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Happy Birthday, Margaret Bourke-White (1904), American photographer whose work included the first cover of Life magazine. Obviously a woman in that profession was regarded as an anomaly of the time.  But her work documenting Soviet industrial production, the Great Depression, World War II , the Korean War and more firmly established her  legacy.

In the spring of 1945, she traveled throughout a collapsing Germany with General George Patton. She arrived at Buchenwald and later said, "Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me." After the war, she produced a book entitled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.

In the 1950's NASA agreed to reserve a spot for Bourke-White on a future space flight.  However, in 1953, Bourke-White developed her first symptoms of Parkinson's Disease. She was forced to slow her career to fight encroaching paralysis. In 1959 and 1961, she underwent several operations to treat her condition, which effectively ended her tremors but affected her speech. 

A pension plan set up in the 1950s, "though generous for that time", no longer covered her health-care costs. She also suffered financially from her personal generosity and "less-than-responsible attendant care."

Margaret Bourke-White died at age 67.






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