For reasons that are of no real importance, yours truly earlier this week stumbled on a list of the interview subjects for each month of Playboys throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Take, for instance, the two months that bookended my birth month of November 1966:
• In October 1966, the interviewee was Mel Brooks. Pretty hip and happening fella.
• In December 1966, the interviewee was Sammy Davis Jr. Also hip for his era, although my own familiarity with him came 15 years later in the “Cannonball Run” films. (I loved you and Dino in them, Sammy, even if the critics did not!)
But for November 1966? The Playboy interviewee of my birth month was, wait for this: six-time socialist candidate for president Norman Thomas.
Norman Thomas? Norman Thomas??? That seems a tad bottom-of-the-barrel. What, was Gus Hall, the perennial communist candidate, unavailable?
That had to have been a pretty big snoozer of an interview. I’d have registered a complaint with Mr. Hefner himself if I’d been able to speak at the time, which of course I wasn’t.
As for the November 1966 centerfold, Lisa Baker, she would go on to be the tops for the year and assume the crown of Playmate of the Year 1967.
(Ms. Baker returned to the magazine’s pages in the December 1979 edition for a “Playmates Forever” pictorial, Wikipedia tells us. She’s still rockin’ today at 78 years young.)
Declining to clear it with the Sun Gazette legal-defense team first, I opted to use a photo (above) of Ms. Baker from back in 1966, rather than a photo of Norman Thomas from any year, even though it required me to strategically place a “censored!” circle on the photo.
Let me tell you, I gave a lot of thought to how big it needed to be to avoid trouble. (They are just nipples, people. We’ve all got’em, what’s the big deal?)
– Scott McCaffrey