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Born Mildred Linton in Ottumwa, Iowa, Karen Morley lived there until she was 13 years old. When she moved to Hollywood, she attended Hollywood High School. She went on to attend the University of California, but she dropped out to join the Los Angeles Civic Repertory Theatre and the Pasadena Playhouse.
After working at the Pasadena Playhouse, she came to the attention of the director Clarence Brown, at a time when he had been looking for an actress to stand-in for Greta Garbo in screen tests. This led to a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and roles in films such as Mata Hari (1931), Scarface (1932), The Phantom of Crestwood (1932), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), Arsene Lupin (1933), Gabriel Over the White House (1933), and Dinner at Eight (1933).
In 1934, Morley left MGM. Her first film after leaving the studio was Our Daily Bread (1934), directed by King Vidor. She continued to work as a freelance performer and appeared in Michael Curtiz’s Black Fury, and The Littlest Rebel with Shirley Temple. Without the support of a studio, her roles became less frequent; however, she did play Mr. Collins’ wife Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice (1940), which was produced by MGM. The film was critically well-received, but it did not advance her career; as a result, Morley turned her attention to stage plays.
In the early 1940s, she appeared in several plays on Broadway, including the role of Gerda in the original production of The Walrus and The Carpenter.
Her career came to an end in 1947 when she testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about her alleged American Communist Party membership. She maintained her political activism for the rest of her life. In 1954, she ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of New York on the American Labor Party ticket.
After being blacklisted in Hollywood by the studio bosses, she never rebuilt her film acting career.
In the early 1970s, Karen Morley briefly resumed her acting career with guest roles in television series such as Kojak, Kung Fu, and Police Woman.
In 1993, she appeared in The Great Depression, a documentary TV series produced by Henry Hampton’s Blackside Productions in association with BBC2 and WGBH. In the series, she talked about how helpless she felt as a privileged Hollywood actress in the face of all the poverty and suffering that surrounded her. She also spoke of her experience making Our Daily Bread and working for King Vidor, whom she described as a conservative who thought that people should willingly help each other without government interference.
In December 1999, at the age of 90, she appeared in Vanity Fair in an article about blacklist survivors, and she was honored at the San Francisco FIlm Festival.
In November 1932, Morley married director Charles Vidor in Santa Ana, California. They were divorced on March 2, 1943. They met on the set of Man About Town, in which Morley played the female lead, and Vidor was co-director. Vidor and Morley had a son, Michael Charles Vidor.
Morley lived in Santa Monica, California during her later years. She died of pneumonia at the age of 93 in Woodland Hills, California. (Wikipedia)
These vintage photos captured portrait of a young and beautiful Karen Morley in the 1930s.








































American rock star Alice Cooper at his home with his girlfriend wearing a mask imitating The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the low-budget film which was re-released in 1975. The photographs were taken by Terry O’Neill in August 1975. The house burned down later that month, while he was away in New York.
The woman in these images is Cindy Lang. She and Alice separated in 1975 at which time Alice began a relationship with dancer Sheryl Goddard. Cindy never had any children. The kid is Micky Dolenz’s daughter Ami whom Alice used to babysit.
Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier, February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer whose career spans over 54 years. With a raspy voice and a stage show that features numerous props and stage illusions, including pyrotechnics, guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, reptiles, baby dolls, and dueling swords, Cooper is considered by music journalists and peers to be “The Godfather of Shock Rock”. He has drawn equally from horror films, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a macabre and theatrical brand of rock designed to shock audiences.
Originating in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1964, “Alice Cooper” was originally a band with roots extending back to a band called The Earwigs, consisting of Furnier on vocals and harmonica, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, and Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar and background vocals. By 1966, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar joined the three and Neal Smith was added on drums in 1967. The five named the band “Alice Cooper”, with Furnier eventually adopting the latter as his stage pseudonym. They released their 1969 debut album with limited chart success. Breaking out with the 1970 single “I’m Eighteen” and the third album Love It to Death,[citation needed] the band reached their commercial peak in 1973 with their sixth studio album, Billion Dollar Babies. After[citation needed] the band broke up, Furnier legally changed his name to Alice Cooper and began a solo career with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare. Over his career, Cooper has sold well over 50 million records.
Cooper has experimented with a number of musical styles, including art rock, hard rock, heavy metal, new wave, glam metal, and industrial rock. He helped to shape the sound and look of heavy metal, and has been described as the artist who “first introduced horror imagery to rock and roll, and whose stagecraft and showmanship have permanently transformed the genre”. He is also known for his wit offstage, with The Rolling Stone Album Guide calling him the world’s most “beloved heavy metal entertainer”. Away from music, Cooper is a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur, and, since 2004, a radio DJ with his classic rock show Nights with Alice Cooper. (Wikipedia)








