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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Séeberger Brothers: The Fathers of Street Style Photography

The fathers of fashion street style photography: The Séeberger Brothers, Jules (1872-1932), Louis (1874-1946) and Henri (1876-1956) who with their cameras at the beginning of the 20th century were snapping pictures from the wealthy people in the streets of Paris and selling their shoots to magazines.

As impromptu portraits of beautiful women in inimitable finery at racecourses, resorts, and cafes began to appear in magazines, designers such as Chanel, Hermes, and Madeleine Vionnet rushed to send their models to posh watering holes to be photographed with the beau monde.

While not so famous at the time they were taking their photos, nowadays they are back to the fashion limelight giving inspiration to designers and stylists. The Séeberger Brothers have left a precious archive for the fashion industry. Brothers Jean (1910-1979) and Albert (1914-1999) sons of Louis and only descendants of the family, together form the “second generation”.

These elegant photos were taken by the Séeberger Brothers that show street styles in the 1920s and 1930s.

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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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In 1929, Prominent Woman Auto Racer Joan LaCosta Placed on Probation in Chicago Robbery Charge

November 7, 1929 — Joan LaCosta, prominent woman auto racer, was held by police in Chicago, Illinois for attempted robbery in a Chicago hotel, with chloroform and a toy pistol. When first arrested she refused to reveal her identity.

Joan LaCosta was a flamboyant French driver (apparently), mostly noted as a daredevil and speed triallist in the USA in the 1920s. Her usual car seems to have been a Miller special.

Joan’s origins are obscure. She appears in the mid-1920s, and by 1925, was proclaimed as the “women’s international champion”, as reported in the Santa Cruz Evening News. The Danville Bee, a Virginia newspaper, elaborated on this, claiming that she won her title in a women’s championship meeting at Indianapolis that year. No details of such a meeting are forthcoming, and Indianapolis was not a welcoming venue to women drivers. The event must have been held somewhere else. Reports from this time suggest that she was most active in Florida. Later, she would claim to have been racing on dirt tracks since about 1923, but this is proving hard to confirm.

There is more concrete evidence of one of the most dramatic incidents of her short career, from 1926. Whilst practicing for a speed record run on Daytona Beach in April, her car caught fire, traveling at about 130mph. The cause of the fire was a broken fuel line. A photographer was on hand to capture Joan leaping from the car, as she steered it into the sea in an attempt to douse the flames. She was not seriously hurt. Only a few days later, she made the record run in a different car, and set a series of new female records, driving at 138mph. The dramatic photos were reprinted in newspapers all across the United States.

Photo from the New York Herald Tribune of Sunday, May 2, 1926.

Later in the year, she made another record run at Jacksonville beach, also in Florida. This time, she got up to 145mph, smashing her own record. The car was a Miller Special, although not much detail about it is available.

Her talents did not stop with record-breaking. In 1926, Joan entered a match race on a half-mile dirt track, as part of an IMCA (International Motor Competition Association) event in Toronto, Canada. IMCA was the only sanctioning body that allowed women to race at all. She won, beating Louis Disbrow. The two had considerable history, having raced against each other twice, in Canada and Mississippi. The same year as their Toronto battle, Disbrow apparently led a protest against Joan’s inclusion in a Lakewood starting grid. His objection was overturned, partly because her speed-trial times proved that she was faster than several of the male entrants.

IMCA’s leading promoter of the time was J. Alex Sloan, who believed in motor racing as spectacle, and used several woman drivers to add controversy and a touch of glamour to IMCA meetings. At the same time as he was promoting Joan, he was also using Elfrieda Mais, usually as a stunt performer, although she did race occasionally. The row with Disbrow must have had him rubbing his hands together with glee. Disbrow’s position on female drivers was also rather puzzling; his own career had been launched in the 1900s, as a riding mechanic to Joan Newton Cuneo, the first notable American female racer.

Her activities in 1927 are unclear. Her name does not appear on any published start lists for IMCA meetings, but she may well have continued to race at fairgrounds and horse-racing tracks.

In 1928, Joan won a women’s race in Milwaukee, but this was one of her last triumphs. At the end of the year, she announced her intention to retire and take up flying.

This did not happen, although she continued to appear in the news due to a conviction for robbery in 1929. She attempted to steal jewelry from another woman, using a replica gun in a hold-up situation. In defense, she claimed that she had lost “all of her money” at a horse race, and was unemployed. During her court appearance, she fainted and burst into tears of remorse.

By 1931, she had married a meat salesman called Joseph Maurer. At the time, she worked in the offices of a stationery firm, and pronounced herself “through” with both motor racing and aviation.

