Grey Villet Photo Archives - LIFE

“The Synanon Fix” in LIFE

Bill Syken — Fri, 03 May 2024 13:49:33 +0000

The new Max series The Synanon Fix captures the rise and fall of an organization that began as an well-regarded treatment program for addicts and ended up turning into something more sinister. The full title of the show, which is a documentary, poses the question, “Did the cure become a cult?”

The names of Synanon and its founder, Charles E. Dederich, may be unfamiliar to most people today—the group, which was founded in 1958, disbanded in 1991. But for a time it was a big deal, because people saw Synanon as a revolutionary way of dealing with a scourge that was on the rise. In 1962 LIFE ran a story on Synanon that was fairly glowing, with the headline declaring that the program offered addicts “a tunnel back to the human race,” and the story said “both doctors and narcotics experts look at Synanon as en exciting, practical approach, and even skeptical federal narcotics officers see promise in it.” The pictures from LIFE’s Grey Villet focussed on the anguish of addicts as they sought to get their lives back.

Dederich’s program featured a technique called the Synanon Game, which was an extreme version of group therapy. LIFE described it as “a dozen or so persons seated in a circle, telling the truth about each other, interrelating. Verbally, anything goes and the games are sometimes brutal, although never physically violent.”

Over the years Synanon evolved from a therapy into a way of life, with many adherents living on the Synanon compounds. When LIFE returned for a major profile of Dederich in 1969, the founder was more at the center of the story, which featured photographs from Ralph Crane and Fred Lyon. Dederich was by then already a polarizing figure. Here’s how that story opened:

A madman with delusions of grandeur. A saint. An opportunist. A brilliant executive. Latter-day Socrates. Loud, arrogant egotist. Hilarious comic. An earthquake. A herd of one elephant. Charles E. Dederich has been called all that, and more.

And again, that was before things really started to go sour, which they would, especially in the 1970s, after LIFE had ended its original run. A passage from a history of Synanon which appeared in TIME in advance of the Max series shows how disturbing the world of Synanon became in its later years:

As Synanon’s eccentric leader Dederich started to decline, so did the organization. He began drinking again after his wife died in 1977 and remarried soon after. Then, he decided everyone in Synanon would also benefit from remarrying, and called for wife-swapping. Suddenly, men and women who were married to one another at Synanon were divorcing and marrying different people affiliated with the organization.

After encouraging people to raise families at Synanon, he called for residents to be childless. Men started to get vasectomies, like Mike Gimbel, who credits Synanon for getting him clean and worked for the organization in the 1970s. He says in the series that he was in love with his wife, but they decided to separate when Dederich called for wife-swapping. When she got pregnant, she got an abortion because they were afraid of running afoul of Dederich. As he puts it in the final episode, “Synanon saved my life, but screwed it up too.”

The group was at its most extreme when it attacked a lawyer who had successfully sued Synanon on behalf of former members. Two Synanon members placed a live rattlesnake inside the lawyer’s home mailbox, and those members were eventually convicted of attempted murder.

With that level of drama its no wonder that, so many years later, documentarians have returned to this fascinating story.

Synanon founder Charles E. Dederich at a treatment center, 1962.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon founder Charles E. Dederich talked to an addict who had come with his mother in an attempt to get clean, 1962.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon Founder Charles E. Dederich posed at the group’s research and development center in California, 1968.

Fred Lyon/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon founder Charles E. Dederich, 1968.

Fred Lyon/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charles E. Dederich (center) at work with other Synanon members, 1968.

Fred Lyon/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon founder Charles Dederich spoke at a gathering in Oakland, 1968.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charles E. Dederich with a group of Synanon members, 1968.

Fred Lyon/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon founder Charles Dederich, 1968.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon founder Charles Dederich (left), 1968.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon founder Charles E. Dederich, 1968.

Fred Lyon/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon founder Charles Dederich in his office, 1968.

Fred Lyon/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Synanon founder Charles E. Dederich relaxed in his office while blowing a tune on the recorder, 1968.

Fred Lyon/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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The Hot Rod Life

Bill Syken — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 14:50:51 +0000

The world of hot rods and drag racing has its romance, but it has its dark side as well. Recent high-profile incidents—such as one involving football star Jalen Carter—show that the pastime is one which courts peril and even death.

The thrills and the dangers were both acknowledged when LIFE took a deep dive on drag racing in a 1957 cover story. The photos capture the charm of a sport in which people take cars and soup them up and see how fast they can go. It’s the essence of an age in which people were deeply connected to their cars, seeing what they drove as an expression of self and of a newfound mobility, rather than just a way to get from point A to point B. Many of the photos in this gallery are by the great Ralph Crane, but it also includes other drag racing images from LIFE photographers Frank Scherschel, N.R. Farbman, Grey Villet and Loomis Dean are either from that story or other instances in that decade when LIFE sent its photographers to document the hot rod life.