The 1940s (pronounced “nineteen-forties” and commonly abbreviated as “the 40s”) was a decade that began on January 1, 1940, and ended on December 31, 1949.
Most of World War II took place in the first half of the decade, which had a profound effect on most countries and people in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. The consequences of the war lingered well into the second half of the decade, with a war-weary Europe divided between the jostling spheres of influence of the Western world and the Soviet Union, leading to the beginning of the Cold War. To some degree internal and external tensions in the post-war era were managed by new institutions, including the United Nations, the welfare state, and the Bretton Woods system, facilitating the post–World War II economic expansion, which lasted well into the 1970s. The conditions of the post-war world encouraged decolonization and the emergence of new states and governments, with India, Pakistan, Israel, Vietnam, and others declaring independence, although rarely without bloodshed. The decade also witnessed the early beginnings of new technologies (such as computers, nuclear power, and jet propulsion), often first developed in tandem with the war effort, and later adapted and improved upon in the post-war era. (Wikipedia)


















































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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James Butler Hickok (May 27, 1837 – August 2, 1876), better known as “Wild Bill” Hickok, was a folk hero of the American Old West known for his life on the frontier as a soldier, scout, lawman, gambler, showman, and actor, and for his involvement in many famous gunfights. He earned a great deal of notoriety in his own time, much of it bolstered by the many outlandish and often fabricated tales he told about himself. Some contemporaneous reports of his exploits are known to be fictitious, but they remain the basis of much of his fame and reputation.
Hickok was born and raised on a farm in northern Illinois at a time when lawlessness and vigilante activity was rampant because of the influence of the “Banditti of the Prairie.” Drawn to this ruffian lifestyle, he headed west at age 18 as a fugitive from justice, working as a stagecoach driver and later as a lawman in the frontier territories of Kansas and Nebraska. He fought and spied for the Union Army during the American Civil War and gained publicity after the war as a scout, marksman, actor, and professional gambler. He was involved in several notable shootouts during the course of his life.
In 1876, Hickok was shot and killed while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory (present-day South Dakota) by Jack McCall, an unsuccessful gambler. The hand of cards which he supposedly held at the time of his death has become known as the dead man’s hand: two pairs; black aces and eights.
Hickok remains a popular figure of frontier history. Many historic sites and monuments commemorate his life, and he has been depicted numerous times in literature, film, and television. He is chiefly portrayed as a protagonist, although historical accounts of his actions are often controversial, and much of his career is known to have been exaggerated both by himself and by contemporary mythmakers. While Hickok claimed to have killed numerous named and unnamed gunmen in his lifetime, his career as a gunfighter only lasted from 1861 to 1871. According to Joseph G. Rosa, Hickok’s biographer and the foremost authority on Wild Bill, Hickok killed only six or seven men in gunfights.

