Girls of the Atlantic Coast Conference

To borrow a hook from New Wave's Eurythmics, sweet dreams are made of this: sugar and spice, intimations of vice, sunny young women scented with pine on sticky Southern nights.

Close your eyes and start on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, where the wind chips at a Maryland coast line that was familiar to Colonial fishermen. This is old country. Echoes from the Revolutionary War rattle between the trees. Wander inland to College Park, then follow a southwesterly line through Virginia, North Carolina and the red hardpan of north Georgia to Atlanta. You'll be in the land of cigarettes and basketball. Every other hill hides a green field dedicated to the taste of fine tobacco. Tar Heels and Terrapins roam among the rows. Demon Deacons exorcise Blue Devils, and every so often--it happened one night last spring--a Wolfpack goes Cinderella and turns them all into pumpkins.

This is the home of the Atlantic Coast Conference. More important as far as about 70,000 A.C.C. boys are concerned, it's the home of the girls of the A.C.C. Yes, Virginia, the Girls of the Atlantic Coast Conference are finally here. Better tell the other states.

These girls are the cream of the current college crop, and they're pretty levelheaded. Clemson's Lisa Smith is a budding neurosurgeon. Lynell Lowren of Georgia Tech says that aerospace engineering is a blast. Cara Lee Macdonald of Virginia and Duke's Michele Nelson have already settled on law and med schools, respectively. Terry Lynn Richardson of Clemson gets a boot out of programming computers. Maryland's Kerry McClurg, on the other hand, aspires to be a Playmate. Thank heaven for old-fashioned girls. The girls are not at all level below the head, but that's about the end of it as far as similarities go.

Fun facts about the A.C.C.

• Clemson is the only school that ever won the N.C.A.A. football championship one year and went (text concluded on page 186)Girls of the A.C.C.(continued from page 132) on probation the next. In 1971, the thenhip Underground Guide to the College of Your Choice said the school's attitude toward a sexually active coed was "Let her get pregnant so we can stone her." Some Clemson coeds get stoned even today.

• Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson as an "academical village," should be referred to only as "Yoo-vee-ay."It's known as the school Edgar Allan Poe left and Ralph Sampson kept going back to.

• Georgia Tech offers courses in almost anything nuclear. It's the school that most loves the bomb.

• North Carolina State, last year's upset N.C.A.A,. basketball champ, had the first nuclear reactor ever used for educational purposes (the A.C.C. is big on the atom). Now it has two. It's situated in Raleigh, which is situated where it is because the North Carolina General Assembly mandated way back in the 18th Century that an "unalterable seat of government" be established less than ten miles from a joint known as Issac Hunter's Tavern. Even then, legislators knew their capacities.

• North Carolina offers a major in insurance for Tar Heels who want to make sure they get a premium education. The bells in Morehead-Patterson Tower weigh from 300 pounds to two tons. You might expect heavy metal from such heavy metal, but the bells peal boring tunes from dawn to dusk.

• For more than a century, Wake Forest was in Wake Forest, but then it was moved to Winston-Salem. Freshmen who show up at the school's old location can't see the Forest for the trees.

• For years, the Rossborough Inn, built in 1788, housed the University of Maryland's Agricultural Experiment Station. Recently, it was turned into a faculty club. So much for agricultural experiments.

• Of Duke, named for the former head of the American Tobacco Company, the Underground Guide said, "There aren't any hangs for the freaks, which do not exist." Sad to say, nonexistent freaks still have no hangs in which to hang out in Durham.

Selecting just 19 girls from eight such noteworthy schools was no piece of cupcake, even for Contributing Photographer David Chan, who puts together this College of Carnal Knowledge for us every year.

The girls he discovered were unabashed and beautiful. He charmed them with his Lilliputian size and his Cheshire-cat smile, the way he always does. Meanwhile, particularly in College Park, protectors of academic purity were busy getting up on their steeds of discontent. Maryland chancellor John Slaughter said that Playboy photographers wouldn't be seen on his campus "if I can help it." Some campus conservatives were equally crazed. Women's Center member Madge McQueen--probably a zoology major--charged that we portray women as only Bunnies, foxes and chicks. "It just exposes the fact that we're still vaginas in women's bodies," said McQueen. Student legislator John Rogers was no less eloquent, if questionable grammatically. "Women are rewarded for use of their body as an economic tool," he told the Maryland Diamondback., "Playboy promotes this. They just promote something like, 'Hey, wow, she's got a nice ass.'"

To which we'd have to own up. Hey, wow, she does. The fact that we appreciate her many other fine qualities doesn't, thank God, keep us from noticing that.

Like the old collegiate hand he is, Chan took an offcampus apartment and let the ladies come to him. The spoils of his toil, presented here, must be worth at least 19,000 words. (You'll get off lighter than that with this article, but keep it in mind.) Chan packed and left the A.C.C., still bewitched by the beauties and befuddled by the brouhaha.

"A woman is liberated, to me, when she decides to come see playboy or not to come see playboy," he says. "A girl going to college shouldn't be told what to do. She should decide for herself."

These encounters with various stripes of campus Polizei are good publicity for us, of course. "They help us rather than hinder us" is how Chan puts it. "And they bring me out into the limelight. Those demonstrations are for kindergarten. When we were shooting Shannon Hallowell of Clemson for the opening shot, three or four Bible people were there trying to convert her. They were telling me this and that, too, until she told them off."

In Valleyese, you'd call a girl like that a tubular belle, but we just marked her down as one of the girls of the A.C.C. We figure the Atlantic Coast schools, academic hotbeds all, can foster and develope the first half of Juvenal's very collegiate axiom Mens sana in corpore sano--"A sound mind in a sound body"--so we'll take care of rewarding the other half.

"I've wanted to be in Playboy since I was 14," Maryland's own Kerry McClurg told us. "My parents have always supported my dreams and are as excited by this as I am." For Kerry and the other girls, for us and for countless real and absentee guys of the A.C.C., sweet dreams are made of this.

"'A girl going to college shouldn't be told what to do. She should decide for herself.'"