One man’s Playboy: Encounters with Hefner through the years

LOSANGELES » It is time to confess something I did as a teen age mail handler in the late 1960s, when Playboy reigned supreme, its rabbit- head logo stamped on a voluptuary empire of publishing, television, restaurants and bunnies.

Each month, I would intercept a half- dozen copies of Playboy magazine at a busy Los Angeles post office, slip them out of their plain brown wrappers and set them aside. Postal workers with a free moment would pass the magazines across the desks and cancellation machines. Then they carefully tucked the issues back into their wrappers and sent them on to their rightful subscribers.

Occasionally, complaints cropped up in Playboy’s letters- to- the- editor column: Some prankster at the post office had put a postage- due stamp across the Playmate of the Month’s breasts.

Though tempted, I never did that — I had too much respect for the magazine. I had read Playboy since I was 13, thanks in large part to a crusty old newsstand operator who would willingly sell a copy to any kid who had the 75 cents to pay for it.

I knew about Hugh Hefner. Who didn’t? Depending on your perspective, Hefner — who died this week at age 91 — either launched the sexual revolution or set women’s rights back by half a century. Or both. But in the pages of Playboy, he seemed impossibly cool, with his pipe and silk pajamas and the apparent ability to attract all themost beautiful women in the world, first to his Chicago mansion and then to a spectacular castle in the tony Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles.

Even if generations retold the joke that they read Playboy for the articles, Hefner was serious about words. In the pages of Playboy, I discovered the works of writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury,