Playboy's Rearview

Over 66 years and 761 issues, we've covered plenty of ground. From marijuana policy to Mideast mediation to feminist porn, here are a handful of contributions worth a second look

1950s History unfolded in the March 1956 PLAYBOY with the three-page photo of nightie-clad Marian Stafford-the magazine's first literal Centerfold. Although Stafford captivates as a Playmate (below left), the talent behind the lens is equally notable: Ruth Sondak (left), who had been a World War II photojournalist. After the war Sondak became an agency photographer and later a freelancer, shooting portraits of such luminaries as Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt, among other assignments, across a decades-long career. Sondak's photos of antiwar protesters swarming the Pentagon in 1967 are perhaps her best known-excluding, of course, her pictorial of Stafford.