Girls of the Southwest Conference

Where do pretty girls come from? It's the kind of question that sparks the spirit of adventure in us. Surely someone must once have said to himself, "I wonder where the headwaters of the Amazon are," and then gone out and found them. Darwin must have had such a question in mind when he set about tracing the roots of life on this planet. The search for the origin of life, we grant you, was interesting; but a search for the source of beauty--now, there's a challenge. One that we at Playboy, as true scientists, could not ignore. After nearly six months of intensive research, we can report that we think we've found it--the source. The mother lode. The sine qua non of American beauty may just be the Southwest Conference. Beautiful women are there in quantity, gliding across the sun-baked campuses of the Bible Belt. They are healthy, vibrant and unmistakably feminine. These are the kind of girls that make all too brief appearances in our dreams. The ones who are just out of reach, just as we wake up. The only difference is that they are here, in the Southwest, in the flesh. The proof of all this became apparent the first time we wandered onto a S.W. Conference campus. We saw girls there who knew how to wear (text continued on page 159) Southwest Conference (continued from page 143) jeans. Nowhere else in the world do girls wear jeans the way they do in the American Southwest. Not your big-city Vanderbilts, mind you. These are Lees, Levis and Wranglers cut to quarter sizes. Our cultural analysts have told us that the wearing of well-fitted jeans bodes well for any society. We do not quarrel with the cultural analysts. Of course, any sort of scientific inquiry has its ups and downs. Amazon explorers ran into piranha. Darwin's theories led to the Scopes trial. Our explorers, the Playboy photographers, had Abner McCall.

Abner McCall is the president of Baylor University, a strict private, Southern Baptist institution in Waco, Texas. We said strict. No drinking, no dancing, no messing around. We knew we were in trouble when we heard that the annual swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated was banned in the student bookstore. If S.I.'s annual coffer-enrichment issue couldn't make the grade, what chance would Playboy have? The answer, from McCall, was an unqualified none. Any girl, he said, who posed in the nude for Playboy and was identified as a Baylor student, would be disciplined. The discipline he had in mind was not spelled out, but expulsion was a good bet.

For those who don't know, Waco sits in the center of a triangle formed by Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin. In the center of Waco sits Baylor U, under what has come to be known as the Baylor Bubble. No matter what else is going on in the surrounding community, peace and serenity prevail under the Baylor Bubble. It's sort of a twilight zone where parents can send their sons and daughters to get an education without actually sending them out into the world. It is well guarded by Waco police, campus police, fundamental religious tenets and McCall, a former judge and FBI agent--and the whip hand of Baylor's very conservative administration.

The first target was the advertisement Playboy photographer David Chan wanted to place in the school paper, The Baylor Lariat. It was a simple announcement stating that Chan was on his way to photograph the best of the Baylor women. It gave his phone number and the motel where he would be headquartered. The ad was rejected. Chan has experienced such rejection before. The editorial board of The Harvard Crimson refused his ad, disapproving of Playboy's "exploitative tactics" and launching a feminist outcry; and, earlier this year, the SMU paper also opted out. Chan was undaunted. There were other papers. He would simply take his business elsewhere.

By that time, however, the Playboy story was big news on the Baylor campus. The staff of the Lariat, in the best journalistic tradition, decided to cover the news. The paper's masthead reads, "The Baylor Lariat is a student publication of the Journalism Department serving the Baylor community. Editorials reflect the opinions of the authors and not necessarily of the student body or the administration. The Lariat is also a laboratory newspaper for students enrolled in various journalism courses."

True to its policy, the Lariat printed two signed editorials under the headline "Playboy? to pose ... or not to pose." The first, signed by staffers Jeff Barton, Barry Kolar and Carla Wood, was, if not pro-Playboy, at least pro--freedom of choice. "Choice still rests with the individual," the editorial read. "If that individual is mature enough to understand her own needs, her own inhibitions, her own qualms and her own mischievousness, then show us the harm in her posing."

The second editorial, signed by student Jimmy Puckett, Jr., took Playboy to task. "After spending time drooling over a magazine like Playboy, a guy finds it rather difficult to look at a woman as a human being with a mind and a heart and personality of her own. Instead, a guy can't help but look at her as no more than a sexual object that he can use to satisfy his Playboy-inspired fantasies." It was clear that the Lariat's expression of opinion was balanced. But not balanced enough for McCall. The word went out to the Lariat editors that Playboy was not to be mentioned further in its pages. The Lariat, McCall ordered, should concern itself with other matters. Suggested topics: the length of ticket lines and the controversy over library hours.

The issue in which the editorials were published also contained reports on Canadian elections, Carter's draft proposals, the Iranian situation, Baylor's homecoming celebration and a seminar on Christian life. The Sports Illustrated controversy got front-page treatment.

Now, understand, big news in Waco is when somebody gets a tough T-bone at Pelican's Restaurant. Playboy's visit to this quiet Texas town rated in the high-news category of "man bites dog."

Would Lois Lane ignore that story? Would Brenda Starr? Would Peter Parker fail to get pictures? It was obvious to every student who had ever taken a high school history course that the issue at hand was First Amendment rights. Censorship had come to Waco, Texas.

It was high noon. The Lariat editors stood, hands poised above their typewriters, squinting in the sun. At the other end stood McCall, one hand on the Bible, the other on the university ledger.

