I’ve got a copy of the John Lennon interview with Playboy. Even though my dad bought me this copy when I was in puberty, I don’t remember anything at all about the centerfold, since Lennon was assassinated a few days later.
I’ve always wanted a copy of the issue with the interview with Jimmy Carter. I looked on eBay once and it wasn’t cheap.
Playboy actually was a magazine you could read just for the articles. I’ll never forget citing it for a college paper.
Easily the “Playmate of the Year 1983” (Marianne Gravatte) issues.
I was on a Senior Trip to the Bay Area, and me and a few guys were walking down a street and I found a bundle of these. Probable a dozen or more. Wrapped in those strong tie-things. Well, I picked them up, took them back to the hotel (along with a ton of booze) and distributed them to all the guys in the class (weren’t that many of us), and kept a couple for myself.
Had the poster and everything.
I think I’ve still got one… (poster and issue)… might get me a few bucks on ebay.
There was that issue a few years back with the cover, centerfold, and feature article on Marge Simpson.
November 1976. My parents bought it for the Jimmy Carter interview. My brother and I stole it for Patti McGuire and Misty Rowe.
December 1998. The Dahm triplets and Katarina Witt.
September 1980. One of my summer jobs while in college was at WF Hall Printing, where they printed Playboys. Worked in the bindery stacking magazines and catalogs on pallets. The reason I remember that issue is because that was the first time a playmate was younger than my 19 yr old self! Up until then, they had all been “older women”!
And yeah, mbh, Patti McQuire was extremely memorable!
Any issue with a “Little Annie Fanny” in it. If the writing could only have been HALF as good as the art, it would have been the greatest comic strip ever. Ever page hand-painted.
Say what you like about the Hefner legacy, but he was GREAT for cartoonists.
Playboy 8/72 - had a pictorial from Boxcar Bertha. Rumors claimed David Carradine and Barbara Hershey weren’t acting. (They were living together in real life).
The pictorial is more explicit than the edited movie. IIRC a photographer was on set taking photos for Playboy. Those images are on Google and worth a look.
I always had a crush on Barbara from her appearances on TV in the 1960’s. I really had a crush after that pictorial.
Suzanne Summers old Playmate test shoot got published in 1980. Seeing Chrissy nude certainly made an impression. (She did a test shoot, but never followed up when Playboy wanted to shoot the centerfold).
Miss Feb 1986 Julie McCullough is one of my favorites. Her Playboy appearance lead to an acting career. She was on TV, Growing Pains for awhile.
I had a subscription for a while but only kept one: January '95.
Am I the only one who would like to see the age of the responder as it related to the issue of the magazine. 
I have to hand it to mbh… there’s a 22 year gap on his favorite issues. I’m sure my favorite issues would be in the late 70s, early 80s era. BTW, I graduated HS in 1980.
I’m glad I’m not the only one with that crush, then. You are a man of taste.
I liked the issues with the Sex in Cinema series. Lots of good pictures with interesting copy also.
I believe the Times obit said that Hef started as a cartoonist, which might explain it.
My fave issue is the one that had a picture of a roommate of mine, (We lived with 3 other people) who was a stripper and a University student, in a “girls of…” spread. When she was living in the apt. With us. It was a moment.
Just yesterday I thought of another Playboy cartoon from 50 years ago that I never forgot: A black singer-guitarist is in a TV studio and says “This is for all you muhfuggers in love…”
Yeah, he edited the humor magazine when he was an undergrad at the University of Illinois. His comics strips were god awful, but it was good to see him extending a helping hand (full of cash) to guys like Jack Cole and Harvey Kurtzman.
Similar story. In the fall of 1978 (my freshman year) PLAYBOY did their first college feature on the “Women of the Ivy League.” (Not “girls.” Woo.)
The one Yale chick in it lived in the suite next to ours in Farnam Hall; she needed the $400 for a full frontal because she’d lost a shitload of money playing backgammon.
I remember that she had very flat, lank hair, nothing like the Farrah locks that were popular at the time. We were impressed that the photographer was imaginative enough to shoot her coming out of the shower, soaking wet.
She got dissed by the other women on campus for doing it, but now that we’re all old enough to be grandparents, I bet she’s glad she did.
Wow, you’re just a baby. I’m HS class of 77. This occurred in the Spring 1980 Girls of some damned historic city/university etc. while I was beginning my “lost years.”
I loved the cartoon of the interior of a hippy crash pad, where everyone is lying around a Christmas tree, stoned. Santa has just come down the chimney and is standing there with bag in one hand and badge in the other. Caption reads: “Ho, ho, ho - you’re all busted!”
So there I was, a lowly grad student, photocopying out of the March '69 Playboy on the faculty photocopier, when in walked a tenured feminazi – someone who described her own son as a parasite when a fetus, and a parasite when an adult. She looked at what I was copying, and started screaming. A small crowd formed while I continued to photocopy. When the department chair came along, I explained that I was making copies for my class. That’s when the feminazi turned her ire on him.
What I failed to mention was that it was the Marshall McLuhan interview that I wanted to distribute to my class, not bunny pics. (I had had some academic interactions with McLuhan previously, and figured that a bit of McLuhan might make my writing class a bit more playful for my students.)
Fast forward a few months. I turned up in the feminazi’s fem lit course – the course in which only one male had ever registered, but dropped by the drop deadline. Well you can guess what happened. The ancient, battle-scarred prof took one look at me, started screaming at me again, and stormed out of the classroom to go harass the department chair about me.
The next week when that class was held again, the feminazi started the class by asking why I was there. I figured that this was a big improvement over uncontrolled screaming, so I told her that I was shopping about for a feminist thesis supervisor, and figured that taking her class would help me determine if we would be a good fit. Well, she went back to screaming for a few minutes, but at least she didn’t storm out again (although some of my classmates discretely left the room rather than listen to the ranting).
One thing led to another (including my being the first male to ever pass her course), eventually resulting over a year later with her declaring, “That is the best thesis I have ever supervised.” We learned a lot from each other, both about the subject matter of my thesis, and about each other and ourselves.
Although my favourite playmate pictorial is of Barbie Benton in March 1970 (which I came across when I was nine, and thought she looked like a really nice person – my not being old enough to realize what nudie pics were about), my favourite issue of Playboy is the March 1969 McLuhan issue, not because of McLuhan, but because of how that issue started an academic and person journey that left me immeasurably enriched.
I remember the April 1966 issue, the interview with George Lincoln Rockwell, American Nazi (interviewed by Alex Haley who went on to write Roots.
It was my dad’s copy, I grabbed it to look at the pics, but eventually got fascinated by the interview. And continued to read the interviews in the magazine for many years.
The September 1971 issue had a fold-out board game called “Feds And Heads,” created by underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton and featuring his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and their cohorts. To win, you needed to score 35 kilos of “grass.”
I remember tearing it out and playing it with my aunt and my grandmother (they loved board games), sometime around 1974, and the looks of horror on their faces.
