life:

One of the characteristics that endeared LIFE magazine to millions of readers in its heyday — and that still makes readers smile when they happen to pick up an old copy 40 long years after the magazine stopped publishing as a weekly — is an evident willingness to cover pretty much anything and everything that might be of even passing interest to the public.

Here, for example, is a small gallery of pictures about, in the magazine’s sober phrase, “the craze and the menace of skateboards.” Proof, if any was needed, that when it came to genuinely seismic shifts in contemporary society, behavior, and habits … well, LIFE was right there.