Everyone knows the story about the founding of Playboy Magazine in the early 1950s by Hugh Hefner, who in his 30s, was working for Esquire Magazine when he had an epiphany about the same time that Esquire refused to give him a token salary raise.
<<---Hugh M. Hefner turned 84 this past April
And everyone has an opinion about Mr. Hefner's personal life as it has been reported to us over the years, the content of the Playboy magazine as it has evolved over the past nearly 50 years, and the Meese Report that stepped in and dictated how it can be marketed.
Subscription and news rack sales of Playboy are reported to have diminished from about eight million at their highest to currently between two and three million, although I was unable to find the audited reports to confirm this.
Playboy announced this week that Mr. Hefner, who personally owns 69.5% of the company's voting stock, is proposing to buy all shares for $5.50 each that are in the hands of others. That's $122.5 million which is almost twice what the shares have been trading for on the open market.
I began my teen years reading Playboy. And other than looking at the pictures of the "girls next door," I read short stories by well-known authors. I learned about business from J. Paul Getty. I got an early appreciation of art and jazz and found out about exotic cars.
I was shown style, style in how to choose clothes and to dress, and I got cooking lessons from famous chef Thomas Mario, who also introduced me to the method of making fine cocktails.
Mr. Hefner wrote a long series titled The Playboy Philosophy. It was a carefully researched and intellectual piece that explored the sociology of human beings. I read that, too. And from it I learned things I hadn't known before and began to think about how I should live my adult life. Sometimes I agreed with Mr. Hefner, other times I didn't. Nevertheless, like a college classroom discussion, it helped me to understand who Bill Cherry was then and figure out who he would be later.
In 1986, about thirty years after Playboy's first issue hit the stands, Edwin Meese was the attorney general in the administration of Ronald Reagan. On orders from President Reagan, he and nine commissioners, including Christian activist, Dr. James Dobson, explored and tried to figure out what constituted pornography, and how it could be regulated without violating First Amendment rights.
A good deal of what it decided to stifle were not only the rights of Mr. Hefner and his magazine, but the rights of those who chose to read it and those who retailed it.
One of the new restrictions was that Playboy, and others with similar photographic content, had to wrap each of its magazines in a sealed wrapper, a wrapper that one could not see through if the cover displayed what the Messe commission defined as photographic pornography.
That wasn't enough for the 7-Eleven convenience stores, who had sold the magazine, unwrapped and easily available, on its store racks for thirty years. They decided that they wouldn't no longer carry the magazine. Other retailers interfered as well, some hiding the magazines behind the counter so customers would have to ask for them, others putting them on the highest shelf of the magazine rack so that only the tallest person could reach one.
And that's where we are today, even though hard core pornography now runs rampart and virtually unmonitored and unregulated on Internet web sites, in movie houses, and in places euphemistically called "gentlemen's clubs."
So a week ago, I decided to see how Playboy was being treated in Dallas. Here's the silliness of what I found.
At Barnes and Noble's largest Dallas store, the store across Northwest Highway from NorthPark Center, for most, the magazine cannot be reached without the use of a store employee with a ladder. In the photo, only about an inch or so is visible. That's it at the very top, left-hand corner.
However, across the store, a hardcover anthology of Playboy centerfolds is wrapped in
cellophane and displayed on a shelf that is chest high and with its cover facing the customer. Directly next to it, also facing outward, is a hardcover book titled XXX 30 Porn Star Portraits. It isn't wrapped in cellophane.
At Borders Bookstore on the corner of Royal and Preston, the magazine is wrapped but can easily be reached on the magazine rack. However, next to it is a similar magazine called Maxim. It is unwrapped.
Within fifty feet from the magazine rack at Borders, among the "coffee table books" in the section on photography, is a large book that "explores" photographing homosexuals. This book is extremely sexually graphic, including men with erections It's title is Man to Man - A History of Gay Photography. It isn't wrapped in cellophane and it is on a shelf that is waist high.
7-Eleven stores still don't carry Playboy.
Yet all around us, the world is being shown that the Meese Report and the actions taken by the government as a result, have not accomplished their mission.
What they have done is provide rules and regulations that, at least in the case of Mr. Hefner and Playboy, interfere with his freedom of speech, interfere with his company's rights to operate in a free market, and worse of all, require his company to follow restrictive rules that are not applied to others.
Those are the reasons that Playboy Enterprises stockholders have seen their investment shrink dramatically in recent years, a cost that surely none of those on the Meese Commission experienced since surely they had no financial interest in the enterprise.
What we do know for sure is that the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, a requirement that the public demanded before the Constitution could be ratified. The sole purpose of the Bill of Rights, in general, is to promise protection of each individual's dignity. In other words, that in the actions of the government, we will each be treated equally. What is applied to one, will be the same as what is applied to all others.
That obviously isn't happening here. It's time for Mr. Hefner, his shareholders, and those interested in selling and buying his magazine, to be allowed to regain their guaranteed freedom.
BILL CHERRY, REALTORS
DALLAS - PARK CITIES
Our 45th Year
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BILL CHERRY REALTORS
I began as a radio personality at 14, and I worked in radio, later TV, as an avocation for the next 50 years. And although I loved it, I never had the intestinal fortitude to depend on it for my livelihood. I have a strong need for stability.
BILL CHERRY, REALTORS
One of my friends there is Freddie Hernandez. He's going to be leaving at the end of the summer. He's going to go to the University of Texas in Austin to study computer engineering. He'll be a sophomore. I'm very proud of Freddie.
west of Galveston's most famous seafood restaurant, Gaido's.
BILL CHERRY, REALTORS