Joan LaCosta was almost certainly not her birth name. Marriage records show that Joseph Maurer married a woman named Marion Martins in 1931. There was a racing driver named Marion Martin or Martins active in Canada in the summer of 1925, just before Joan LaCosta appeared. She raced against Elfrieda Mais three times, winning once, over a mile, at Regina. Her car was a Frontenac-Ford. She also took part in open races at Edmonton, and set a speed record at Toronto. At the Canadian National exhibition at Toronto the following year, Joan LaCosta makes her confirmed debut. On her arrest for robbery, she was named as Marion Carver. Reports of her trial mention parents living in Memphis, and a former husband named Waldo Martins.

Her original nationality is not clear; she was probably not French, but American or perhaps Canadian. Given the showmanly nature of IMCA’s promoted events, it is not completely surprising that some drivers hid behind noms de course, or exaggerated their origins to make themselves stand out. There was perhaps an element of hiding from a disapproving family or a grudging husband.

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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The Girl Who Flirts With Death: Amazing Photos of Motorcycle Stunt Rider Lillian La France in the 1920s and 1930s

“It was the thrill of risking my life that made me to take to drome riding. I was the girl who flirts with death. From childhood I was inspired by wanderlust. I was always alone, dreaming of adventures– how to ride a pony out West, to follow my calling to fame. This was my secret. I shared it with no one.” – Lillian LaFrance

Lillian La France (1894–1979) was born as Lillian Ossage, but she changed her last name when she got into riding in motordromes. In 1916, she ran away from home in Kansas to be part of a traveling carnival. La France was billed as the world’s foremost woman motorcycle stunt rider, one of a handful of female stunt riders in the 1920s and 1930s.

La France started riding the Wall of Death carnival sideshow and motordrome in 1924 at the age of 30. She used a “skull and crossbones” logo, and was skilled at riding motorcycles and driving four wheel vehicles, and was the first person to ride a wall in a scaled down midget racing car. She was one of the first and most popular female wall of death riders of the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, walls of death were often called silo-motordromes.

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Vintage Photos of Immigrants Approaching the Statue of Liberty

Between 1886 and 1924, almost 14 million immigrants entered the United States through New York. The Statue of Liberty was a reassuring sign that they had arrived in the land of their dreams. To these anxious newcomers, the Statue’s uplifted torch did not suggest “enlightenment,” as her creators intended, but rather, “welcome.” Over time, Liberty emerged as the “Mother of Exiles,” a symbol of hope to generations of immigrants.

The opening of the immigrant processing station at Ellis Island in 1892 in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty facilitated an immigrant association, as did the later popularity of Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus.” In 1883, Lazarus donated her poem, “The New Colossus,” to an auction raising funds for the construction of the Statue’s pedestal. This poem vividly depicted the Statue of Liberty as offering refuge to new immigrants from the miseries of Europe. The poem received little attention at the time, but in 1903 was engraved on a bronze plaque and affixed to the base of the Statue.

War tensions in the 20th century reinforced this connection and further advanced the image of the Statue in the harbor as an emblem of the United States as a refuge for the poor and persecuted of Europe, and as a place of unlimited opportunity. Sometimes this image glossed over the very real drawbacks and difficulties of settling in the United States, but it was a romantic view that was dominant for decades and continues to persist. In addition to masking immigrant setbacks in the United States, it was a story that tended to favor the European side of immigration at the expense of trials encountered by newcomers from Latin America and Asia.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 speech in honor of the Statue’s 50th Anniversary helped solidify the transformation of the Statue into an icon of immigration. In the speech he presented immigration as a central part of the nation's past and emphasized the newcomers’ capacity for Americanization.

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Portrait Photos of Louise Brooks During the Filming of ‘Now We’re in the Air’ (1927)

Now We’re in the Air is a 1927 American silent comedy film directed by Frank R. Strayer, starring the late-1920s intermittent comedy team of Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton. In a supporting role, Louise Brooks plays twins, one raised French and the other raised German.

Wallace Beery and Louise Brooks worked together the following year in the taut drama Beggars of Life, a well-received early sound film. Hatton also sometimes appeared paired in films with Beery's older brother Noah Beery.

Now We’re in the Air was popular in its time, although not as well received as the earlier military farces from the Beery/Hatton team. The aerial scenes were an interesting aspect of the production. In a modern re-appraisal, however, reviewer Janiss Garza commented: “In spite of a dual role, Brooks doesn’t have much to do; Moving Picture World felt that ‘any intelligent extra girl’ could have handled the part.”

These fabulous photos captured portraits of Louise Brooks during the filming of Now We’re in the Air in 1927.

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