I spent some time this past week making some changes around the house, which involved moving pieces of old furniture which had not been attended to in a while. Those of you who have parents or grandparents from the post-war generation know that they never threw anything away, so I found spare jars of cold cream, receipts from long-defunct hardware stores and sundries long past their usefulness, and my discard pile grew quite large.
What I didn’t expect to find, while cleaning out a drawer, was a 1974 issue of Playgirl magazine. The idea for the magazine had sprung from the popularity of the Playboy franchise and Hugh Hefner’s hold on the men’s lifestyle movement, so it was the equivalent for women readers, with a less ritzy and raunchy vibe.
The magazine apparently had first published the year before, when I was still a high school student, and I didn’t know the publication existed until 1979. I know this because I bought my first issue out of a hotel vending machine while job training during the day and going to college at night, so this early issue was definitely not my copy. It certainly was not my father’s.
So how did it get into a drawer at home? A mystery to be unfolded.
Playing Shirley Holmes with no Dr. Watson, I looked through the issue and found several insightful and timely (for then) articles on travel, lifestyles, medicine and home, with the usual smattering of cigarette and stereo system ads. The funniest of these was for an introductory eight-track tape offer. Some of us of a certain age remember those ill-conceived ideas for changing record albums into something portable for the car or take-along player. I recall listening to a song on eight-track one time, which broke off abruptly because the player had to switch to the next tape reel inside. The results were hilarious and rather annoying when trying to appreciate a classic.
But I digress. I was surprised to find that, for a magazine supposedly aimed at the female desire for admirable nudity similar to what their opposite-gender counterparts were receiving monthly (courtesy of a pajama-clad entrepreneur), there were only a handful of full-frontal glimpses in the issue. Yes, there was a centerfold, and a photo essay, but the pages were mostly devoted to articles of interest to the modern woman of 1974.
So my deduction is that the issue somehow found its way into the mostly female office where my mother worked. She may have removed it from the common area or been lent it for some reason and kept it out of a sense of enforcing workplace decency, or took it home for an article and didn’t need to bring it back. Maybe the lender didn’t want to deal with feedback from the spouse. The only other possible cause was that it was brought home after an ill-conceived joke went wrong on somebody’s part. One thing I know for sure is she didn’t buy it.
So I unearthed a piece of magazine history, and I don’t want to get rid of it. The pages are a time capsule, looking back at when life was different. I’ll never know what articles were read in the privacy of our home, but I think I will read them all myself.
Then I can take in the photos.
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