Brooklyn Dodgers 1951 and 1956
Today's photos were all taken by LIFE photographer George Silk, from the huge LIFE magazine photo archive. None of these photos were published in the magazine.
First, we see the Dodgers locker room crowded with reporters and friends, as player Roger Craig makes his way to or from the showers. Except his hand is in the way.
No problem. Here's another view of Craig from a photo set called "Dodgers and Pittsburgh Baseball," 1956.
Here are two unidentified Dodgers players having a naked locker room discussion, from a photo set called "Dodgers vs Braves." Unlike today's locker rooms where people cover up as quickly as possible, in those days players just hung out naked in the locker room.
The photo set is dated 1956 in the LIFE archive, but that can't be right (see next photo).
From the same photo set, this is Dodgers player Wayne Terwilliger apparently gesturing to the cameraman not to shoot a picture. Out of thousands of locker room photos in the LIFE archive, this is the only one I've seen where a player objected to being photographed naked. In that era, rear nudity was acceptable, even in a family magazine, and players knew that frontal nudity would not be published, so they just tended to ignore the photographers.
About the date: although this photo set is dated 1956 in the archive, Wayne Terwilliger only played for the Dodgers in 1951, so this and the previous photo must be from 1951. The LIFE archive is unfortunately riddled with errors (mostly names spelled wrong, but also some wrong dates). The errors presumably happened when the archive was digitized. Processing over 4 million photos and manually assigning names and dates to them, some errors were bound to occur.
3 comments:
Now that female reporters are allowed in the locker rooms, the players are more prone to cover up. And even us homosexuals are sexualizing these photos nowadays. I'm not saying there weren't guys back then who checked things out. But the photographers took a bunch of pictures. If cocks were visible, the picture wasn't published. We make a "thing" out of something that, in those days, was not a "thing."
In my recollection, the dudes who covered up with a towel or a hand we either small or way above average in the cock department. The rest? Well, they never cared - naked was normal.
I always like these Life magazine posts.
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