Rarely Seen Childhood Photos of Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks’ artistry is her gift to the world. She led a remarkable life, one filled with as many twists and turns as there were ups and downs. She possessed ravishing good-looks, plenty of talent, and smarts — and could have achieved so much more… but because of a knack for self-defeating behavior, she would end up snatching obscurity from lasting fame. Brooks was something of a lost soul. She once said, “Somehow I have avoided being found.”

Mary Louise Brooks was born in Cherryvale, Kansas on November 14, 1906. She was the second of four children, the daughter of Leonard Brooks and Myra Rude. Cherryvale was a small town of only a few thousand residents. Nevertheless, it produced another noted entertainer, the slightly younger Vivian Vance. She was one of Brooks’ childhood friends, and years later went on to play Ethel Mertz, Lucille Ball’s sidekick on the TV sitcom I Love Lucy.

Brooks’ mother was a cultured woman, a participant in Chautauqua (a popular self-improvement and educational movement), as well as a pianist who played Debussy and Ravel for her children. Above everything, Myra inspired in little Louise a love of books and the arts. Her upbringing, as well as her father’s large library, had a profound influence on Brooks’ lifelong love of reading. In fact, Louise read voraciously from a young age. As a teen, her favorite magazines were Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. In each she could envision a life beyond Kansas.

Louise also loved the movies, which were then called “flickers”. She and her brother went to the local movie theater to watch westerns, serials and melodramas starring the likes of cowboy actor Tom Mix, vamp Theda Bara, and serial star Pearl White. Young Louise was especially enthralled by young Gloria Swanson, the most exciting new actress of 1915.

Brooks’ life was profoundly shaped by something else that happened when she was young. When Louise was about 9 years old, a neighbor known as “Mr. Flowers” sexually abused her. The assault left its indelible mark on Brooks’ psyche. In later years, she commented that she was incapable of real love and that this man “must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure.” None of her two marriages or many affairs ever lasted long.

In 1919, at the age of 13, the Brooks family moved 10-miles south to the larger Independence, Kansas. With her bobbed-hair, captivating looks, and a personality that turned heads, boys began to focus their eyes on Louise. In 1920, the Brooks family moved again, this time to nearby Wichita, Kansas, a larger and more metropolitan town. There, her father expanded his law practice and pursued his ambition of becoming a United States District Judge. Meanwhile, Louise pursued her dream of becoming a dancer.

Throughout her childhood, Brooks had performed at events across southeastern Kansas. She made her first public appearance at age four playing a pint-sized bride in a church production of Tom Thumb’s Wedding. By the age of 10, she had become in her own words what “amounted to a professional dancer,” appearing before community groups, men’s and women’s clubs, local fairs, and at various social gatherings in neighboring counties — sometimes as far away as Missouri. By age 11, she was dancing in public on a regular basis, performing at recitals and in programs held in meeting halls and at the local opera house.

Brooks also studied dance with the best local instructors, and choreographed pieces that were performed at her high school in Wichita. Brooks was serious about her art. While a student, she traveled to see the great ballerina Anna Pavlova, who was performing in a nearby town. She also attended a Wichita performance by the famous Denishawn Dance Company, led by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. There, backstage, she met its principals. The meeting proved pivotal.

(via Louise Brooks Society)

Group Portraits of Women’s Ice Hockey Teams From the Early 20th Century

Ice hockey is believed to have evolved from simple stick and ball games played in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere, primarily bandy, hurling, shinty and lacrosse. Arguably the games most influential to the early design of ice hockey were early forms of an organized sport today known as bandy, a sport distinctly separate from ice hockey. These games were brought to North America and several similar winter games using informal rules developed, such as shinny and ice polo, but would later be absorbed into a new organized game with codified rules which today is ice hockey.

Women’s hockey teams started forming early in the 20th century, though there wouldn’t be a professional league for a long time. Women still played casually hockey for fun, and so before long, they started getting organized.

The first formal women’s match happened in Ontario in 1891; however, women’s teams didn’t really get going until the 1910s and 1920s when college teams started to form in the US and especially in Canada. Below are some vintage photos of women’s ice hockey teams from between the 1900s and 1920s:

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Amazing Photos of American Houses Around 1900

In 1900, for instance, a typical American new home contained 700 to 1,200 square feet of living space, including two or three bedrooms and one or (just about as likely) no bathrooms. It was probably a two-story floor plan.

