English
Naked as a Jaybird and loving it
A true milestone in fine art publishing. Excerpt from the book by Dian Hanson
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It started when Connie was only eight, in Chicago's chilly Lake Michigan.
I'd swim out beyond where I should in the lake and struggle out of my swim suit and swim around nude, and then struggle back into my suit and swim to shore. Sure it was cold, but it felt so good," she says.
The feeling only got better with age. "When I was at summer camp, age about 14, and we were supposed to be sleeping decently, I convinced another girl to go to the lake with me and keep watch and I swam around in the lake naked until I was tired out, then I threw my robe on and went up to bed. It was the only way I could sleep."
Connie never dared share her peculiar urges with her first husband, this being the American Midwest of the '50s, but her second husband, she says, "was a weirdo too." We decided to devote the rest of our lives to fun, and who cared what society thought," she says, still giggling about it 40 years later.
They began by joining the Illinois nudist camp owned by Alois Knapp, a German Nacktkulturist and editor of Reverend Ilsley "Uncle Danny" Boone's Sunshine and Health magazine. Boone's original magazine, The Nudist, debuted in 1933, just about the time young Connie was learning to swim. It was a serious, philosophical magazine, much like the early German journals, but America was not Germany, and to keep his distribution Boone was forced to obscure the genitals in his photographs. A few years later he changed The Nudist's title to the less confrontational Sunshine and Health, but the airbrush stayed busy.
Boone was known as The Dictator in nudist circles. He loved to preach and he loved to fight-as long as he won. He confronted the courts over and over on the issue of censorship, demanding the right to display the naked human body-every dangling bit of it-in his magazine. In 1941 the government resurrected the Comstock Law, a Victorian law that prohibited sending obscene material through the mail, in an attempt to defeat him.
It only enraged him. Through the '40s and '50s "Uncle Danny" fought for pubic hair. On January 13th, 1958 he won. Nudist magazines were judged to be nonsexual, and therefore not obscene; they could travel through the mails and show what no other American magazines could: full frontal nudity. New magazines sprang up like violets after a spring rain.
Back in Chicago, Connie and her new husband were enjoying the honeymoon, spending weekends in an old milk truck at the camp and plotting their nude future. Hubby had become the camp photographer, with Knapp's encouragement. Connie had begun to write. In the evenings, in the truck, they dreamed their dreams.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
It started when Connie was only eight, in Chicago's chilly Lake Michigan.
I'd swim out beyond where I should in the lake and struggle out of my swim suit and swim around nude, and then struggle back into my suit and swim to shore. Sure it was cold, but it felt so good," she says.
The feeling only got better with age. "When I was at summer camp, age about 14, and we were supposed to be sleeping decently, I convinced another girl to go to the lake with me and keep watch and I swam around in the lake naked until I was tired out, then I threw my robe on and went up to bed. It was the only way I could sleep."
Connie never dared share her peculiar urges with her first husband, this being the American Midwest of the '50s, but her second husband, she says, "was a weirdo too." We decided to devote the rest of our lives to fun, and who cared what society thought," she says, still giggling about it 40 years later.
They began by joining the Illinois nudist camp owned by Alois Knapp, a German Nacktkulturist and editor of Reverend Ilsley "Uncle Danny" Boone's Sunshine and Health magazine. Boone's original magazine, The Nudist, debuted in 1933, just about the time young Connie was learning to swim. It was a serious, philosophical magazine, much like the early German journals, but America was not Germany, and to keep his distribution Boone was forced to obscure the genitals in his photographs. A few years later he changed The Nudist's title to the less confrontational Sunshine and Health, but the airbrush stayed busy.
Boone was known as The Dictator in nudist circles. He loved to preach and he loved to fight-as long as he won. He confronted the courts over and over on the issue of censorship, demanding the right to display the naked human body-every dangling bit of it-in his magazine. In 1941 the government resurrected the Comstock Law, a Victorian law that prohibited sending obscene material through the mail, in an attempt to defeat him.
It only enraged him. Through the '40s and '50s "Uncle Danny" fought for pubic hair. On January 13th, 1958 he won. Nudist magazines were judged to be nonsexual, and therefore not obscene; they could travel through the mails and show what no other American magazines could: full frontal nudity. New magazines sprang up like violets after a spring rain.
Back in Chicago, Connie and her new husband were enjoying the honeymoon, spending weekends in an old milk truck at the camp and plotting their nude future. Hubby had become the camp photographer, with Knapp's encouragement. Connie had begun to write. In the evenings, in the truck, they dreamed their dreams.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
