On Aug. 22, 1949, Life Magazine put on its cover, Clarence Hailey Long, a working cowboy on the JA Ranch. The magazine was publishing a series of Leonard McCombe photographs on ranching in the American West.

Five years later, Leo Burnett, the founder of a Chicago-based advertising agency, remembered the tough masculine photo of C.H. Long with that cigarette dangling from his lips.

An American icon w…