At the turn of the 20th Century, more than 20 percent of the U.S. population lived in crowded units, with entire families often sharing one or two rooms. Most homes were small, rural farmhouses and lacked many basic amenities, complete plumbing and central heating chief among them.

A set of amazing photos from paws22 that shows what American houses looked like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Burton family with sod house, Bartley, Nebraska

Barn and horseman

Big brick house

Country cottage with family

Eaton homestead, Tacoma, Virginia

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The Nine-Fingered Geisha: 30 Vintage Portraits of Chishō Takaoka aka Teruha From the Early 20th Century

Chishō Takaoka (April 22, 1896 – October 22, 1994) was a geisha in Shinbashi who became a Buddhist nun later in life. Her stage name was Chiyoha or Teruha, while her real name was Tatsuko Takaoka. She became famous for her radiant beauty, and for chopping off one of her fingers for her lover. She was a popular model featured in postcards, and was known internationally as the “Nine-Fingered Geisha”. She also inspired Jakucho Setouchi’s novel, Jotoku.

Chishō was born in 1896 in Nara Prefecture, but her birth notification was registered at Osaka city hall by her parents. Her father was an alcoholic who worked as a blacksmith. When Chishō was two years old, her mother, Oda Tsuru, died; some theories speculate that Tsuru ran away from home. Chishō was brought up lovingly by her grandmother, and when she was seven years old, she worked in her aunt’s tea parlor as a waitress. At 12 years old, her father sold her into slavery, sending her to Oume Tsujii, courtesan of kabuki actor Onoe Kikugorō V. At 14 years old, upon being given 250 yen employment preparation money, Chishō became the adopted daughter of Kagaya, and debuted with the stage name “Chiyoha”. Her unusual beauty helped her gain popularity, and her mizuage was bought by a chairperson of an Ōsaka stock exchange transaction.

At 15 years old, she became emotionally involved with Otomine, a famous playboy and upscale clothes dealer, who lived in Higashi ward. Chishō eloped with him to Beppu Onsen. When Otomine discovered she had a picture of a kabuki actor in her hand mirror, he became jealous and broke up with her. To convey her fidelity to Otomine, she cut off her pinky with a razor and brought it to him. It was also said that, when he was trying to cure his arthritis at the Beppu spa, she came over and proposed love suicide to him, but he refused it. Then she gave her own finger for the purpose of appealing for his love.

The scandal made it difficult for her to remain in Osaka, and she was taken under the care of Kiyoka, a geisha in Tokyo who was the mistress of Lord Taketarō Gōtō. She worked in Kōfuen, Mukōjima, and Kiyoka assumed 3,000 yen debt repayments. The day she debuted, she got word that her younger brother had been burned to death in a fire. Originally in nature she was a quiet geisha in the zashiki parlor, so when she was hit with the shock of the separation from Otomine and the news of her brother’s death, she had cut off her finger. Many men came and saw her and she soon became a sought-after geisha. The many picture cards of her were a commercial commodity, and they sold quickly. Some men also illegally copied and sold them, and Chishō accused them of copyright infringement.

She had a modest talent as a geisha, having an academic goal. She learned the kanji by reading many books and later became a writer.

In 1919, Chishō married Suezo Oda, the market player of Kitahama and a runner for a motion picture company. She visited the United States with her husband and traveled across the entire county. During this time she lived in a girls’ school dormitory while studying English for eight months. After returning home, her behavior in the U.S. created tensions in her marriage. She attempted suicide two times, and they divorced.

After this, she traveled back to the U.S. She went to London, and on her friend Sessue Hayakawa’s advice, she moved to Paris where, it is said, she gave birth to a child.

After returning home, she worked as a geisha. In 1923, under the name of Teruha Oda, she starred in the film Ai no tobira (The Gate of Love) directed by Shiro Nakagawa. She then remarried to a medical doctor and ran a bar in Osaka.

In 1928, she wrote the first of five autobiographies, titled “Teruha Zange”. In 1935, at 39 years old, she entered the Buddhist priesthood in Temple Kume, and referred to herself as Chisho. She went to Giōji in Kyoto, which had been ruined, and rebuilt it. Giōji attracted attention among wounded women as a refuge.

She died in 1994 at the age of 98.

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Beautiful Photos of Australian Actress Mae Busch in the Early 20th Century

Born 1891 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australian actress Mae Busch had her first film appearances in The Agitator and The Water Nymph, both released in 1912. She worked in both silent and sound films in early Hollywood.