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The Miss America protest was a demonstration held at the Miss America 1969 contest on September 7, 1968, attended by about 200 feminists and civil rights advocates. The feminist protest was organized by New York Radical Women and included putting symbolic feminine products into a “Freedom Trash Can” on the Atlantic City boardwalk, including bras, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, mops, and other items.
While it was widely rumored that the trash can was then lit on fire — sparking the decades-old myth of bra-burning feminists — the protest occurred incident (and flame) free. However, thanks to the widespread media that the pageant already drew, the protest and the cause was heavily covered in newspapers across the nation.
The dramatic, symbolic use of a trash can to dispose of feminine objects caught the media’s attention. Protest organizer Hanisch said about the Freedom Trash Can afterward, “We had intended to burn it, but the police department, since we were on the boardwalk, wouldn’t let us do the burning.” A story by Lindsy Van Gelder in the New York Post carried a headline “Bra Burners and Miss America.” Her story drew an analogy between the feminist protest and Vietnam War protesters who burned their draft cards. Individuals who were present said that no one burned a bra nor did anyone take off her bra.
The parallel between protesters burning their draft cards and women burning their bras were encouraged by organizers including Robin Morgan. The phrase became headline material and was quickly associated with women who chose to go braless. Feminism and “bra-burning” then became linked in popular culture.











At home or in public, 1930s women most commonly wore dresses with wide shoulders; puffy sleeves; modest necklines; higher, belted waistlines; and mid-calf flared hemlines. Frilly bows, ruffles, buttons, and other details often decorated dresses.
Formal dresses most dramatically displayed the decade’s willowy, elegant silhouette. Evening gowns in fluid fabrics were cut on the bias to create flowing, figure-hugging lines that reached the floor. Popular fabrics included satin, rayon, and chiffon.
Hollywood screen stars Katherine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich helped introduce women’s trousers for sports and leisure. These trousers were wide-legged and high-waisted, often styled like sailors’ pants. Women wore baggier, casual lounge pants on vacation and at the beach.
For men, suits of the 1930s typically had high waists and slightly tapered, creased trousers with turned-up cuffs. Younger men preferred baggier trousers and longer jackets. Suits were darker blue, brown, or gray for cooler weather, with lighter tones for warm weather. Bold patterns included stripes, checks, and plaids.
A vest, pocket handkerchief, shorter tie, hat (such as a fedora or bowler), and dark or two-toned leather dress shoes completed the look.
Here is a set of vintage photos from Vintage Cars & People that shows couples posing with their cars in the 1930s.






































Born 1936 in New York City, American actress, producer, and social advocate Mary Tyler Moore began with a job as “Happy Hotpoint”, a tiny elf dancing on Hotpoint appliances in TV commercials during the 1950s series Ozzie and Harriet. Her first regular television role was as a mysterious and glamorous telephone receptionist in Richard Diamond, Private Detective.
Moore was widely known for her prominent television sitcom roles in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977). She won seven Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. Her film work included 1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie and 1980’s Ordinary People, the latter earning Moore a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
With her two most prominent roles challenging gender stereotypes and norms, The New York Times said Moore’s “performances on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show helped define a new vision of American womanhood”. The Guardian said “her outwardly bubbly personality and trademark broad, toothy smile disguised an inner fragility that appealed to an audience facing the new trials of modern-day existence”.
Moore was an advocate for animal rights, vegetarianism and diabetes prevention. She died at the age of 80 in 2017, at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut. Take a look at these beautiful photos to see portrait of a young Mary Tyler Moore in the 1960s and 1970s.































Laura Webb Nichols (1883–1962) got her first camera on her 16th birthday, October 28, 1899, as a gift from Bert Oldman, a miner who would become her first husband the following year and the subject of many of her early photographs.
The earliest photographs are of her immediate family, self-portraits, and landscape images of the cultivation of the region surrounding the mining town of Encampment, Wyoming. In addition to the personal imagery, the young Nichols photographed miners, industrial infrastructure, and a small town’s adjustment to a sudden, but ultimately fleeting, population increase. The images chronicle the domestic, social, and economic aspects of the sparsely populated frontier of south-central Wyoming.
As early as 1906, Nichols was working for hire as a photographer for industrial documentation and family portraits, developing and printing from a darkroom she fashioned in the home she shared with her husband and their children. After the collapse of the copper industry, Nichols remained in Encampment
and established the Rocky Mountain Studio, a photography and photofinishing service, to help support her family. Her commercial studio was a focal point of the town throughout the 1920s and 1930s.



































(Photos by Lora Webb Nichols / Lora Webb Nichols Photography Archive)