40 Amazing Photographs Capture Daily Life in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1941

Mar del Plata is the second largest city in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina located on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The name “Mar del Plata” is a shortening of “Mar del Rio de la Plata,” and has the meaning of “sea of the Rio de la Plata basin” or “adjoining sea to the (River) Plate region.”

From the 1910s, the residents, mostly new arrived immigrants from Europe, demanded and obtained the control of the Municipality administration. The socialist were the mainstream political force in this period, carrying out social reforms and public investment. The main port was also built and inaugurated in 1916.

The first military coup in Argentina's history took place on September 6, 1930, restoring the conservative hegemony in all levels of Government, including the local one. Although unpopular and fraudulent, this old new order brought some progress and investment to an ailing country in the climax of the Great Depression. Mass tourism began to arrive in this decade, helped by improved roads, but it took off in the 1940s and 1950s, when the development of union-run hotels under the Perón presidency put the city within the reach of Argentina’s middle and working classes.

These amazing photographs below, taken by LIFE photographer Hart Preston (1910–2009), show what life was like in Mar del Plata in the early 1940s.

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40 Handsome Portrait Photos of Robert Montgomery in the 1930s and ’40s

Born 1904 in New York, American actor Robert Montgomery began his acting career on the stage, but was soon hired by MGM. Initially assigned roles in comedies, he soon proved he was able to handle dramatic ones as well. He appeared in a wide variety of roles, such as a weak-willed prisoner in The Big House (1930), an Irish handyman in Night Must Fall (1937) and a boxer mistakenly sent to Heaven in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). The last two earned him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

During World War II, Montgomery drove ambulances in France until the Dunkirk evacuation. When the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, he enlisted in the Navy, and was present at the invasion at Normandy. After the war, he returned to Hollywood, where he worked in both films and, later, in television. He was also the father of actress Elizabeth Montgomery.

Montgomery died of cancer in 1981, at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, aged 77. These vintage photos captured portraits of a young and handsome Robert Montgomery in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Vintage Photos of People Posing With Their Packard Automobiles

Packard was an American luxury automobile marque built by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, United States. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899, and the last Detroit-built Packard in 1956, when they built the Packard Predictor, their last concept car.

The company was considered the preeminent luxury car before World War II, and built aircraft engines for the Allied war effort. Owning a Packard was prestigious, and surviving examples are found in museums, car shows and automobile collections.

Packard bought Studebaker in 1953 and formed the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of South Bend, Indiana. The 1957 and 1958 Packards were actually badge engineered Studebakers, built in South Bend.

Here below is a set of vintage photos from Vintage Cars & People that shows people posing with Packard automobiles from between the 1920s and 1950s.

A company of five posing in a 1925 open-top Packard Eight Phaeton on a gravel road in the countryside, circa 1925

A company of five posing in a 1926 open-top Packard Phaeton on a graveled Alpine road, August 1927

A well-to-do family of three posing with a 1928 Packard Standard Eight Sedan in summertime. The Packard is registered in the administrative region of Düsseldorf, circa 1928

Four stylish individuals posing with a 1928 Packard Sedan in front of a large brick-built house in summertime, circa 1928

Two elegant couples posing with a 1926 Packard Roadster open-topped in a residential street on the outskirts of town, circa 1928

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Amazing Color Photos of the American West in 1947

The Western United States is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term the West changed. Before about 1800, the crest of the Appalachian Mountains was seen as the western frontier. The frontier moved westward and eventually the lands west of the Mississippi River were considered the West.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of the 13 westernmost states includes the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin to the Pacific Coast, and the mid-Pacific islands state, Hawaii. To the east of the Western United States is the Midwestern United States and the Southern United States, with Canada to the north, and Mexico to the south.

The West contains several major biomes, including arid and semi-arid plateaus and plains, particularly in the American Southwest; forested mountains, including three major ranges, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and Rocky Mountains; the long coastal shoreline of the American Pacific Coast; and the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest.

Here is a set of amazing color photos from dianp that show American West in 1947.

