Teen detective Nancy Drew, of all people, led Peggy Wilkins to Playboy. It was July 1978 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and 13-year-old Peggy was a huge fan of the TV series. That summer the actress who played Nancy, Pamela Sue Martin, appeared on the cover of Playboy. Coyly holding a magnifying glass, she was wearing an artfully draped trench coat and clearly little else. Peggy had to have it. But how?
“Not gonna happen.”
Wilkins was 14 in January 1980, when she successfully bought a Playboy for the first time, and since then she’s bought every issue, new and old. She hid her magazines from her mother in boxes in the closet—and she hid her obsession from just about everyone else she knew too. “The first person I told was my high school boyfriend,” she says. “Of course I told him.” In 1983 she left Kalamazoo for the University of Chicago, where she took out a subscription. She’s been a subscriber ever since.
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When the Internet emerged, Wilkins used it to find other people who shared her interest in Playboy. She participated in conversations on alt.mag.playboy on Usenet and was one of the first ten subscribers to the Playboy Mailing List, started in 1994 at the University of Michigan. Now she moderates it.
But Wilkins’s fondness for Hef can’t overcome her distaste for the direction Playboy has taken in recent years. Her beloved centerfold, photographed on large-format film for decades, has changed to medium format and then digital photography over the past decade. Wilkins seethes when she looks at the first digital centerfold (March 2006, Monica Leigh). “Look at this!” she cries. “It’s grainy. Her skin tone is all off. It’s just a technically bad picture.”
The e-colloquium continued on the PML for months. When it finally settled down, Wilkins printed it all out, went over the reams of pages with a highlighter, and wrote index cards stressing the most important points. In 2004 she bound everything together and sent it off to Hef. “It was a very happy day of my life,” she laughs.
