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.

Sure, the editors missed the boat on a few pop culture items through the years — Elvis, James Dean, the Beatles, and Dylan, for example, all seem to have somehow slipped pretty much under the radar — but by and large, the single greatest photographic publication of the 20th century didn’t miss much.

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.