Pamela Ann Gordon's centrefold from March 1962
Shortly following on from hitting 1 million visits we now have reached, today, the milestone of having 100 followers. So thank you to you all; your existence means that we do try to keep up the regular posting.
What better way to celebrate the 100th follower than examining the 100th Playboy Playmate who, if our calculations are correct, was Pamela Ann Gordon from March 1962.
Pamela was the first Canadian Playmate and came from Vancouver where, as Triple P well knows, they have more than their fair share of attractive women.
Time for a cocktail or two in Vancouver. In the background can be seen the Bayshore Inn (now the Westin Bayshore). A view very similar to the one from our particular friend S's apartment in Coal Harbour
At the time of her pictorial she was working as a receptionist at a Vancouver construction firm but the nineteen year old Pamela was planning to go to the University of British Columbia.
Petite at 5'1", she measured a rather awe inspiring 39-23-35.
A lot of freckles on this one
The really unique thing about her was, of course, her amazing freckles. Now in her centrefold they aren't that apparent but in some of the pictures of her, before retouching, it can be seen that she has a huge amount of them. This was from the days when people didn't use suntan lotion, of course.
In fact there was limited retouching on Playmate centrefolds. That is not to say that they weren't manipulated, they were, but this was done at the printing stage when the engraving was being made.
A rare early sixties pubic shot. It didn't appear in the magazine, of course
Playboy centrefolds were printed seperately from the rest of the magazine by Regensteiner Printing in Chicago. Theodore Regensteiner, of course, invented the four colour lithographic process in 1894 using red, yellow, blue and, his addition, black, to develop the four colour process that is still in use to this day.
It was at the printers that the Playboy centrefold pictures, taken on the 8x10 Deardorff, would be turned into a lithographic engraving. Any adjustments to the image were made at this stage.
Playboy had strict guidelines and liked to push the reds and restrict the blacks in their centrefolds and remove natural skin tone. It was quite deliberate that the centrefold image didn't look too realistic as they wanted to avoid a too sexy image.
In an interview in 1970 Art Johnson, the supervisor of the process at Regensteiner said that "Depending on the word from Hefner, freckles either stay or come off. Or we can leave some freckles on and take others off."
In Pamela's case they have dialled back on her freckles, particularly in the centrefold as these other non-published, non manipulated images show.
Pamela the Bunny Girl
Pamela went on to work as a Bunny in the Chicago club and lived at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago.
She appeared in two Playboy calendars in 1963 and 1964.
Pamela also featured in this advertisement for the magazine but then disappeared from the Playboy radar.
In Capilano Gardens
Here she is in the other photographs from her actual magazine pictorial; putting her blouses under some serious strain.
Her centrefold and the nude shots were taken by Mario Casilli. The clothed ones from her pictorial were by Vancouver photographer Ken Honey. He became one of Playboy's top scouts; Pamela was his first discovery.
So we hope our followers think that Miss Gordon is an appropriate offering for today's milestone!
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