After serving in the Army as an infantry clerk and drawing cartoons for various Army newspapers, Hefner enrolled at the University of Illinois. He attended Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High School, where he founded a school paper. Hugh Marston Hefner was born in Chicago on Apto Glenn and Grace Hefner. “Playboy After Dark” aired 52 episodes from 1969-1970. In addition to the magazine, Hefner served as the host of two late-night variety shows, “Playboy’s Penthouse,” and then later “Playboy After Dark.” The former began in 1959 and ran for 44 episodes, and was the “first televised program to feature mixed groups of African American and white performers and audience members together,” according to a Playboy press release. While the magazine is most well-known for its centerfolds, Playboy also published articles addressing civil rights and reproductive rights, including interviews with Malcom X, Martin Luther King and George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Video: In this April 2004 “Chicago Stories” segment, John Callaway recaps the early days of Playboy magazine and revisits a 1978 interview with Christie Hefner, then vice president of corporate promotions and public relations for the company. By the 1970s, the magazine had more than 7 million readers and inspired imitations like Penthouse and Hustler. Within a year, circulation neared 200,000 and within five years, topped 1 million, according to the Associated Press. “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex,” Hefner wrote in Playboy’s first issue. The first issue sold more than 50,000 copies, which was enough to pay for publishing costs and finance another edition.Īs a men’s magazine, Playboy challenged 1950s conventions and attitudes. To finance the inaugural issue, Hefner got friends and family to invest in the venture, raising $8,000-including $600 of his own money borrowed from a bank using his apartment furniture as collateral, according to the Steinmetz Alumni Association website. The inaugural issue was created at Hefner’s kitchen table in Chicago and hit newsstands in December 1953 without a cover date because he was unsure if a second issue would be published. In 1953, Hugh Hefner launched Playboy magazine featuring nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe that were taken years earlier.
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