At the pinnacle of her film career, Busch was known as the versatile vamp. She starred in such feature films as The Devil’s Pass Key (1920), Foolish Wives (1923), and in The Unholy Three (1925). Her career declined abruptly after 1926, when she walked out on her contract at Metro–Goldwyn–Mayer and suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1927, Busch was offered a leading role in a Hal Roach two-reeler, Love ’em and Weep, which began her long association with Laurel and Hardy. She appeared in 13 of their comedies, often as shrewish, gold-digging floozies (Chickens Come Home, Come Clean), a volatile wife of Oliver Hardy (Sons of the Desert, Their First Mistake), or more sympathetic roles (Them Thar Hills, Tit for Tat, The Fixer Uppers). Her last role in a Laurel and Hardy film was in The Bohemian Girl, again as a combative spouse of Hardy’s, released in 1936.

Busch’s film roles after 1936 were often uncredited. Overall, she had roles in approximately 130 motion pictures between 1912 and 1946. She died in 1946, age 54. For her contributions to the film industry, Busch was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 with a motion pictures star located at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard.

Take a look at these vintage photos to see the beauty of young Mae Busch in the 1910s and 1920s.

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Propaganda Posters From World War I

World War I was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously known as the Great War or “the war to end all wars”, it led to the mobilization of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history, and also one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated 8.5 million combatant deaths and 13 million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war.

Propaganda posters from World War I

During World War I, the impact of the poster as a means of communication was greater than at any other time during history. The ability of posters to inspire, inform, and persuade combined with vibrant design trends to produce thousands of interesting visual works.

Here below is a set of amazing propaganda posters from World War I.

"Be yours to hold it high!", Buy Victory Bonds

"I Summon You to Comradeship in the Red Cross" Woodrow Wilson

Attendrons-Nous Que Les Nôtres Brûlent?, Bataillon Canadien Français

Books Wanted For Our Men In Camp And "Over There"

Britain Needs You At Once

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Vintage Portraits Taken by German Photographer August Sander From Between the 1910s and 1940s

August Sander (1876–1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer. While working at a local mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer who was working for a mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom. He spent his military service as a photographer's assistant and the next years wandering across Germany. Sander started working for a photo studio in Linz in 1901 but left at the end of 1909 to set up a new studio in Cologne.

In 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work “People of the 20th Century”. In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the Cologne Progressives, a radical group of artists linked to the workers' movement. Under the Nazi regime, Sander’s work and personal life were greatly constrained. His book “Face of our Time”, which was published in 1929 and contained a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century, was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates destroyed. 

Sander's work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series “People of the 20th Century”. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People. He has been described as “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century”.

Take a look through these 19 extraordinary portraits by Sander from the 1910s to 1940s:

Three generations of the family

Farm children

Cretin

Police officer

Middle class children

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Amazing Photos of Porters at Covent Garden Market in London Carrying Tower of Baskets on Their Heads

Covent Garden Market had its beginning in 1835 when a patent was issued to hold a “public fair or mart” in the area of Richmond, Dundas and King Streets. In 1845, the Market found a permanent home when city business owners donated land near Richmond, Dundas and King Streets.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays were the days the farmers arrived to sell their wares. The inside main floor was strewn with sawdust and the shoppers could choose meat from many different butchers. Outside, buyers and sellers mingled, bargaining over wares ranging from boxes of trinkets and wild raspberries to kitten litters.

Until well after World War I, the Market was, without question, the business and cultural heart of the city. But the advent of automobile began to take its toll on the timehonored tradition of visiting the Market. In 1955, a group of nine businessmen formed the Covent Garden Building Inc. to replace the old Market building and in 1958 the new building was finished. It contained four levels of parking along with an area on the main floor for the traditional Market.

These vintage photographs show some of the hundreds of market porters who transported the many and varied forms of garden produce from the market buildings to their end buyers, in a basket (or more often than not, baskets) balanced on their heads.

A market trader with a stack of baskets, 1915.

A Covent Garden market porter, 1922.

Market trader Alfred Bailey practicing with 15 baskets at Covent Garden, London, for the basket-carrying championships, 1925.

A Covent Garden carman crossing a temporary Waterloo Bridge, London, 1925.

A porter at Covent Garden Market, London, carries twenty baskets on his head, 1925.

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