You What color was the explosion at Ripple Rock? Red, blue, yellow, black, combined to create an image, an impression, a spectacle in color.
This is the story of a magazine, Life, set partly in and around this tall building on Rockefeller Plaza during Easter week, April 1958.
But this building is only the hub of a worldwide news gathering operation.
Here in the building's brain center, the wire room, messages flow steadily to and from the 600 editorial staff members of Life.
This wire room is a sensitive link with Life's 15 domestic bureaus, 16 overseas offices, and a worldwide core over 300 stringers who day and night feed in news, fresh ideas, story suggestions, and long -range plans.
Through these machines from the Seattle Bureau came first word of the world's largest non -atomic blasting job at Ripple Rock in British Columbia.
Life is pictures, ideas visually expressed in tens of thousands of photographs, pouring in day by day to be examined, accepted or rejected.
Printed or filed away.
A brimming flood of pictures, unprecedented in volume, unparalleled in scope.
The bulk comes from Life's 36 photographers all over the world, two of whom were assigned to the Ripple Rock story.
Ripple Rock lies between Vancouver Island and the mainland.
In his office in New York, reporter Ken Gouldthorpe digs through a mass of background material.
Canadian admiralty charts, maps to help an artist to draw a diagram, instructions to cover the explosion by air, land, and perhaps even underwater.
He types the assignment.
Over the teletype, it goes out to Bob Shulman, Seattle Bureau chief.
At Easter time, the West Coast team lays plans, while other Life stories brew around the world.
Wednesday, April 9th, 10 a .m., in Belgium, photographer Mike Rougier visits the World's Fair in Brussels with reporter Israel Schenker helping carry the gear, the fate of all Life reporters.
In the American Pavilion, they meet Saul Steinberg, whose witty murals adorn the U .S.
exhibit.
The reporter is the photographer's shadow, but he's far more, with ear tuned to the quotable quote, to capture the lively detail.
And record the shots one by one.
That same Wednesday, near a home, photographer Ed Clark flashes his pass at the White House gate, where he checks in to cover a presidential press conference.
The photographers are arranged across a platform at the back of the room.
After two terms of office and three illnesses, Mr.
Eisenhower enters the conference room, shown here in color for the first time.
The other half of the Life team, Charles Moore, takes notes on a question he just asked.
Each press conference makes news, and our Washington bureau is always at hand.
Photographs from the world of tomorrow.
This April scene is set in the desert of White Sands, New Mexico.
J.
Ironman, master technician, shows us the loading of Life cameras into the nose of the Navy's Aerobie rocket.
The flaming takeoff.
The Earth falling away below, to reveal a strange glimpse of our planet.
This photo montage from 100 miles up in the thin emptiness.
Getting closer to Earth, a continuing source of pictures are aerial photographers like Tony Link.
Tony's specialty is banking his own single -engine plane, flying solo as he is here at a perilous angle.
Look ma, no hands, while he shoots the sprawl of suburbia, or the strange, compelling architecture of a new church, this one in Stamford, Connecticut.
Churches yield artistic triumphs and pose photographic problems, as Demetri Kessel knows, but Demetri has the expert touch.
This stunning Meroe de Alter screen shines forth in life's Easter issue as clearly as though painted yesterday.
The Flemish masterpiece is at the Cloisters in New York.
Pictures from all over, some feature, some news, some planned, some predictable.
But the parachute jump of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky brought unexpected results.
Disaster struck.
Music The tragic death of five paratroopers and the injury of 150 others by freak ground winds became headline news.
Music Expanded into a five -page black and white lead in life with pictures from United Press photographer Vic Cooley in Nashville.
Life stories are found all over the world.
Many spectacular color essays come from faraway places with strange sounding names.
This Easter, Fritz Goro with an artist and reporter in tow set off for the ancient Mayan city Tikal, lost beneath the jungles of Guatemala.
Excavations will be staffed by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and will go on for years.
Goro's first views from the air were of a dense jungle through whose 130 -foot canopy only the tallest temples protrude.
But they hint of fabulous palaces to be uncovered and will be shown in exclusive pictures and paintings to our readers later this year.
A project of major importance.
Music Pictures from an even more colorful land, the South Sea island of Ang Tong Java.
Music Elliot Ellis often roams with the men strut in gaily colored masks and plumage.
The women just dance and dance and dance.
Elliot does a little dance too and no wonder.
Music Ellis often is equally at home on Broadway.
Here today's stars posed for him in roles they've always dreamed of playing.
Judy Holliday in The Glass Menagerie.
Jason Robards Jr.
in Idiot's Delight.
And Peter Ustinov as King Lear.
People, places, faces, wonder and tragedy.
Life catches the world going by.