The 1957 magazine story was headlined “The Drag Racing Rage: Hot-rodders Numbers Grow But Road to Respectability is a Rough One,” and the nine-page package talked about how drag-raching was going to backroads amusement/hazard to a controlled sport, with a growing number of fans clamoring to see these races that lasted as little as ten seconds.

But not everyone was happy about it. “Safety groups and some police officials feel that the glorification of speed on the strips infects the teenagers with a fatal spirit of derring-do on the highways,” LIFE wrote. The story reported that police chiefs had voted to condemn drag racing at a gathering in Chicago, as had the National Safety Council.

Despite the dangers, the sport carried on, and it still does. These photos are a monument to a time when drag racing was born, and car culture was at its peak.

Competitors sitting on top of cars during drag race in Santa Ana, California, 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

People watching cars drag racing in Santa Ana, California, 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A drag race competition, Santa Ana, California, 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A team of men push a car at a National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) sponsored drag race held at the Orange County Airport, Santa Ana, California, 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two uniformed men stand beside hot rods at Santa Ana Drags, the first drag strip in the US, Santa Ana, California, 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scenes of drag racing (and drag racing cars) in Minneapolis, 1957.

Frank Scherschel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A hot rodder tuned up his Model T Ford before a race at a drag strip in Santa Ana, California, 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shuttertstock

It’s a concern that carries on today. Even as it’s hard to deny that the photos of the world and its enthusiasts all looks pretty cool, as it takes you back to a place and time when car culture was at its peak.

Men praying during drag racing in San Francisco, California, April 1957.

Nat Farbman/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A man prepared his hot rod for large drag race, California, March 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the parking lot of a drive-in, an unidentified carhop serves a tray of food to hot rod owner Norm Grabowsky, who sits with a friend in his customized Ford with a Cadillac engine, as a large group of other admire the car, Santa Ana, California, 1957.

Arthur Schatz/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A drag race begins, 1957.

Hank Walker/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hot Rodders drag raced in the L.A. River, 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A drag race, 1957.

Hank Walker/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Men working on a chromed roadster in preparation for a drag race in California, 1957.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Men cleaning their hot rod, 1953.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From a 1953 story on hot rods and hot-rod accessories.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Drag racing in Moline, Illinois, 1957.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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A Historic Graduation at Little Rock Central High

Bill Syken — Fri, 19 May 2023 13:47:05 +0000

Little Rock Central High School lives in American history as one of the landmark battlegrounds of the civil rights movement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called in the national guard after the nine black students chosen to integrate Little Rock Central following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education were initially barred from entering. LIFE’s coverage of their first day of school produced some of the most memorable photos in the history of the magazine.

That was in the fall of 1957. In May 1958, LIFE photographer Grey Villet came back to Arkansas when Ernest Green was set to become the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central.

Villet’s photos capture a day that had some of the familiar elements of graduation—the gathering of friends and family and the pride of a moment of achievement. But other images mark it as a moment in history. Martin Luther King Jr. was there (he would sit with Green’s family during graduation and go largely unnoticed), and national guard troops were also on hand to safeguard the ceremony. Then there are Villet’s shots which show Green as the lone black face among crowds of white students, which hints at the reality Green and the rest of the Little Rock Nine faced on a daily basis.

“It’s been an interesting year. I’ve had a course in human relations firsthand.” That was Green’s brief comment in the story that ran in LIFE on his graduation.

That assessment was, obviously, an understatement, as Green and the other members of the Little Rock Nine endured harassment from white students throughout the school year. As an adult, Green gave a lengthy interview about Little Rock Central which is available at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. In it he said “I think there is no question that the nine of us thought that the sacrifice we were doing was worth it, and if having to do it over again, I would do it the same way.”

He also detailed the drama of graduation day, from the down-to-the-wire question of whether he would pass physics to the anxiety he felt walking across the stage for his diploma:

I had been there nine months and had thought that all I needed to do was to graduate, just get out of there, and that it would be impossible for white people to say that nobody black had ever graduated from Central High School. So the graduation was in May. I was having difficulty with one course, it was a physics course, and almost up to the last minute didn’t know whether I was going to complete it successfully so that I would be able to, to get out of there, but as things were, I got a fairly decent grade out of it. And at the graduation ceremony, one of the guests was Martin Luther King. He was speaking in Pine Bluff, Arkansas AM&N, at the black college there, and came up to sit with my mother, and Mrs. Bates [Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas NAACP], and a couple of other friends in the audience. And all I could think of, there were six hundred and some odd students graduating that night, it was in the stadium, the place was packed, cameras, lights, to record this event, and I said, now, I can’t walk across this stage and stumble. [laughs] And all I figured that I had to do was to get up to the principal, take that diploma, and walk off the other end and it would be over. I would have done my duty and been able to have a relaxing summer. Because it really wasn’t, certainly wasn’t the way to go to go to school under that kind of pressure.

