Playboy
June 1975
June, 1975, and the latest issue of Playboy is on the stands, featuring the stunning Marilyn Lange, Playmate of the Year, on the cover.
On Top 40 radio, 'Love Will Keep Us Together,' by the Captain and Tennille, sits at Number one. It's in good company with other 70s hits, such as 'Wildfire,' by Michael Murphy, and 'Love Won't Let Me Wait,' the ultimate Love Man groove song, courtesy of Major Harris.
Looking through the pages of the June Playboy, we have an advertisement for Coppertone suntan lotion, because in '75 everyone tanned.....skin cancer ?! What's that ?!
Also in '75, the most forward fashion involved wearing bib denim overalls from a Wisconsin company called OshKosh B'Gosh........ Bruce Williamson has a lengthy pictorial about 'Sex in Cinema: French Style.' Ooh, La-La ! Modern-day readers will be amused to know that seeing such films meant finding an 'adult' theater that showed XXX films. These theaters were scarce outside major cities. Thus, sadly, for many Playboy readers access to the naughty French cinema could only be glimpsed through these articles in Playboy (videocassettes were still some 5+ years into the future).
A great short story in this June issue: 'Never Beat A Full House,' by William Kuhns. I actually have Kuhns's 1973 novel, 'The Reunion,' in one of my boxes of paperbacks. I should dig out 'The Reunion' and read it !
Anyways, 'Full House' features an amazing illustration by Martin Hoffman.The story is about a hustler named Derek, who, while tooling along a highway in Kentucky in a new, white Lincoln Continental, encounters an unlikely pair: a pouting, supersexy 18 year-old named Nat, and her chaperone, a harassed-looking man named Lowell Perry.
Derek soon is scheming about ditching Lowell and enjoying the favors of Nat. Although, Lowell won't shut up about how Nat is not to be trusted, she's a very bad girl.....
Another short story in this issue is of a genre more familiar to Playboy readers: the misadventures of a middle-aged man, traumatized and adrift after a recent divorce. In Peter Lars Sandberg's 'Blue Dog on Angusport Hill,' our hero, Jack Burton Doyle, 43, hears a CB radio transmission that leaves him alarmed. But when he contacts the local police, they seem quite indifferent......
Playboy's 'On the Scene' profile of up-and-comers focuses on a director named Steven Spielberg, whose film Jaws is expected to do well in the Summer of '75 box office. Then there's an illustrator / cartoonist named Ralph Steadman, who is in tight with rising cultural legend Hunter S. Thompson.
As for our Playmate of the Year, young Marilyn, a Hawaii resident, is a very worthy selection. She insists she's a 'one man woman,' but then, her boyfriend is named 'Kip'............I sense a possible opening......?!
And that's what we had in Playboy, fifty years ago..........