The Ripple Rock assignment has been received in Seattle.
A sunny Thursday, April 3rd, fine seaplanes standing by to fly equipment and photographers north to Vancouver Island and British Columbia.
Music There's the Ripple at last, beautiful from the air but a menace to navigation.
The ripples and eddies caused by twin peaks of rock only a few feet beneath the water.
In a century they've claimed 114 ships, a hundred lives.
DuPont of Canada has taken on the massive job of removal.
Mounties warn local residents to open their windows against the shock waves and to leave home for the day.
Launches are provided for transportation to and from the island.
These heavy bunkers overlook the site and will shelter crew and cameras.
Marshall Lockman, one of life's two photographers, photographs the mineshaft.
600 feet below this point, tunnels lead underwater into the rocks where two and three quarter million pounds of high explosive lie ready.
Music Out in a launch, technical wizard Ernie Stoud is over the Ripple with two skin diving photographers specially hired to try for pictures of the submerged menace.
Hmm, what's this, a camera? Nat Farbman poses them for a shot.
But the water proved too murky, the currents too treacherous.
No farewell picture of the ugly rocks today.
By dusk on Good Friday, all was in readiness.
The Ripple Rock assignment awaited only execution.
Music In contrast to a news story such as Ripple Rock, there are essays which take shape in the mind of a creative photographer such as Nina Lean, who we follow on her travels about the country, thinking, pondering, jotting notes.
For her latest essay, she took the theme of happiness, that intangible personal human emotion.
But let's eavesdrop on Nina's thoughts.
Many people talk about happiness without really knowing what they mean.
In my story, I want to show that happiness is made up of a lot of daily happy moments.
For instance, warm candle glow around a birthday cake, the feeling of being loved and needed, driving around the country, I was thinking about those ideas for my pictures.
At a studio in Connecticut, I watched this artist making a beautiful statue.
Maybe immortal art.
How much satisfaction she gets from her work.
Music Everywhere along the roadside, I saw letter boxes.
Letters can mean a lot to people.
Those letter boxes became symbols to me.
Those little things add up to happiness.
By Easter, Nina's pictures were completed, and the writer and layout man take over.
Skillful hands block out the pictures, text, captions.
Music The parts become the whole.
A major photo essay is born.
And so we leave Nina Leen's dream world of happiness.
The scene rippled rock, the time, early morning on Saturday, April the 5th.
Five, six, seven, eight, five, four, three, two, one, fire! BOOM Slowly the grey smoke and cloud drift away into the rain.
In the turbulent water, dead fish belly upwards bob on the curling crest of a tidal wave.
Six hours later the sun shines again.
The hazardous rocks only a memory.
With cameras unloaded, the film takes off for New York, carrying with it the message, Operation a complete success.
Operation a complete success.
Such might well have been Charles Darwin's words on his return from the Beagle voyage.
Years later came the origin of species.
Life is now commemorating these epic discoveries with five expeditions in Darwin's footsteps.
At 15 ,000 feet in the high Andes of Bolivia lie Laguna Colorado and Laguna Verde.
Roger Tory Peterson, the famous ornithologist, is in pursuit of rare birds.
His first discovery, a colony of 10 ,000 James flamingos, which experts thought extinct.
This slog through miles of queasy mud, the bed of an ancient lake, is a grueling hike at so high an altitude.
The Indian guides, descendants of the ancient Incas, strongly opposed the trip, for their main food is flamingo eggs and woe to anyone who disturbs the nests.
As well as three different kinds of flamingos, Peterson found a bird never before photographed, a horned coot, its chick feeding busily by its side.
Their nest is a huge heap of water weeds piled up from the lake bottom.
Andean flamingos feeding and nesting and flying, the pale sky full of beating wings, just as Darwin saw them a century ago.
A second Darwinian expedition finds artist Rudy Freund and the ubiquitous Alfred Eisenstadt exploring the Galapagos, volcanic peaks thrusting above the waters of the Pacific, where relics of earlier eras abound.
Tortoises, a different kind on each island, penguins and iguanas.
Izzy is entranced, tries the tortoises from every angle, including the jockeys.
Back at his home in Connecticut, Rudy Freund is now at work painting the discoveries, still wearing the beard from his voyage in pursuit of iguanas to those remote islands.
Slowly, in intricate detail and scientific accuracy, the illustrations come alive.
Life uses artists whose varied techniques vividly supplement the camera's eye.
The talents of life's artists are displayed in these books, assembled from the pages of the magazine, often best sellers, found in the home and in the classroom.
Sometimes translated into foreign languages.
A new life book is on its way this summer, a cookbook, called from the modern living department's colorful stories on desserts and salads, cocktails and cool concoctions.