Green, a former Eagle Scout, did make it across that stage despite his nerves, and from there he continued his education at Michigan State, where he earned a bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He would go on to serve as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor under Jimmy Carter.

In 1993 Green’s life was dramatized in Disney’s made-for-TV movie The Ernest Green Story, in which he was portrayed by Morris Chestnut. That film, by the way, had its premiere at Little Rock Central High School.

Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, on the day of his graduation from Little Rock Central, 1958.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Green with his mother on the day he became the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central, 1958.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Green, the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central, at home with his graduation gifts, 1958.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Green, the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central, on his graduation day, May 1958.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, became the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central, 1958.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The national guard was on hand at for the graduation ceremony at Little Rock Central that included Ernest Green, the first black student to graduate from the school, 1958.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Green, the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central, on his graduation day, 1958.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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There’s Quaint, and Then There’s a Story on Phone-Obsessed Teens from 1956

Bill Syken — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 13:20:48 +0000

In 2022 teenagers spending an average of seven hours a day engaged with their screens. There’s plenty of reason to wonder why this is ruinous—addictive algorithms, the highs and lows of being liked or ignored on social media, and so on.

But a LIFE photo essay from 1956 shows that while the power of the cellphone is new, the phenomenon of teenagers being addicted to phones goes back to the days of the rotary dial.

In 1956 LIFE staff photographer Grey Villet shot a photo essay documenting the teenage obsession with telephones. The subject was timely back them because the 1950s were the decade in which in became landlines became more common than not in American homes. Then as now, teenagers loved to use phones to connect with their friends.

Villet’s essay never ran in the magazine, so we don’t know much about the people in the story, including where they lived or their exact age. But Villet shot enough pictures of them away from home to confirm that they were high school students.

The details of their lives are secondary, though, to the landline era that Villet captured so vividly.

There’s the picture of a teenaged girl running down the stairs after her little brother has answered the phone. The photo captures the particular panic of a personal call being intercepted by a nosy sibling in the same home.

Another picture shows mother trying to wrest the receiver from a daughter who has been tying up the line. And another of a brother popping into her room, presumably checking to see when she will be done.

But Villet’s piece de resistance is a photo sequence of a teenage girl in her room, going through physical contortions over the course of a long phone conversation. She is on her back, then flipped over, legs akimbo. And then she slides halfway off the bed, and then all the way down to her floor. If George Balanchine had choreographed a ballet titled “Teenage Girl Talks on Phone, 1956” this is what it would look like.

That was all decades ago, and now the percentage of households with landline only is in the low single digits. Since 2014 households with only cellphones became the most common sort.

The most hilariously dated aspect of Villet’s 1956 essay is not the sight of an entire household sharing a phone that performs no additional functions. It’s the photos that Villet took of the kids outside the house. We see them at a basketball game, trying on a dress at a store, and at a school dance. It’s not clear exactly what the point of those shots was meant to be back then, but what stands out now is that these kids are enjoying all kinds of activities without a cellphone in sight.

Photo essay on teenagers and telephones, 1956.

Grey Villet/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Portrait of a Working Mother in the 1950s

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 08:00:21 +0000

In 1956, just 16% of women with children under 6 worked outside the home, but twenty-seven-year-old Jennie Magill of Hammond, Ind., was one of them. When LIFE Magazine published a special double issue on “The American Woman: Her Achievements and Her Troubles,” the editors selected Magill for its cover. Smiling lovingly at her child, who smiles adoringly back, Magill was introduced to America as the face of that rare specimen, the “Working Mother.”

For historical context, this was seven years before the Equal Pay Act prohibited sex-based wage discrimination and The Feminine Mystique exposed the plight of the joyless housewife. It was more than a decade before the Equal Rights Amendment and long before the idea of equal pay for equal work became a rallying cry. People back then were more likely to be talking about whether women should work at all.

For many of LIFE’s readers, Magill would have been something of an introduction to the working mom. But despite the prevalent stigma back then against mothers who worked outside the home, LIFE portrayed Magill in an overwhelmingly positive light.

Magill worked in the bridal service at a local department store, and her husband Jim as a junior executive at a steel company. Her job afforded her a social life with coworkers. It brought the family more disposable income. It provided time for her and Jim, on their drive home together, to talk without the distractions of a hectic household. And both parents” time away from home meant that when they were with their children, they were entirely focused on enjoying time as a family.

