The first three years: A founding father’s account
By Kurt Barthel, originally written in 1932
Editor’s preface
Originally published in 1932 in the Bulletin of the American League for Physical Culture and reprinted in 1956 in the American Sunbather & American Nudist Leader, Kurt Barthel’s “The First Three Years” recounts the founding of Sky Farm, which technically celebrates its 95th anniversary this month. This version retains the text from the American Sunbather reprint, with added headers for readability and flow.
The story of Sky Farm, the historic club featured in this article, is explored in the next episode of Naked Age, titled Sky Farm Rising, which will be premiering tomorrow on all major podcast platforms and here on Planet Nude. The episode includes firsthand reflections from Bill Meyer, a founder and pioneer alongside Kurt Barthel. 🚀
The First Three Years
By Kurt Barthel
On December 5th, 1929, three men met in the upstairs dining room of the Café Michtelob at 28th Street near Fourth Avenue, New York City. As far as the rest of the world and, especially, the charming hostess and the Viennese waiter were concerned, they had gathered there to dine on spareribs with mustard and sauerkraut—at least two of them because the third was a vegetarian and betook of the mustard and sauerkraut only.
Under their breath, however, and especially in the intervals when the persistent hostess had drawn away to smile at other guests, the three strangers discussed a subject which at that time was, here in America, quite new or, rather, downright undiscussable among decent folk. The subject in question was nudism and the possibility, desirability, and advisability of importing that sensational stranger into this land of the free and the brave; furthermore, the probability that their more law-abiding compatriots would no doubt shoot or quarter them right at the beginning; and finally, their capability of financing the project.
The great Wall Street crash of that remarkable year had just passed, leaving them quite broke financially. However, one of them had assembled during the late summer a small group of young men and women with whom he had practiced nudism since Labor Day, way up in the Hudson Highlands. The second had some friends, among them one of the female gender, interested in the thing—people who might be willing to join up if it could be gotten together. And the third had already located a gymnasium with a small swimming pool where the whole jolly group could meet during the approaching winter to prepare and organize for a real outdoor nudist summer and, so they hoped, many more to come thereafter.
So, everything was there except the money, for the gym was to cost $250 for the rest of the season, and when the three nudist planners consolidated their belongings, they found that they had only $35 among them. But the balance could perhaps be gambled on by simply relying on "future earnings" from dues, which might be collected. Thus, the question of the financial capability of nudism in America was disposed of with a single stroke of the pen.
As to the other "bilities," including the shooting and quartering, they decided to take a chance. When the waiter came around with the coffee, what was to become the first nudist organization in America, The American League for Physical Culture, was already safely launched, and so December 5th of this year was the twenty-sixth anniversary of the launching.
Stepping stones / a rocky start
On Friday, December 13th, 1929, we met for the first time in the gymnasium—eight men and three women, with a fourth woman, the wife of one of the planners, ready to join only after the “crazy thing” had gone through—or, better yet, “busted.” But it didn’t “bust” and never came anywhere near “busting,” so she joined later. At the gym, we met every Friday during that first winter and grew, slowly but surely. We have grown ever since. The Depression hit many members hard and, no doubt, slowed down our progress. But we grew nonetheless, both in numbers and financial capacity.
After a long search for suitable land, we opened on June 21st, 1930, on rented grounds, the first American nudist camp near Spring Valley in Rockland County, N.Y., barely 20 miles from the city. It was a lovely, well-protected cedar grove of 20 acres with a bungalow, two acres of meadow, and a small, rush-bordered lake. Here, on a bright Sunday in August, we were raided by a troop of twelve cops who broke in from all sides with drawn revolvers. They roped in nearly everyone—about thirty on the grounds that day.