Arizona. El Tovar Hotel, Grand Canyon National Park, 1947

Arizona. Grand Canyon National Park view from Watchtower, 1947

Arizona. Hopi boy in doorway of Pueblo at El Tovar, Grand Canyon National Park, 1947

Arizona. Hopi Indian and Canyon, Grand Canyon National Park, 1947

Arizona. Hopi Indian dance at El Tovar, Grand Canyon National Park, 1947

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Rack Protects Food From Poison Gas, 1940

Supplies of food and drink can be protected from contamination by poison gas in case of wartime air raids by a novel and inexpensive device developed by M. Jaffe, a British inventor living in Liverpool, in 1940.

Food on the rack is set over water and then covered.

Food is placed on a raised wire platform and covered by an inverted mixing bowl, bread box, roasting pan, or other nonporous kitchen utensil. By means of two long wire handles, the covered food is then lowered into four or five inches of water standing in a basin or in the kitchen sink. The water forms a perfect air lock inside of the improvised food protector, making it impossible for gas fumes to seep in.

With the device, it is said, one minute is sufficient time to protect a supply of food which could be consumed without fear of contamination or pollution after the danger of the gas raid had passed. Larger units could be used for protecting food in hospitals and other institutions.

Gorgeous Photos of American Actress Audrey Totter in the 1940s

Born 1917 in Joliet, Illinois, American actress Audrey Totter began her acting career in radio in the latter 1930s in Chicago. She played in soap operas, including Painted Dreams, Road of Life, Ma Perkins, and Bright Horizon.

Totter made her film debut in Main Street After Dark (1945) and established herself as a popular female lead in the 1940s. By the late 1950s, her film career was in decline, though she continued to work steadily for television.

Although Totter performed in various film genres, she became most widely known to movie audiences for her work in film noir. Looking back, Totter stated in August 1999, “The bad girls were so much fun to play. I would’t have wanted to play Coleen’s good-girl parts.”

Totter played a continuing role from 1972 to 1976, that of Nurse Wilcox, the efficient head nurse, in the CBS television series Medical Center, with James Daly and Chad Everett. Her last acting role was as a nun, Sister Paul, in a 1987 episode (“Old Habits Die Hard”) of CBS’s Murder, She Wrote, with Angela Lansbury.

Totter died of a stroke, eight days before her 96th birthday, in 2013. Take a look at these vintage photos to see the beauty of young Audrey Totter in the 1940s.

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Intimate Portraits of the Tuskegee Airmen at Air Base in Italy During WWII

The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of primarily African American military pilots and airmen who fought in World War II. They formed the 332d Expeditionary Operations Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Forces.

The 99th Pursuit Squadron (later the 99th Fighter Squadron) was the first black flying squadron, and the first to deploy overseas (to North Africa in April 1943, and later to Sicily and other parts of Italy). The 332nd Fighter Group, which originally included the 100th, 301st and 302nd Fighter Squadrons, was the first black flying group. It deployed to Italy in early 1944. Although the 477th Bombardment Group trained with North American B-25 Mitchell bombers, they never served in combat. In June 1944, the 332nd Fighter Group began flying heavy bomber escort missions and, in July 1944, with the addition of the 99th Fighter Squadron, it had four fighter squadrons.

Several Tuskegee airmen attending a briefing in Ramitelli, Italy, March 1945

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American military aviators in the United States Armed Forces. During World War II, black Americans in many U.S. states were still subject to the Jim Crow laws and the American military was racially segregated, as was much of the federal government. The Tuskegee Airmen were subjected to discrimination, both within and outside of the army.

These intimate portraits were taken by Toni Frissell, a high-fashion photographer who volunteered her photographic services to the American Red Cross, Women's Army Corps, and Eighth Army Air Force during WWII. On volunteering for the American Red Cross in 1941, Frissell said: "I became so frustrated with fashions that I wanted to prove to myself that I could do a real reporting job." Take a look:

Members of the 332nd Fighter Group

Crew chief Marcellus G. Smith, Louisville, KY, 100th F.S.

