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Almost worked for "Heff" - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 10/31/2011 2:00 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
It was 1974; I had just graduated from high school; the economy was abysmal; the Nixon Administration was collapsing under "Watergate"; Dad was greatly considering winding down our dairy farm; I already had a part-time job at the then Super America gas station in Whitewater. The environment was ripe for me to cut off on my own.
I saw a blurb advertising for a job to work at the Playboy Club golf course over in Lake Geneva. As I think back on the person I was in those days, the connection with that young man 38 years ago is fading. I have to work a bit harder now to conjure up the memory of what made me tick back then.
I am not in the least ashamed of that 18 year old kid that made that humble attempt to work for Hugh Hefner. Of course at the time, I made the connection between farm work and golf course work. Poetically, only eight years later, the City of Dallas, Texas, Parks Department would see the perfect logic in my summation that the two occupations are bound at the hip in the world of Agriculture / Horticulture.
But in that early summer of 1974, I cut out the job ad, and on the advice of my mom I called to have an application sent to the house. They set up an interview as well - it seemed easier in those days to get past "The Gatekeepers" for job interviews. A few days later, filled-out application in tow, I loaded myself up in my '66 Fairlane, made sure I had on a clean shirt and pants, put an ink pen and pencil in my pocket and headed for the land of..., the "Bunnies."
I don't remember feeling nervous at all. I was comfortable with who I was. I had just graduated from high school, our football team had won two conference championships in row. I had made all-conference defensive end. I had my health, I was young. In regards to golf course landscape maintenance, I had just worked six years on a vibrant dairy farm. There was not much about equipment, crops, and green plants I had not seen or heard..., at least in my mind. I had that swagger of immortality that comes with young adulthood.
At the golf course, I remember how amiable and friendly everyone was. The thing that struck me immediately was being interviewed by a woman of about 29 years old. The farm world, although replete with female contributions, usually was a patriarchal society - men had the ultimate last say. I had assumed my interviewer would most certainly be no one else but..., a guy.
She was a nice woman; and, she seemed to anguish over hiring me. In other words, she did not write me off and just go through the motions - an exercise I have come to expect after 40 years of various interviews. Ultimately, she did not make the connection that farm work was basically a segue into horticulture maintenance. She apologized, and declined to hire me because I had no previous golf course experience. Had I a couple of months of doing landscape maintenance work somewhere, or perhaps even been on the high school golf team, I am sure I would have found myself working for the Hefner empire.
That Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, was sold off in 1982-ish to another resort consortium - the place is still there, and alive and well in its current presentation. I think Playboy built the place around the mid-1960s. There were several Playboy resort clubs at one time. There are still a few left out there as we speak.
Maybe nothing would have come out of working for Playboy. But, it was one of those moments in life when the time-line could have perhaps slide a different direction. Poetically, decades later I would find myself with a substantial landscape maintenance resume. And as fate would have it, even more decades later I would have academic credentials in journalism - journalism being a capstone of the Playboy empire's beginnings with their magazine. Finally, just six years after the interview, I ended up working in Lake Geneva at a bar-tavern-discotheque-bowling complex. Connections; yet, near misses.
Remnants of the Bunny culture permeate Lake Geneva culture to this day. The Sugar Shack (gentlemen's / strip club) is run by the famous former Playboy Bunny Dana Montana. Many people of the region still have memories of the many shows the Playboy Cub put on. Heide has often mentioned she saw comedian David Brenner perform a comedy show there. The ski hill that the original club constructed is still a destination. Back in the day, I used to watch Heide's brother run the difficult slope (Hotdog Mountain) while I sat in the lounge looking out the big picture windows to the slopes and was served hot chocolate by a scantily clad..., Bunny. And finally, Heide has a second cousin who was a Bunny Mother - one who mentor's to the Bunnies.
"What-could-have-been" refections are often painful, but in this case, my foray's with Lake Geneva and the memories of all the brushes with what might have been, none-the-less, have always been pleasant.
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
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