I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a fan of the pictures in Playboy. However, there is this:

In the summer of 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner disappeared in Mississippi. And they couldn’t be found. The assumption (true) was that they were dead. Comedian Dick Gregory got an idea:

I told Farmer, “Jim I’ve got the wildest idea.” He said, ” What?” I said, “You know, the only way we’re gonna get it out is with large sums of money. If you’ll put up $100,000, we’ll break this case in one week.”

The comedian wasn’t able to get the full $100,000 but he was able to get $25,000 thanks to a phone call to Hugh Hefner. “Hefner understood what those rednecks didn’t: that things had changed,” he told British GQ in 2011. That you could no longer argue that you’d ‘killed three Jews’. Or ‘killed three blacks’. What you’d done was, you’d killed three fellow human beings.”

stillcrew.com

And yes, this helped to break the case wide open. After 44 days, the bodies of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were found. If you read the article, you’ll find that the FBI was worse than no help at all, and there were lots of rumors going around that the three had run off to Cuba or worse. Finding the bodies allowed the reality of what happened to sink in.

So thank you and Rest In Power, Hugh Hefner.