Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has learned, Hugh Hefner has shuffled off his mortal coil and is now in that great Playboy Club Lounge in the great beyond.

Like boys (men now?) of a certain age, Hefner’s contribution to society, Playboy Magazine, had a part to play in your Maximum Leader’s formative years. He remembers the first Playboy he ever saw. It was the issue for May 1978. Here is a picture of the cover of the issue. He remembers finding it in the spare bedroom of a friends house. The friend’s uncle had been staying with them for a time, and had left the magazine out. My friend and yours truly took the magazine and spent an inordinate amount of time looking over it. Specifically looking at the three sections that contained the nudie pics. The Playmate of the Month was Kathryn Morrison. There was another photo group of some model. There was also a picture spread of a New York City swingers club and the orgies within. It was pretty exciting for excitable boys.

As it turns out, many decades later, your Maximum Leader was in a used bookstore and they had a room in towards the back of the store that was separated from the rest of the store by a black curtain above which was a handwritten sign reading “Over 21 only.” He entered the room expecting to see lots of smut and erotica. But instead the room was filled with neatly ordered rows of magazine racks holding pretty much every back issue of Playboy and Penthouse every published. Remembering the first Playboy he’d ever seen, your Maximum Leader went to find it. Sure enough it was there. He paid for it and the magazine now resides on a shelf in his gun safe.

(NB: It wasn’t until he’d purchased the magazine that he bothered to read the articles. One of which was the famous Anita Bryant interview.)

In later years, mostly in college and immediately thereafter, your Maximum Leader would pick up a Playboy when he’d heard there was an article that was worth reading. The titilation factor was also a consideration in buying the magazine, but he did read the articles.

As for Hefner himself, there isn’t much your Maximum Leader wants to say. He’ll let others speak to the nature of the man. Insofar as your Maximum Leader could tell, Hefner was a lifestyle unto himself. You can judge it as you like. Regardless of how you choose to judge him, Hefner did what he chose to as he chose to. Few people in this life do.

And now, since smut has been a theme of this post… One of your Maximum Leader’s favorite smutty songs…

Carry on.