The students fired first. It was a broadside. The staff signed an editorial, which stated: "We have been handed down guidelines concerning just what type of hard news we can cover. The administration--through President McCall--has decided certain topics are off limits. That's not something we can live with."

McCall dodged the broadside and fired swift and sure. The editors of the Lariat were no longer editors. Barton, editor in chief, Kolar, city editor, and Cyndy Slovak, news editor, were all told to quit or be fired. Lariat editors are paid employees of the university, but they are appointed by the school's publications board. Before the board acted, McCall dispatched campus police to the Lariat offices; they threatened to remove bodily any student who resisted the edict. (There is, after all, some journalistic tradition being kept intact here. In 1905, the radical editor of the Waco Iconoclast was shot by local Baptists.)

Campus reaction to the firings was mixed. The majority of students reacted to the ouster with overwhelming apathy, but there were at least three demonstrations of support attracting at one point nearly 300 students. On the sidewalk leading to Castellaw Communications Center, home of the Lariat, someone had scrawled editors: some of us care.

Not enough cared, however. Most felt that McCall as head of the university and de facto publisher of the Lariat was well within his rights to determine what was news and what wasn't. The Baylor Bubble was not to be broken. It was at that inopportune time that photographer Chan hit town. All 120 pounds of him. Chan, the professional, wanted nothing to do with the controversy. He wanted to shoot pictures of beautiful women. Unfortunately for him, he was the controversy. He and his assistant, Sherral Snow, found themselves the toast of Waco. Playboy News Consultant Dan Sheridan flew in to handle the media barrage that was soon literally dropping out of the sky, in helicopters. (concluded on page 214) Southwest Conference (continued from page 159) All of a sudden, Waco was the news capital of Texas.

Before Chan had even opened for business, Sheridan got a call in his motel room early one morning. The voice told him to be out of town by six o'clock. Sheridan didn't know if the caller meant A.M. or P.M., or even if he was serious; so he contacted Waco police. Sheridan is not an excitable guy, but how much help can you expect from a 120-pound photographer and his luscious red-haired assistant?

Off-duty Waco police officers, hired for security purposes, were more than cooperative. If the truth were told, the job of guarding the Playboy photographer was considered something of a plum. Chan's first bodyguard actually gave up a day off to serve and protect. Indeed, the dedication of all the officers was exemplary. They should be commended.

During his stay, Chan interviewed some 80 coeds from Baylor. A pretty fair number, considering McCall's threats. But McCall and his patrons were not to be denied their pound of flesh. It wasn't enough to simply fire the Lariat editors and shut down the paper. The entire journalism department was affected. Students and professors took sides. Associate professor of journalism Donald Williams quit in disgust. He was told to leave Baylor without finishing the term. Associate professor Dennis Hale, citing First Amendment violations and the treatment of Williams, also left the journalism school. Faculty advisor Ralph T. Strother backed the administration against his editors. He'll probably remain. Then, in the coup de grâce, president McCall revoked the scholarships of the two junior editors, Barton and Slovak, as well as that of the president of Baylor's chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalism society, Sheri Sellmeyer. Kolar escaped retribution by being a senior.

In their last editorial, the editors and staff of the Lariat had called president McCall's administration "smug" and "arrogant." Those words, predictably enough, were censored by advisor Strother, acting on behalf of the administration.

The Baylor controversy may have begun with Playboy, but it ended with the Bill of Rights. We were aware of a certain ambivalence toward Playboy, but until we ran into Abner McCall, we thought the U. S. Constitution was pretty much agreed upon by everybody.

McCall, in the end, missed the whole point. The Playboy controversy, he said, "was kind of like a wart on my toe. It's just a cheap, pornographic magazine. Among our constituents they've got as much influence as Mao's little red book." It was unfortunate company, but we'll work with the analogy. Clearly, the administration is ready to quash dissenting political views along with social commentary. The fact is, when somebody starts censoring, there's no telling where he'll stop. The integrity of The Baylor Lariat will hereafter be in question.

One has to wonder at the administration's purpose. The firing of the Lariat staffers and the revocation of scholarships were both petty and vindictive moves. It's unfortunate that the administration felt it had to flex its considerable muscle against the very students it purports to have educated in the journalistic professions. The question arises: Were they educated too well or not well enough? No matter. The Baylorites affected were first-rate students and journalists. They will survive. The university has told the editors that if they return to Baylor, they will not be welcome. So McCall has, in effect, solved his problem. Peace and serenity once again prevail inside the Baylor Bubble.

Fortunately, the problems at Baylor were not typical of the reception we got at other conference schools. There, hundreds of women turned out. Far more than we could ever use in one pictorial. The Texas schools, in particular, impressed our editors so much that a Girls of Texas pictorial is in the works.

Until then, you can feast your eyes on the current offerings. When we said we'd found the mother lode, we weren't kidding. Next time you're in the area, why not do a little prospecting yourself?

When president McCall of Baylor restricted his coeds' posing, the controversy received national attention.

Baylor women got a new look in the cartoon above from the Austin American-Statesman. Ben Sargent was the couturier.

Michael Fry of The Baylor Lariat took a humorous shot at Baylor's Baptist underpinnings in his drawing above.

The Southern Methodist University newspaper rejected Playboy's ad, but students turned out in droves anyway. One possible result of our foray into the Southwest Conference was suggested by Etta Hulme of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

"The word went out to the 'Lariat' editors: Playboy was not to be mentioned further in its pages."

"Sheridan got a call early one morning. The voice told him to be out of town by six o'clock."