"Three West Lafayette youngsters engage in a bit of outdoor sport called skateboarding..."

"... balancing themselves on boards to which skate are attached."



The news — just handed to me — from 1964, when Indiana newspaper readers were assumed not yet to have heard of skateboarding and when kids made their own skateboards by breaking up a metal roller skate and nailing the pieces to a board.

(The caption misspells Meade's first name and his last name.)

Here's Jan & Dean on "American Bandstand," singing their 1964 hit "Sidewalk Surfin'" — and calling this "the newest sport around":

LIFE's sexiest photographs.

A nice collection. My favorite as a photograph is Jayne Mansfield. The sexiest, in my personal opinion, is "Clint Eastwood... bare-chested and bandaged after a brutal beating...."

And for those of you who were sad that I laughed at Raquel Welch yesterday — in her uncomfortable dancing singer guise — she's looking much more at ease here in a roller derby outfit — possibly because it's a still photograph.

Speaking of photography, here's a question I thought of yesterday and realized I couldn't answer: Who was the first U.S. President to be photographed? It's easy to think of photos of Abraham Lincoln, but was there anyone before him? It turns out to be crucial how you ask the question. You'll get a different answer if you look at the list of Presidents in the order that they served and find which is the first of them to have been photographed than if you look for the oldest date on a photograph of a U.S. President.

Do you even have a rough idea of when the earliest photographs were taken? Clue: it was not during the Civil War. Do you know the date of the earliest photographic portrait of a human being? You can see this person at 0:55 in this video, which collects many photographic firsts. The man looks like someone you would find — I would find — attractive if he walked down the street today. And at 1:12, you'll see the earliest-born person that we have a photograph of. Try to guess the year she was born before you look.



ADDED: By coincidence, it's Louis Daguerre's birthday, and Google has a doodle for him today:

Durango costumery.

There was — as far as I could see — exactly one person in town wearing high heels:



Now, what book do you imagine this individual was reading?

Then there were these characters on roller skates:



Note the tail.

And yeah, I know: men in shorts. But this is beyond the normal men in shorts problem (which is, to refresh your recollection, that a grown man is making himself look like a boy). This is skating in hot pants. I have always had a sports exception to the "no shorts" rule. And this is the best costume for today.

Roller dancing babies — an ad, but what an ad.

(Via LGF.)