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Here’s a recent photo of Pat McGee, one time national girls’ champion skateboarder — back in the long lost days before skateboarding was a total sausage fest. She’s holding a couple of magazines that featured her on the cover, including the May 14^th 1965 issue of LIFE, which actually happens to be the first magazine to ever cover skateboarding.

The issue focused on “the craze and menace of skateboarding.” And god knows I love me some menace, so I went and put that shit on my wall.

Although it was the first to address the topic, LIFE might not have done it best. The tone of the article is skeptical to say the least, more in-line with how a modern-day blogger might write of UGG Boots or Lady Gaga’s fictitious testicles. The very first sentence of the article comes off like an introduction to a lousy PSA:

That thing 19 year-old Pat McGee is balancing on is a skateboard, the most exhilarating and dangerous joy-riding device this side of the hot rod.

Of course, this hostile tone that remains throughout the article only makes it that much more hilarious. Such is the case with this brief anecdote about a victim of an ill-fated skateboarding experiment:

It reminded Mrs. Greer of a roller coaster and gave her “a very free kind of feeling, but if Peter had let go of me, I think I would have died.” She was luckier than a California woman who tried her son’s board and got going too fast. She landed on both elbows and now has one arm in a sling, the other in a cast.

I’ll never understand this type of resentment toward an activity whose injuries are entirely limited to those participating in said activity. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t go skateboarding, bitch. It’s part of the fun. Bob Muller must have felt similar confusion, as he wrote a letter to the editor in response to the article, which was published three weeks later:

So what if we get a few broken bones, scraped knees and lumpy heads. They’re our bones, knees and heads.

My feelings exactly. Now get out there and bruise something, already.