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Doug Clark: Playboy was an important part of my young life
Johnny Carson’s last “Tonight Show,” for example. The death of Michael Jackson. And another bombshell rocked the Kasbah on Monday with the following news:
Playboy magazine will no longer publish nude photos.
What? This couldn’t be more shocking, especially to aging male members of my baby boomer generation.
With its centerfold and bawdy cartoons, Playboy provided titillation both real and imagined for a curious legion of adolescent lads.
Hugh Hefner claimed he created the magazine as a reaction against the repressive values of the 1950s and blah, blah, blah.
Teens of my era didn’t know anything about such sociological mumbo jumbo. The juvenile whisper campaign was focused on only one thing.
KID 1 – “Hey, you seen Playboy?”
KID 2 – “Yeah. They got pictures of naked women in there.”
KID 3 – “I’ll never look at National Geographic again.”
But Playboy without nudity?
That’s McDonald’s without the Big Mac.
In a New York Times story, Playboy CEO Scott Flanders blamed the Internet for the magazine’s circulation plummeting from 5.6 million to about 12 guys in raincoats who can’t afford a computer.
“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” he said. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
The Internet. I knew it.
Damn you, Al Gore.
My first Playboy experience literally knocked the wind out of me.
It happened one day during my freshman year of high school. I showed up wearing a yellow sweatshirt that bore a black frontal imprint of the famous Playboy bunny.
Was I too cool for school, or what?
What I failed to consider was that to some tightly wrapped adults, the Playboy rabbit represented evil incarnate.
At least it did to this large, chiseled vice principal who looked like a model in an Army recruiting poster.
Just as I walked by he grabbed me by the bunny, which sounds a lot funnier than it actually was.
He tossed me into a locker, where I made this odd deflating sound once common to a Patriots equipment room.
“Whoomph!!”
Things were a little foggy after that. But I remember Sgt. Chaos getting in my face and describing in detail some horrific things he would do to me if he ever again caught me wearing the Mark of the Beast.
If this had happened today I would have A) hired attorney Mary Schultz and B) wound up owning the school district.
Back in those days, however, locker-slamming a student was considered sound educational practice.
Needless to say it made an impression on me, both real and imagined.
My second experience with Playboy occurred when my older brother, Dave, went off to college.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune when he left his meager Playboy collection behind, under his bed.
In fact …
On Tuesday, it dawned on me that some of those very magazines might still be gathering dust in my old homestead on the lower South Hill.
I went over to look and, sure enough, there they were on a shelf in a basement closet.
“Why, helloooo, ladies.”
At second glance, nothing looks quite as outdated and silly as a half-century-old Playboy.
“Allan Sherman discusses sex and the single Sherman,” declared one of the teaser headlines on the cover of the July 1965 Playboy.
Allan Sherman?
Oh, yeah. “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh. Here I am at Camp Granada …”
That was a big AM radio hit back in the Stone Age.
I unfolded the Centerfold.
Miss July Gay Collier, 22, stared back at me wearing a blue sweater that would have earned her an F in buttoning class.
“Our artful July miss spends her few dateless nights decorating her new Burbank bachelorette pad in a Spanish Baroque motif …” gushed the writer.
Well, la-di-dah.
Then, while absorbing the text, my inner computer did some extremely depressing math.
Let’s see. She’s 22 in 1965 and …
My Gawd. Miss July would be a 72-year-old senior citizen.
Hope she’s learned to button her sweater by now.
Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or dougc@spokesman.com.