Women smoking and playing poker somewhere in Connecticut. An actor doing a cartwheel on a Hollywood sidewalk. Five figures in checkered suits, lined up at the ticket window of Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island. In the 1950s, LIFE Magazine possessed that rare talent: unearthing, within the most ordinary scenes, what would ultimately define an era. Gordon Parks would take it to its peak. Here, Nina Leen and Allan Grant hunt for the mundane. To magnify it. Perhaps that is what makes these images so difficult to date: they seem to speak of yesterday, and yet they have lost none of their relevance today. This way of illustrating people’s daily lives, of immortalizing their era, continues to fuel the magazine’s legend to this day.