Hugh Hefner, RIP

It was a hell of a party. Most parties don't last for more than 60 years:

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner died Wednesday, Playboy Enterprises, Inc. announced. He was 91.

"Hugh M. Hefner, the American icon who in 1953 introduced the world to Playboy magazine and built the company into one of the most recognizable American global brands in history, peacefully passed away today from natural causes at his home, The Playboy Mansion, surrounded by loved ones," Playboy Enterprises, Inc. said in a statement Wednesday night.

It wasn't just Playboy magazine, which started way back in 1953 with a nekkid Marilyn Monroe. He had Playboy Clubs all over the country and had television shows like Playboy After Dark, which featured memorable music performances, too -- here's Deep Purple:

Back in 1984, I had a summer job working as a shipping clerk for a small ink company. The company shared space in a large American Can facility in Neenah, Wisconsin. Another company operating out of the facility printed the centerfolds for Playboy, so for that summer I got to see the centerfolds a few months before they appeared on the newsstands. At the time, it seemed like a real cool deal. Here's a picture of Miss August (don't worry, it's safe for work) that year, a woman named Suzi Schott:

There was more to the picture

Those big blue eyes were staring at me the whole summer. Hundreds of beautiful women posed for Hugh Hefner's cameras. The joke, as always, was that people would get Playboy for the articles. That wasn't completely false, because there were often interesting features in the magazine -- Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Shel Silverstein, even Roald Dahl graced its pages. And reading the Playboy Interview of various members of the Sandinistas was revelatory -- that inteview, meant to be sympathetic, made it clear to me that evil was afoot. But it was mostly about pictures of nekkid women.

It's been nearly 20 years since I've looked at a copy of Playboy; you have to grow up eventually and girlie magazines don't help you get there. We can debate the larger meaning of Hefner's career, and the glittering wreckage he left in his wake. But I'll always remember those big blue eyes and that come hither stare.