Filipinos Simplicio and Lucio Godina, the only set of adult male Siamese twins, were joined at the hips by a band of muscle and fiber eight inches in diameter. On Nov. 24, in York Hospital, Lucio (smiling) died of rheumatic fever and Simplicio felt “a very strange feeling.” Forty-five minutes later Surgeon Hippolyte Marcus Wertheim (center) sliced through the connecting band, freed Simplicio from his dead brother. Flat on his face in bed but reported in “favorable condition,” scared, lonely Simplicio was visited by his wife Victorina (right in picture above) and her sister Natividad, Lucio’s widow. When he recovers, Simplicio’s first task will be to learn to walk alone.
Georgia O’Keeffe grooms her two large fluffs at home in New Mexico.
“Life” magazine photographer John Loengard captured this candid moment on a trip to mark the artist’s 80th birthday. This photo is now in our National Portrait Gallery.
The original Life magazine began as a weekly in the 19th century and published many gags about the technological future around 1900. The actual caption for this full-page joke was: In Futuro. “You are nearly an hour late, dear.” “Yes, the air ship broke down, and I had to fly home.”
Scan and transcribed text from Out of Time: Designs for the Twentieth-Century Future, by Norman Brosterman. Post link
Photos of Katharine Hepburn in a playsuit and pants suit from an article about the Broadway production of Philadelphia Story in the April 24, 1939 LIFE magazine.
Home Sweet Home, or Man on Ship With Accordion Norman Rockwell Oil on Canvas, 76 x 66 cm 1923, commissioned by and featured on the cover of Life Magazine
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world cantell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to tell that. I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.”
As I write this I am wearing a flannel shirt with pearl snaps, and I have my cowboy boots on in the house because I don’t feel ready for the day unless I have shoes on — even when I have nowhere to be. My roommate’s cat is on the couch, despite my efforts to keep him off of it. And I really can’t blame him. Because it’s warm here. We have the fire going, and we’re listening to Gillian Welch sing…
“U.S. citizens have been demonstrating a distressing ignorance on the delicate question of how to tell a Chinese from a Jap. Innocent victims in cities all over the country are many of the 75,000 U.S. Chinese, whose homeland is our stanch ally. So serious were the consequences threatened, that the Chinese consulates last week prepared to tag their nationals with identification buttons. To dispel some of this confusion, LIFE here adduces a rule-of-thumb from the anthropometric conformations that distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs.“ LIFE magazine. December 22, 1941, Vol. 11, No. 25, pp.81-82
