Who Needs Hemingway?
Who needs it — when you’ve got Miss April
For those of us who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, life was simple, carefree, and unpretentious.
At least that’s how it was in my solidly middle-class family. My parents were meat-and-potatoes suburbanites who preferred baseball to ballet and sitcoms to symphonies. No one would ever have mistaken them for connoisseurs of fine art, music, or literature.
Inside our small, ranch-style home were a few framed prints, some Dr. Seuss books, and a set of encyclopedias. (Remember those?) In the living room, Dad had one of those enormous stereo consoles on which he played his Big Band records. For us, that was about it in terms of the arts.
No, my parents didn’t take us to museums or concerts. In fact, we hardly went to the public library. (Except for me, no one in the family was much of a reader, so comic books, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and MAD magazine were typically what I consumed.)
Growing up, I wasn’t exposed to the trappings of high society. In our home, there was no mention of Van Gogh, Beethoven, or Hemingway. But our humble residence was not devoid of culture. In fact, we had something most others didn’t.
We had Playboy! And who needs Hemingway when you’ve got Miss April?
For as long as I remember, Dad had a subscription to Playboy. And there it sat . . . on the coffee table in plain sight. And why not? To my dad, an ex-Navy man, it was no big deal. Even mom didn’t seem to care.
Today, this might seem alarming — to some, even repulsive — but in the 1960s, concepts such as the objectification of women and the male gaze were decades away.
As a young boy, I read very little of the magazine. (That would come later when I devoured almost every word from front to back.) But it goes without saying that my wide eyes perused those delightful glossy photos the way an excited archeologist might examine newly discovered hieroglyphics.
Playboy became a good friend and, at times, even a traveling companion. For instance, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, I had a sleep-over at a classmate’s house. Naturally, I wanted to share Miss April with my host, so I tucked her away into my tiny suitcase.
The following day, my older brother met me, for it was his obligation to make sure I got home safely. But as we headed home, my suitcase fell open, and out poured the magazine. My brother, being a responsible older sibling — in truth, he was being a snitch — couldn’t wait to run home and tell Mom. Immediately, she called my classmate’s mother and apologized for my indiscretion. My friend’s mother laughed.
As I said, people weren’t so uptight in those days.
Of course, any kid with two eyes and a Y chromosome got excited to hear about the treasure at our house. Playboy was serious booty. (Pun intended.) I can imagine the boys in our neighborhood exclaiming to their pals: “The Trevors have Playboy magazines!”
Yep, we had Playboy — and lots of them. My dad maintained a subscription for many years, and he kept all the old issues stacked up in the basement. Naturally, our house, particularly the basement, became a favorite destination for friends and kids in the neighborhood. Had I been smarter, I would have charged admission.
However, it wasn’t just kids who appreciated Playboy. Whenever my grandfather came to babysit my brother and me, he would light his pipe and settle down on the couch with the latest issue.
For nearly three decades, all the old Playboys sat there in our basement. (Well, admittedly, a few were stashed under my mattress.) Some were more than 25 years old and might have been valuable. But the musty basement atmosphere and the excessive “handling” they endured over the years degraded their condition. Oh well. To me, their value lay in the enjoyment and the education I had gleaned from my continual studies.
As the years passed and my interests expanded, I explored the magazine from cover to cover. I perused the interviews, comics (like Little Annie Fannie), movie reviews, and short fiction. But my favorite column was The Playboy Advisor, from which I gained a plethora of fascinating information that I could use years later — when the women I encountered weren’t just air-brushed fantasies.
How did Playboy shape my life and mindset? Besides improving my reading skills, who can say? But one thing is certain: I’d still take Miss April over Hemingway any day.
Mark is a proud Boomer living in Raleigh, North Carolina. His memoir THE MISFIT CHRONICLES describes his misadventures growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s.
