Lake Rudolph

A monumental legacy carved in stone with bare hands and bare spirit

Author’s Note: This is the second installment in a series of occasional posts exploring the history of my 2x great grandfather, Rudolph Johnson, a notable figure in early 20th-century American nudism. Today marks what would have been his 140th birthday—or possibly his 138th; the records are somewhat ambiguous. These posts aim to weave together Rudolph’s legacy with my own journey into naturism, a path that has unfolded from my extensive research into his life and my efforts to preserve his story.

It’s my hope that these narratives might one day culminate in a book. For now, they remain a series of personal and true short stories available exclusively to our paid subscribers. Enjoy.

Prologue

Rudolph Johnson faced a defeat in the presidential elections held at the Sunbathers’ Convention in Denver, the summer of 1949. It was an upset for members and delegates who were rooting for an outsider, voting for change.

Living as he did on the other side of the country from the New Jersey-based American Sunbathing Association (ASA) and most of its founders and leaders, Rudolph Johnson was an outsider in more ways than one. It was a status he embraced in politics as in life. In fact, as a tattooed proprietor of a rural nudist camp in the deep woods of western Washington, it was an image he rather cultivated.

It was likely due to his outsider reputation that Rudolph was well-liked among nudists and had strong support for the presidency. His home nudist club, the Cobblestone Suntanners, and his regional organization, the Northwest ASA—which he co-founded in Washington three and two years prior, respectively—were both growing in influence in the national movement. Rudy’s good-natured affability and soft sense of humor must have been viewed as a nice change from the big egos that the political position tended to attract.

It was a particular moment in the ASA’s history in which a substantial faction of the organization’s members were demanding reforms. Many of the men had recently returned from fighting a great world war overseas that saw them championing democracy over the evils of autocracy and authoritarianism, and they wanted their national nudist organization to reflect those values. Currently, it wasn’t.

Over the last three years, nudists around the country began establishing their own regional offshoots of the ASA as a path toward better representation in the national movement and as a way to wrest some control from the national organization. Many members took issue with the organization’s central leadership. The corporation’s charismatic Executive Secretary and founder, Ilsley “Uncle Danny” Boone, managed the day-to-day and chaired the board and also ran the magazine Sunshine & Health. Boone kept tight control over the organization’s member rolls and finances. The reformists wanted to see Uncle Danny ousted, and one potential step toward this end, in their view, was the election of an outsider president.

But after the votes were cast at the annual convention held at the Mountain Air and Sunshine Club near Denver that summer, it became evident that Boone outmaneuvered Rudolph and his supporters through the strategic use of membership proxy votes, a move he’d pulled before. Boone and his daughter, Margaret Pulis, herself a former ASA President, had exercised their control over these proxies to secure the victory for their preferred incumbent candidate, Edith Church, the club leader from Ohio.

Nudist writer Earl Wright wrote of the vote in his newsletter The Black Horse:

Since 1938, and undoubtedly before that, there has been a very strong objection to the use of proxies for the ASA control of every situation. The Denver convention gave an outstanding example of this in the vote for the president, with and without the use of proxies as follows:

With Proxies
Edith Church - 337
Rudolph Johnson - 127

Without Proxies
Edith Church - 40
Rudolph Johnson - 50

Uncle Danny and Margaret Pulis carried 227 proxies of persons who were absolutely ignorant of what they were to be used for.¹

A motion was made by one member to declare the presidential election invalid, but it was tabled upon a motion by Uncle Danny and Edith Church’s election as president was upheld.

Thus, Rudolph lost the presidency despite being the more popular candidate. However, two concessions were tendered. Rudolph became a member of the ASA’s board of directors, and his home club, the Cobblestone Suntanners of Yelm, Washington, was chosen by convention delegates as the site for the next national gathering, to take place in one year, August 9th-13th, 1950.

Cobblestone’s conundrum

In only a few seasons, Rudolph Johnson had personally built up the rustic Cobblestone Suntanners club from wooded acreage into a rather impressive getaway camp using little more than his own two hands.