68 Vintage Photos So Beautiful We Can’t Look Away

Cookie anyone? — Debbi Fields — ball girl and cookie maker

Photos from the past have the power to inspire and intrigue, but this collection of beautiful shots have something more going on just beneath the surface. Each of these rare historical photos tells a story about a person, sure, but they can also transport us to a time and a place.

Featuring icons from the past that we all dream about, these photos are sure to induce a haze of nostalgia over everyone who sees them. They’ll take you back to most magical decades, when anything was possible and life was less chaotic.

Make sure to take a closer look at each of these photos, and spend plenty of time enjoying these rarely seen nostalgic moments in history.

In 1968, at the tender age of 13, Debbi Fields became one of the first “ball girls” for the Oakland Athletics. While her father worked as a welder for the Navy and her mother stayed home to take care of their five kids, Debbi was earning five dollars an hour to retrieve grounded balls.

Fields says that she used the money that she made from the Athletics to buy ingredients to make cookies, the one thing that she actually liked to eat when she was a child. While speaking with The Muse, Fields explained why she was drawn to baked goods:

My mother raised five children without the luxuries we have today-like a washer and dryer! Cooking was a chore she especially resented, and that showed in her meals. Since the food wasn’t as great as it could be, I used to refuse to eat. The only thing I was actually willing to eat? Cookies. I would bake my own using imitation chocolate, margarine-nothing real, because we couldn’t afford to have that in the house.

The infamous singing duo, Sonny and Cher in 1965

We think of Sonny and Cher as the couple that went to stardom as a singing duo, but that’s not how it all started. They went from America’s sweethearts to bitter rivals, to celebrities who were uniquely successful from one another, without the ability to extract themselves from their past as a duo. Initially, heir relationship began as platonic. They met in 1963 when Cher was 16 and Sonny was 27 and formed an immediate friendship before moving in with one another in a small apartment.

Both Sonny and Cher say that their early relationship was devoid of sexual tension, and it was only later that they got together. In 1975, Cher explained:

It wasn’t a fiery, sexy thing with us, but rather paternal, like we were bound together, two people who needed each other, almost for protection.

At the time, Cher was singing backup on songs like “Be My Baby,” while working on their double act “Caesar and Cleo.” In 1965 they scored a hit with “I Got You Babe,” but it wasn’t until 1969 that the two tied the knot and made their relationship official.

” Hardy — 1973

Take a closer look at this photo, you’re not just looking at some hot rod groupie, this is , queen of the funny car circuit. But she wasn’t born “ela Hardy, a studious young woman with sights on going to college until a spur of the moment decision to join “Jungle” Jim Lieberman on his drag racing run.

Pam says that one day she was walking down the street when Jim pulled up next to her in his Corvette. He asked her to hang out, she hopped in the car and they were together from there on out. At her first funny car race she fell in love with the sounds and smells of the cars, the track, and the world buzzing around her.