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The big 5-0

Look at you, Playboy magazine. Five decades later, you're an adorable anachronism in a world full of free porn. But we continue to read you, and not just for the articles. SIMON HOUPT uncovers a still-living legend

By SIMON HOUPT
Saturday, June 7, 2003 - Page R1

NEW YORK -- Veteran sailors say that an ocean is dead calm before a storm.

By that measure, forecasters in December, 1953, should have known a tornado was just over the horizon. Louis St. Laurent was only halfway through his nine-year term as prime minister, Queen Elizabeth II had just ascended to the throne, and construction on the St. Lawrence Seaway was beginning. Most cities in Canada and many in the United States were governed by conservative blue laws, which prevented any Sunday business from being conducted until church let out. Elvis Presley was still just a machinist in Memphis, Tenn. Topless bars, the Pill and mainstream feminism were years away.

And Barry Crown was studying mechanical engineering at Yale when a magazine unlike any other he'd seen landed on newsstands. "I remember the magazine coming out with a red Marilyn Monroe cover, and that hit the Yale campus like a gangbuster," he chuckled the other day from his home in south Florida. "Don't forget, at that time, anything other than the Sears Roebuck catalogue was pretty risqué."

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