St. Louis Browns
The St. Louis Browns was a baseball team in St. Louis from 1902 to 1953. Then they moved to Baltimore and became the Baltimore Orioles. These photos were taken by LIFE photographer Peter Stackpole in 1944, when they were playing in St. Louis. None of the photos were published in the magazine.
Players in the shower room. In those days, men showered together without embarrassment. One player is soaping up another's back. This is the photo that I use as the background photo for my blog.
Another view just slightly to the left. The same guy is soaping up his buddy's back. Players didn't worry about getting photographed naked. They knew that the magazine would never publish a frontal view. They didn't know that one day, the LIFE archive of millions of unpublished photos would become publicly available.
Not sure what's going on here. It's hard to wash your own back, but it's easy to shampoo your own hair, so these guys seem to be getting very friendly.
What I call a locker room "background" photo. The subject of the photo is the player with the broom pretending to sweep up money, which has to be some kind of gag. Athletes were not highly paid in those days. Meanwhile, in the background, the photo happened to catch a player on the bench wearing nothing but a sock and a legging that he's putting on or taking off.
3 comments:
I have to say the money pro athletes make today is obscene.
I'm also noting the age of the players seems to be older than usual. I'm thinking that is due to the war — the younger ones were in the military (A League of their Own discusses that as well).
The showers had cold water at that time!!!!
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