At Leoni's restaurant, the fabulous array of bottles on the wall of the cellar backdrop a spread of Italian dishes to gladden the heart.
Everyone talking with their hands, perhaps mouths are too full to speak.
At Ben Rose's studio, another chapter on cocktail parties is being photographed.
Ben makes his final arrangements and here checks for authenticity.
Behind the canapes are the feet of Mary Hammond's staff and their friends to suggest a merry party caught for a moment in a flash of strobe.
Thousands of pictures with a common destination.
At dawn Easter Sunday morning, here come our Ripple Rock pictures through a familiar door by special courier from the airport.
In a record eight hours, transparencies will be in the hands of the editors.
But first, raw film must be processed.
Expert technicians must develop it.
Sponge it off, roll by roll, and dry it on a whirly gig.
Late that Sunday afternoon, the transparencies will be in the hands of Peggy Sargent, whose quick infallible eye is legend.
Spread on a light table, they are weighed and balanced, expertly scanned for color, detail, focus, quality, composition.
Eventually comes the word.
They're good, from managing editor Ed Thompson.
His problem now, to juggle quick closing advertisements, find story room in the mock -up.
And around him, teamwork against the clock, turning that prosaic word editing into a speedy weekly panorama.
By 11 p .m.
on Easter Sunday, final pasting up, the choice of a title, and our pictures are off once again by the midnight flight to Chicago and the presses.
Through its editorial page, Life Each Week speaks its mind.
This Easter, its opinions were making headlines.
Letters have swamped the letters department in an unprecedented way since this editorial appeared about education, followed two weeks later by this one.
Frank Gibney, who wrote the editorials, and Jack Jessup, chief editorial writer, read over some of these missives, many pro and many con, but none neutral.
A veritable storm of opinion for and against.
A five -part series on education appeared in the magazine at the same time as the editorials.
This lead picture was caught by Yale Joel, who attached a wire to the homemade ramjet rocket to trip the strobe lights as it hurtled by his battery of cameras.
And the startled faces of these science students.
Another photographer who has evolved a unique system of remote, but controlled picture taking, is Life's sports expert, George Silk.
But George will tell you about it himself.
I bought some holes in one ski and mounted a tripod head on the tip.
I used a Panon camera, which has an extremely wide -angle lens, and put the release tube along the groove under the ski.
Then up my leg, under my ski pants and sweater.
The squeeze ball I tucked inside my mitten.
I practiced with a ski patrolman for a while.
The rig weighs four pounds, you know.
And I had to train a bit to ski with this extra load on one toe.
And following an expert down a steep trail isn't all beer and skittles, even without a camera.
Usually I don't go for ski stories.
But this story I really liked doing.
You see, I wanted to take the reader down mountain right along with me, let him feel that big jump, and the rush of some fast action, and that swooping sensation.
A lot of people wonder why skiers love this silly sport.
But I've skied ever since I was a kid in New Zealand, and it's still one of my favorite sports.
And the fellows that have seen a winter sunset like this one will understand why.
By early Monday morning, our Ripple Rock pictures have arrived in Chicago from New York on their way to the production line.
Step by swift step they come nearer to printing.
Through the elaborate processes of photo -engraving, hand -touching, proofing.
They move towards the presses.
At R .R.
Donnelly's massive plant, life is printed.
Here life has its own color room where Ripple Rock was examined, proofed, and corrected once more.
Dan Sibley marks a subsequent story, politics in Alabama, in this room.
Soon the presses are rolling.
In a matter of hours since the blast, Ripple Rock is on its way to the reader.
As the presses roll, around the world, around the clock, wherever news is made, life and its photographers are on hand.
This Easter, however, found seven photographers in New York.
So we asked them over to our studio to meet you, and gave them an assignment.
Lisa Larson just back from Hungary.
Bob Kelly.
Stan Wayman.
Ralph Morse.
Yale Joel.
Joe Sherchell.
And Walter Sanders.
And a fantastic collection of cameras to boot.
Hasselblad.
Leica.
Contacts.
Minox.
Pannon.
Linhoc.
And the assignment we gave them? Why to follow our story through.
It's another kind of Ripple Rock.
The fabulous Egyptian dancing twins, the Jamal sisters.
The Jamal sisters.
That's life too, brother.
I wonder if they'll make the cover.
What color was the explosion at Ripple Rock? Well, as we suggested before, the answer is fourfold.
Our blast is blue, red, yellow, and black.
All combined to bring you this impression of high explosive.
From these four basic inks comes the kaleidoscope of color.
Week by week, year by year, off these presses comes life.
The end result of the emotions and craft and creative skill that go into the planning, executing, and editing of this picture magazine.
A magazine whose ideals are so well expressed in these words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Thank you.
