complaints have been answered: nylon clothes are available in lighter,
more porous fabrics and bright, glamorous colors.”
For seven decades, LIFE has been a little window into the culture of these United States. But no longer. This year, on March 27, AOL Time Warner announced the magazine would cease publication. The last issue was April 30, 2007. If this is indeed the end (there is talk LIFE may come back as an online magazine), we've lost one of the great mile markers in time.
How else would I know, for instance, that my birth took place in what I’d say was a pretty uneventful week.
Coming Soon: Part II -- LIFE (circa 1950): The Ads.
