It Is Impossible to Clean As You Read

I have been cleaning my office/studio for the last month with little success. I thought that with school out for two weeks during the holidays I would accomplish so much. Alas, it is impossible to clean as you read. I have a collection of close to a hundred LIFE magazines from 1937 to 1947 that I am putting into ziplock polypropylene sleeves to protect them and hopefully extend their "life." If I had a full set there would be over 500 issues. There were at least a hundred issues that I had to throw out over the years, because they were destroyed by mildew and water damage. I acquired the magazines in 1960 from my eighth grade English/history teacher, Mr. Carmichael, at Johnson Intermediate School in Westminster, California. He hired a couple of us boys to come and help his wife and him do garden work, garage cleaning, and general work around their house. The LIFE magazines were stored in boxes in his garage. He was throwing them away, so he let me have them. My mother wasn't happy about it; more junk to clutter things up. To this day, I can hear her saying, "What do you want those dusty, old things for, anyway?" But I saw her looking through them at times when she thought I wasn't watching. I have saved them for fifty years.

Of course, as I pick up each one to slip into its new, zip locked sealed home, I have to thumb through it looking at the pictures and reading an article or two. They are "on the spot" history as it happened in the ten years before I arrived on the scene. When I finish handling them, my fingers are gray from the ink that sloughs off the thick black and white pages. Unfortunately, I am missing some issues that I know I had, and I know were not ruined with mildew. I have/had one of the 380,000 first issues of the magazine after Henry Luce bought the name from the original Life Magazine and launced it as a photojournalistic magazine. It hit news stands the week of 23 November 1936, and featured Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana on the cover. I must have stored the missing issues in another place for safe keeping. They are so safe I can't find them.



Henry Luce's first issue



LIFE was famous for its photography and short, pithy articles. There were a lot of graphic war photos of dead soldiers and civilians that probably would not be published in a magazine today, and a lot of "tasteful" nude photos as well, which seems strange for the 1930s and '40s. Perhaps they weren't as shocking in black and white. I puppose the graphic blood and guts and nude photos, whether tasteful or not, all in living color, are all now found in abundance on the internet.

As I read some of the articles in my collection, I find that many of the topics of seventy years ago are strangely current. The July 12, 1937, issue has a photo spread on striking WPA workers angry over cuts to the WPA budget. One striker's sign proclaims: "THE RICH CAN PAY FOR THE WPA." The title of the piece was "WPA Cuts Bring Strickes, Riots, Protest Parades: Relief jobs now seen as careers." The text says: "To support and give jobs to the unemployed (exclusive of CCC, subsistence homesteads, etc.) the U. S. Government has spent some $7,000,000,000 since the spring of 1933, $1,800,000,000 of it in the fiscal year which ended June 30. Over the protests of hardheaded Congressmen who felt that the time had come to stop such prodigious spending, President Roosevelt and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins secured for the new fiscal year an appropriation of $1,500,000,000. Even that much meant that Administrator Hopkins faced the hard task of lopping 315,000 persons off relief rolls, getting them down to 1,600,000 by July 15. The cuts fell hardest on artists and white-collar workers, chiefly in New York City where 11,800 WPAers were let out June 30. The result, which you see on these pages, was a fresh burst of angry parades, strikes, coercion and riots for bigger and better Relief."
Would it not be nice to have only a seven billion dollar problem instead of a fourteen trillion dollar problem?