A Tuskegee airman standing on an airfield, looking at airplanes

Sgt. William P. Bostic, 301st F.S. in control tower

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1948 Davis Divan: The Three-Wheeled Sedan that Wheeled Itself Into Oblivion

The history of auto design is filled with failed ideas and strange prototypes that never made it to the production line. In the wake of World War II especially, the industry kicked into high gear. Released from building tanks and munitions, large automakers like GM turned their focus back to giving consumers what they supposedly wanted most. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs like salesman Glenn Davis took advantage of the booming post-war economy to launch their own designs. “Davis’s timing could not have been better. Post-World War II America was ravenous for new cars,” writes Autoweek, “and the Davis publicity machine thrived in this consumer feeding frenzy.”

The three-wheeled Davis Divan began its life in 1941 when Indianapolis 500 racer Joel Thorne commissioned a custom vehicle from Frank Kurtis, the future founder of Kurtis-Kraft racing. Kurtis gave Thorne the Californian, and four years later, Davis somehow managed to take the car over as his own (no one is quite sure how this happened). 

Renamed the Divan, the car became the focus of an intense advertising campaign. New prototypes were manufactured at the new Davis Motorcar Company in Van Nuys, California. “The two-door sedan had one 15-inch wheel up front and two 15-inch driven wheels out back and was powered by a 47-hp, 132.7-cid Hercules L-head four cylinder engine (soon changed to a 63-hp, 162-cid Continental four) mated to a Borg-Warner three-speed manual. A removable hard top, covered headlights and a body shaped like a bar of soap completed the $995 package.”

Davis Divans were soon in the news, on the covers of magazines and in newspaper ads. Franchise agreements were signed, and the quirky car looked poised for success. Yet despite the hype and the hyperbole, Davis had oversold and underfinanced his futuristic aluminum-bodied car. Impatient franchisees came looking for cars that were not there. Davis’s own employees—who initially agreed to work without salary on the promise of double pay once serial production began—began to revolt. 

By May 1948, the Davis Divan had gone from car of tomorrow to yesterday’s news. The Van Nuys factory was shuttered, assets were liquidated and Davis eventually served two years in prison for 20 counts of fraud. Roughly 13 Davis Divan sedans are believed to have been built—not including three Jeep-like military variants. Incredibly, all but one survives.

Despite Davis’s own unreliability, the car was a solidly engineered machine that actually seated four people in its long front bench seat. There is plenty of room behind the glitzy plastic and chrome wheel. The dainty wand for the column-mounted shifter feels light and clicks into its gears with ease. Most important, worries that the Divan could feel tippy prove to be unfounded. Perhaps the fledgling automaker should not bear all the blame for its failure.

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Western Canada in 1947 Through Wonderful Color Photos

After the war, close to a million veterans reentered civilian life, marrying, having children (this was the start of the “baby boom” in Canada), and going on a buying binge.

Western Canada in 1947

For the first time since the Great Depression years, Canadians indulged themselves, but the dramatic increase in consumption put tremendous pressure on Canada’s balance of payments with the United States: much of what Canadians were buying was manufactured by its southern neighbor. It also added to inflationary pressures that stimulated industrial unrest, especially in 1945–46.

Organized labour had virtually doubled in size during the war, and the unions were ready and willing to demonstrate their new strength by staging major auto, steel, and transportation strikes.

Here below is a set of wonderful color photos from dianp that shows Western Canada in 1947.

Banff Springs Hotel, 1947

Banff. Cascade Mountains and Bow River, 1947

Banff. Chephero Mountain, 1947

Banff. Johnston Canyon, near Banff, 1947

Banff. Moraine Lake and Valley of Ten Peaks, 1947

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Stunning Pictures of a Wet and Cold New York Taken by Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter (1923-2013) was born in Pittsburgh, the son of an internationally renowned Talmudic scholar.  Leiter's interest in art began in his late teens, and though he was encouraged to become a Rabbi like his father, he left theology school and moved to New York to pursue painting at age 23. In New York, he befriended the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography. His friendship with Pousette-Dart and soon after, with W. Eugene Smith, expanded his interest in photography.

By 1948 Leiter had begun to experiment in color, largely using Kodachrome 35 mm film past its sell-by date. He made an enormous and unique contribution to photography with a highly prolific period in New York City in the 1950s. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. Leiter’s use of color is often attributed to his enduring interest in painting.

