LIFE Launched

This week Charter Subscribers and newsstand buyers got their first look at LIFE, new picture weekly published by Time Inc. Preliminary promotion had promised that LIFE would offer "the biggest and best package of pictures which it is possible to produce at a popular price." For 10-c-, first readers could judge how the new magazine had fulfilled these specifications as they thumbed the 96 big pages (14 in. by 10 5/8 in.) on which LIFE commenced its pictorial career.

First picture in the new LIFE symbolically showed an obstetrician holding by the heels a just-born baby whom he is briskly slapping into mundane consciousness. Caption: "Life Begins." First LIFE feature, Franklin Roosevelt's Wild West, showed how WPA workers disport themselves in frontier style in the bars and dance halls of the new-hatched towns of New Deal and Wheeler, Mont., where the vast Fort Peck Dam project is under way. Prize shot: A pile of tangled wire dumped outside a rooming house, captioned, "The only idle bedsprings in 'New Deal' are the broken ones." Dispatched to the Northwest for some of her famed construction shots, Photographer Margaret Bourke-White came by chance on these frontier scenes. LIFE'S editors snapped them up as a unique human document.

Under the departmental heading LIFE on the American Newsfront, was depicted the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Superimposed on this aerial view was what no camera can yet show: The architect's drawing of the island which is to be built for the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair. Other featured items of picture-news were Louisiana's "Moses" foundling; the spectacular death of Minnesota's Dr. Joseph Graham Mayo, who drove his automobile up a railroad track; awards for diction and genius, respectively, to Actress Ina Claire and Playwright Eugene O'Neill; and the exhumation in California for reburial in their homeland of twelve tons of Chinese cadavers. Eye- worthy also (and a news beat) was a skyscape drawn by Artist F. R. Paul to show what levels will be traversed by Transcontinental & Western Air's proposed "Overweather" plane which is to fly sealed at around 30,000 ft.

For universal appeal, the editors craftily included eight Charming Chinese children at the country's only Chinese parochial school, in San Francisco's Oriental quarter. To please ladies, LIFE'S cinema hero-of- the-week was Hollywood's "beautiful" Robert Taylor, who plays opposite Greta Garbo in Camille to be released shortly. Following this feature, LIFE presented four other memorable Camilles: Bernhardt's, Ethel Barrymore's, Theda Bara's, Eva Le Gallienne's. A memorable color shot from the live theatre showed Helen Hayes & Co. in the great third-act pageant of Victoria Regina, eye-filling scene hitherto overlooked by snappers of performance pictures. To LIFE'S editors Miss Hayes also opened her private albums for her own picture-biography.

In Manhattan's Radio City, LIFE'S cameramen recorded National Broadcasting Co.'s tenth birthday with candid studio shots of such favorites as Gossip Walter Winchell, Exhibitionist Gypsy Rose Lee (with clothes on), Singer Jessica Dragonette, Funnyman Jack Benny and Maestro Rudy Vallee. In The President's Album, a feature which will be continued weekly, LIFE showed shots which Franklin Roosevelt might well paste up in his scrapbook.

For a color spread unprecedented in a 10-c- magazine, LIFE gave its readers three pages of prints from the work of Kansas' John Steuart Curry. In brilliant, accurate reproduction were seen the famed U. S. artist's Line Storm, bad weather brooding on a wide Western landscape; Tornado Over Kansas, in which a family tumble into their storm cellar; Sanctuary, which shows farm animals huddling from a flood on an islet; and two of Mr. Curry's celebrated circus paintings: Elephants and The Flying Codonas.

Striking was the juxtaposition of two seldom seen, well-guarded fortresses: Kentucky's Fort Knox, where the U. S. Treasury is to move most of its gold bullion, and Britain's equally obscure Fort Belvedere, where Edward VIII goes for week ends with his U. S. friend, Mrs. Simpson. For scientifically-minded readers, LIFE depicted, with explicit captions, the cannibal romance of the famed Black Widow spider, who devours her mate when done with him.

Wider was the scope of LIFE'S pictorial presentation of Brazil, in the news now because Franklin Roosevelt is going there. Of South America the editors said, "A month ago LIFE decided to do its duty and be interested--a duty which turned out to be surprisingly easy to take. . . . Next week, The Argentine."

In The Camera Overseas, LIFE offered six pages of foreign pictures, including a shot of a vicious Bombay rioter, another of two old Russian collectivist farmers in a bath. For its promised party-of-the-week, LIFE went with British Ambassador Sir George Clerk to a hunt at the estate of the Comte de Fels near Paris. Readers are shown the famed and wealthy guests, the small army of beaters, the luxurious luncheon which punctuated the proceedings. LIFE'S last picture in its first appearance is the enormous bag of this day's sport--row after row of lifeless hare.

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