Bunnies of 1970

Just a decade ago, an ad seeking "the 30 most beautiful girls in Chicagoland" appeared in the Chicago Tribune. From the hundreds who answered the call, 30 were selected to become the world's first Playboy Bunnies. Since the opening of the Chicago Club in 1960, the Playboy empire has experienced its own population explosion, spreading eastward to London, westward to San Francisco, south to Jamaica and north to Montreal. Now there are 800 Bunnies staffing 17 metropolitan Playboy Clubs, two resort Club-Hotels and even a superluxurious DC-9-32 jet airplane, Hugh Hefner's Big Bunny. Late last year, in anticipation of its tenth-anniversary celebration, Playboy Clubs International inaugurated a Bunny Beauty Contest and selected a Bunny of (text concluded on page 172)Bunnies of 1970(continued from page 125) the year--Baltimore's lovely Gina Byrams. The difficulty of selecting one reigning beauty out of 800 boggles the mind, but Playboy, ever game, is preparing for another go-round. The finals for the next Bunny Beauty Contest are planned for November at the Playboy's finest--a selective sampling of the Year will be chosen. Balloting in individual Clubs began July first and will continue through Labor Day, with top vote getters in each Club being judged by local panels of experts. The 19 winners of these semifinal contests will appear in the November pageant at Lake Geneva.

You may have read statistics on the typical Playboy Bunny. She's five feet, five inches tall, weighs 116 pounds measures 34-24-34 and is just over 20 years old. Like all generalizations, that one's misleading. There is no assembly-line, standard-model cottontail. Playboy's Bunnies come in all shapes--as long as they're well proportioned--all sizes, colors and national origins.

Take blue-eyed blonde Inga Whealton, who packed her bags two years ago and left her home town of Tampa, Florida, for the lure of Manhattan. "I wanted to prove to myself that I have what it takes to make it on my own in the big city," she says. It took a while, working up through such jobs as salesgirl at Bloomingdale's; but now she's happily combining a career as a Bunny in the New York hutch with another as a fashion model.

En route North, Inga may well have crossed paths with Carol Vitale, who moved South from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to become a Bunny in Miami. But Cincinnati's Elisa Simone, Chicago's Carol Imhof and Lyn Love, London's Jeannie Dorman and Ella Garland are strictly stay-at-home girls. Mickey Hersch of Boston is a former schoolteacher; Cynthia Hall of Lake Geneva was a dental assistant; Jet Bunny Avis Miller, a bank loan officer; and New York's Ava Faulkner, a medical aide; but becoming a Bunny in St. Louis was the very first job for Barbie Crawford. Both Atlanta's Nicole Cisar and New York's Nikki Minick were Army brats; Miami's Joyce Bennett-Odlum is the daughter of a dairy farmer.

Several current Bunnies have also been featured as Playboy Playmates of the Month and others are being considered for gatefold appearances--for reasons that will appear obvious in the accompanying photographs. Readers will recognize Playmate-Bunny Jean Bell, the transplanted Texan who has been making a hit both in the Los Angeles Club and as a semiregular on CBS-TV's The Beverly Hillbillies, and Playmate-Bunny Helena Antonaccio, and Plaumate-Bunny Helena Antonaccio, who had just become a New York cottontail when she appeared in our June 1969 gatefold. And Jet Bunny Linda Donnelly may be seen in double exposure this month--on our cover and on page 129.

The next time you're in one of the Playboy Clubs or Club-Hotels, look around and see whom you'd choose as the winner of your own personal Bunny Beauty Contest. It might be one of the girls shown in this pulchritudinous pictorial. Then again, it might not; after all, there are 769 others, each just as eye-appealing. Since beauty is in the eye of the keyholder, visit the Clubs and judge for yourself. You could be a prize winner!