Despite its unequivocally laudatory attitude toward the two-working-parent household, the magazine omitted one thing: the voice of Jennie Magill. As implied by the headline, “My Wife Works and I Like It,” the attitudes expressed in the photo essay, progressive and egalitarian as they were, belonged to Jim. Jennie was the pretty face, and Jim the confident voice, an editorial choice that may have reflected an effort to make the story more palatable to stalwarts of the old guard.

Perhaps the most telling aside in the essay is that Magill, who by all appearances had what we might today call “it all,” could not do what she did alone. Not only was she “blessed with a loyal, experienced housekeeper,” but Jim “enthusiastically approves of the idea” of her working outside the home. And while both partners worked outside the home, they also both worked inside of it. “We all live here,” said Jim, “so why shouldn’t we all help out?”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Jennie Magill with her family in the background.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Working mother Jennie Magill shopping with her children.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie and Jim Magill in the kitchen.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill and family in the kitchen.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE’s original caption read, “Wifely kiss is Jim’s reward for helping with the dishes.”

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill at work.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: ” Companionable lunch with the girls from store is lots better, says Jennie, than a sandwich in solitude at home. `Through Jennie’s friends at work,’ says Jim, `I’ve met a lot of people I wouldn’t have met otherwise.'”

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Her work is a source of pride to Jim. `She has done a terrific job. And when I tell her about my work she doesn’t brush it off.'”

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Going home, Jim always picks Jennie up at Carson Pirie Scott branch. The ride home is a chance to talk without domestic distractions.”

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie and Jim Magill coming home from work.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: ” Taking over the family reins when she gets home, Jennie holds Jackie, 2, who tests cake which he `helped’ housekeeper Sophia Flewelling (left) to bake. Sophie runs household smoothly while parents are gone.”

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill and family.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill ironing with her daughter.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill with her children.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill comforting her crying daughter.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill with her children.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill reading a story to her children; the image is from a 1956 LIFE story on working mothers.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Bill-paying is disagreeable, but it reminds them of how well they live because Jennie works. `It’s nice not to have that lost feeling,’ says Jim. `Now when we see a piece of furniture we want, we buy it.”

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jennie Magill kisses her children goodbye.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Silent No More: Early Days in the Fight for Gay Rights

Thu, 01 May 2014 14:58:23 +0000

In late 1971, two years after the Stonewall riots in New York sparked the modern gay rights movement in America, and twelve months before LIFE ceased publishing as a weekly, the magazine featured an article on “gay liberation” that, encountered decades later, feels sensational, measured and somehow endearingly, deeply square all at the same time.

Titled “Homosexuals in Revolt” and touted as “a major essay on America’s newest militants,” the piece elicited strong reactions from readers many of whom, of course, were less than happy that their beloved LIFE would devote a dozen pages to people whom one letter writer characterized as “psychic cripples.” Largely predictable responses from peeved readers that appeared in the Jan. 28, 1972, issue of LIFE included:

From Telford, Penn. There was plenty to lament in your year-end issue, but the thing that struck me as most sad was the fact that LIFE felt compelled to devote 11 pages to “Homosexuals in Revolt.”

From Chicago Essentially, it is absurd to accept as a mere “variant lifestyle” a practice which, if universal, would mean the end of the human race.

And, from Glendale, Calif., the old standby “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

But there were also letters from readers praising LIFE’s “accuracy, fairness and dignified tone,” and one from a woman in New Jersey, Jule Lee, who was (in her words) “one of the oldest lesbian activists both in age and years of participation in the movement.” She was outraged, she wrote, not only because the “Homosexuals in Revolt” article focused on what she called “LIFE-made ‘leaders’ [who] do not represent me and my age group,” but also because “out of ten picture pages . . . lesbians are mentioned on two. If this isn’t a new high in male chauvinism, I don’t know what is!”

For its part, LIFE introduced its 1971 feature in language that certainly feels more “Us vs. Them” than what we might see in a similar article today, but it’s also language that, all these years later, has about it a sense of an older world trying really trying to get a handle on the new:

It was the most shocking and, to most Americans, the most surprising liberation movement yet. Under the slogan “Out of the closets and into the streets,” thousands of homosexuals, male and female, were proudly confessing what they had long hidden. They were, moreover, moving into direct confrontation with conventional society. Their battle was far from won. But in 1971 militant homosexuals showed they they were prepared to fight it. . . . They resent what they consider to be savage discrimination against them on the basis of a preference which they did not choose and which they cannot and do not want to change. And while most will admit that “straight” society’s attitudes have caused them unhappiness, they respond to the charge that all homosexuals are guilt-ridden and miserable with the defiant rallying cry, “Gay is Good!”

LIFE.com remembers the early days of a movement that, incredibly, in the second decade of the 21st century, still occasionally has cause to take to the streets.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Gay rights march, 1971

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gay liberation, LIFE magazine, December 1971

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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