Scattered clouds threw dappled shadows on the Wisconsin River and the green bluffs beyond. It was mid-afternoon on an August Monday; I’d just arrived at the beach and was settling in for a late lunch when a young man on his way out stopped, tentatively, and asked if I hadn’t been in Madison trying to find a hotel room during the nasty thunderstorm on Saturday night. Indeed I had, and he had been the desk clerk with the bad news that there were no rooms to be had anywhere in the area–I’d ended up sleeping on a roll-away in a conference room in the Ramada Inn in Janesville, halfway back to Chicago.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Bummer. This was 1968 and I was the last of the crew cuts, wearing an upright if not rigid respectability that suppressed, most of the time, all manner of fearsome kinkiness, including the urge to go naked on the beach. Woodstock had not yet happened, and even when it did I was the sort who would publicly proclaim the wholesomeness of baring a thousand butts, but wouldn’t dare let mine be counted among them. In 90-degree weather, I marched on People’s Park in Berkeley wearing a suit, so as not to be mistaken for a street person. Over the next few years, however, the spirit of the times, assisted by the people’s pharmacopoeia, encouraged me to let more and more if not all hang out.
Not that I was obsessive about it. Though I had enough inhibitions that losing them could have become a full-time job, as it does for some people, there was real work to be done in the world. I was turned off by the notion of a nudist club or colony; playing pinochle in the nude in somebody’s rec room seemed, and seems still, a peculiar idea. (I realize that peculiarity is a relative value here.) On a few occasions, however, I made an effort to find a liberated beach. I tried and failed to reach what was touted as the nation’s first nude beach, at San Gregorio in California, which the newsmagazines were salivating over–each time I went, either the cliff face or the fog was too daunting. On an organizing trip in Texas, local journalists took us for a nighttime visit to Austin’s Hippie Hollow, a swimming hole at the bottom of a steeply ledged embankment. The reporters and a couple of dozen young people I took to be University of Texas students were whooping it up and having a good old time. But my traveling companions–our mission was to get journalists in Houston, Austin, and Dallas to launch local versions of the Chicago Journalism Review–were three heavy Marxist dudes from Berkeley and three revolutionary feminist women from New York. We kept our pants on.
There has been organized nakedness in Europe and the U.S. at least since the turn of the century, originally inspired by a lot of now sinister sounding Greco-Teutonic Nacktkultur and by medical practices including “heliotherapy” (sunshine and fresh air), used by Naturheilbewegung, the Natural Healing Movement, to treat a variety of diseases and wounds–sound enough given the medical technology of the time. It was a prominent Chicago naturopath, Dr. Arne L. Suominen, a friend of Mayor Anton Cermak, who first tried to establish an official nude beach on Lake Michigan in the early 1930s.
At the time, it had been less than 20 years since the law allowed men to go topless at the beach. Women’s bathing suits typically extended from an inch or so below the crotch to just below the clavicle.
Don Deakin, president of the Chicago Sun Club, has been putting up such signs on the beach near Mount Baldy in the Indiana Dunes for the past ten years or so, at least once each year on National Nude Weekend, the second weekend in July. For some years now the event has been drawing about 200 people, but then it’s over and the area reverts to its normal emptiness. Sometimes there are a few people in bathing suits. Sometimes there are one or two nudeniks. National Park Service rangers tend to let them be–there’s no federal law against nudity in the national parks, but don’t tell Jesse Helms–unless somebody complains, in which case, says chief ranger Richard Littlefield, “we ask the people either to put their clothes on or leave the area. . . . We’ve made a smattering of arrests for lewd behavior, probably less than a dozen last year. But that has to do with disorderly conduct or flashing, not nude sunbathing.”
