(Ted Rohde/Stars and Stripes)

October is American Archives Month! To celebrate, Stars and Stripes Archives and Library is sharing some “behind the scenes” images of Stripes’ operations, its staff and its archives throughout the paper’s eight decades of existence.

Griesheim, Germany, Aug. 6, 1954: Francis “Red” Grandy (center), Stars and Stripes staff photographer and photo editor, with Maria Kiehl, a temporary Stripes hire, and an unidentified staffer in the photo and art department of Stars and Stripes Europe. Grandy got hired as Stars and Stripes photographer in 1951 and was soon promoted to “chief photographer.” Over the span of his 35-year career at Stars and Stripes, his enviable assignments took him to military maneuvers, natural disasters, plane crashes, sporting events and film and jazz festivals in 37 countries. It was “movie stars, cocktail bars and shiny cars,” he told one interviewer at age 91.

Red died in 2018 at age 96. You can read his obituary here.

Since 2004 the archives staff has worked to make more of our historic content available online. We have digitized our 1948-1999 European and Pacific editions, as well as several of our WWII editions and made them available online through http://starsandstripes.newspaperarchive.com/