A pioneer of color photography and a talented image-maker, Leiter sought neither fame nor commercial success. “I’ve never been overwhelmed with a desire to become famous.” Leiter told TIME. “It’s not that I didn’t want to have my work appreciated, but for some reason – maybe it’s because my father disapproved of almost everything I did – in some secret place in my being was a desire to avoid success.” Instead, he slinked through New York’s city streets capturing moments of beauty within the ordinary: bright umbrellas, faint reflections, neon advertisements, rain-washed cars and snowy junctions.

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The First Image of Earth Taken From Outer Space

This black-and-white image might not look like much, but it represent the first step towards the creation of a new field of photography. What looks like random patches of black, grey and white are actually the earth’s horizon as seen from above the planet’s atmosphere. This is actually the first photograph ever taken from outer space.

First image of Earth from outer space, taken by the V-2 No. 13 suborbital spaceflight.

On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful—the first pictures of Earth as seen from space.

The grainy, black-and-white photos were taken from an altitude of 65 miles by a 35-millimeter motion picture camera riding on a V-2 missile launched from the White Sands Missile Range. Snapping a new frame every second and a half, the rocket-borne camera climbed straight up, then fell back to Earth minutes later, slamming into the ground at 500 feet per second. The camera itself was smashed, but the film, protected in a steel cassette, was unharmed.

Fred Rulli was a 19-year-old enlisted man assigned to the recovery team that drove into the desert to retrieve film from those early V-2 shots. When the scientists found the cassette in good shape, he recalled, “They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids.” Later, back at the launch site, “when they first projected [the photos] onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts.”

Before 1946, the highest pictures ever taken of the Earth’s surface were from the Explorer II balloon, which had ascended 13.7 miles in 1935, high enough to discern the curvature of the Earth. The V-2 cameras reached more than five times that altitude, where they clearly showed the planet set against the blackness of space. When the movie frames were stitched together, Clyde Holliday, the engineer who developed the camera, wrote in National Geographic in 1950, the V-2 photos showed for the first time “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship.”

(via Smithsonian Magazine)

Queen of Muscle Beach: 20 Vintage Portraits of Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton From the 1940s

Abbye Eville, more commonly known around the world as Pudgy Stockton, was born August 11, 1917 in Santa Monica, California. During her childhood she acquired the nickname, “Pudgy” and it stuck with her; little did she know it was a name soon to be known all around the world.

After graduating high school, she started a sedentary job answering phones and became displeased with how the inactivity affected her body so she began lifting weights – a very humble beginning for the future, “Queen of Muscle Beach.”

She later told Sports Illustrated: “In those days, lifting weights was thought to be unfeminine. The misinformed think if women strength-trained, they’d become masculine looking. We laughed knowing they were wrong.”

On most weekends she could be found at Muscle Beach performing any number of highly skilled athletic feats. An example would be, at the height of 5-feet, 1-inch tall, weighing 115 pounds, she held a 100-pound dumbbell overhead with her right arm as she balanced atop her husband's outstretched arms.

Pudgy was a living example of muscular womanhood. She was not only proud of her vibrant health and fitness, she displayed her figure by being photographed with prominent muscle men of her era, such as Steve Reeves, George Eiferman, Joe Gold, and John Grimek.

In 1947, Pudgy and her husband Les, organized the first weightlifting contest in the United States for women. In 1948, chosen as “Miss Physical Culture Venus,” she was awarded a cash prize of $1,000 from pioneer physical culturist, Bernarr Macfadden.

Possibly the most admired of the original women’s physical culturists, Pudgy regularly wrote for Strength & Health magazine while her column was popular by both sexes.  Attracting admiring stares and whistles on Muscle Beach, Pudgy’s two-piece bathing suits added to her allure. She  recalled, “You couldn’t buy a two-piece, so my mother ripped apart an old brassiere to use as a pattern.”

Pudgy Stockton was honored by the Association of Oldetime Barbell & Strongmen in 1991; received the Steve Reeves International Society Pioneer Award in 1998, and inducted into Joe Weider’s Hall of Fame in 2000.

She died of Alzheimer’s disease on June 26, 2006, at age 88.

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