A congenial meeting in the dining room of the justice of the peace followed, during which we discussed the benefits of sunbathing, the rights of a citizen whose home is supposed to be his castle, and the laws of the State of New York, which plainly demanded that “exposure of person” must be lewd and in public to be objectionable. So we won the case. However, since the whole village crowded the porch and windows of the judge’s dining room and possibly expected some blood to be spilled—and since, at least theoretically, we could have been seen from an adjacent orchard bordering our cedar grove—the judge fined us five bucks each and promised us his protection against intruders and snoopers. That was worth $55, although it depleted our club treasury.
Thus the question of the shooting and quartering was disposed of. Most gratifying, however, was the fact that in that crowded vacation area, where the news of the raid spread like a brush fire, we were not bothered once for the rest of the season, which lasted till the end of September. And since the big orghcard next door made more than good for the $55 in delicious apples and peaches, the sky looked bright indeed for the future of American Nudism.
A growing movement
The winter saw us in our gym again, where we now had three full basketball teams and the pool was sometimes so crowded that we had to refrain from diving in. We definitely needed a larger farm now.
We rented sixty acres in Ironia, near Dover, N.J., for the summer of 1931. Disaster almost overtook us when, within an hour of moving in, the village constable walked into a crowd of about fifty of our boys and girls who, already “in uniform” but contrary to orders, had started to clear the ground by the brook in the valley for a swimming pool. Meanwhile, I was on top of the hill assembling a delegation to visit the justice of the peace and settle our status before signing the lease.
When the constable came out of his swoon, he enthusiastically offered to go with us to the judge where he did most of the talking. He had never seen a finer bunch of men and women, he declared, and he wished, by golly, that he could do his work as naked as they did theirs. (The good man was this man of the law only on weekends, but on other days, he was a bricklayer.)
Thus, American nudism may perhaps owe its most decisive summer to a humble bricklayer with a wealth of common sense. Because just then the first American book on nudism1 had come out, Among the Nudists, by Frances and Mason Merrill, the first honorary members of the American League for Physical Culture. That book, a bestseller, not only spread the gospel of nudism nationwide, but it lifted us out of the rut in which we had been floundering because of the depression. It brought us, in one rush, a great number of new members, among them some very substantial ones, and enabled us to make a dream come true; to buy a farm of our own.
Sky Farm rising
Of course, farm ownership had impressed itself upon us as extremely desirable after we had occupied rented farms for two summers. They had cost us a lot of money in rentals, and in no way were what they ought to have been unless we spent more money and untold hours of labor to improve and protect them properly. To create a fund which at least would furnish means sufficient for the down payment on a farm of our own and the legal expenses connected with the deal, we issued certificates of indebtedness, ranging from $10 up to no limit, to those members who could still afford to buy them.
Almost $3,000 were pledged for the loan, an unbelievable amount at a time when the U.S. economy was at the very bottom of the depression, half of our members out of work, and the rest not knowing when their turn would come. (Even a stockbroker and member of the New York Stock Exchange came to us in Ironia, blew all his fuses, and dropped out!) But we nevertheless went on the search for land, and after we had traveled hundreds of miles over the entire metropolitan district, we found, barely forty miles from New York, our lovely Sky Farm on the rainy Saturday of April 30th, 1932. We immediately took an option to buy, moved in and began to collect the pledges.
In a few weeks we had already collected $1,300 and on July 2nd, after we had the club incorporated, and after an existence of only two and a half years, we took title on an entirely suitable property which by the end of the year had already increased in value by about $1,500 for material and labor.
For “labor” we could have gotten any number of skilled craftsmen int he neighborhood of the farm for 35 cents an hour. We didn’t have the 35 cents, but lots of unemployed members. So our jobless moved in and set to work for a dollar a day and the freedom of the Farm. Stingy, you say? Not in those days, with 9 cents a pound for pork tenderloin, a quarter for a dozen of eggs right from under the hen, and 10 cents for a pack of cigarettes. Hundreds of dogwoods in full bloom among hundreds of stately cedars, and the rest of us chipped in on weekends for nothing and paid on top of it 8 cents for a gallon of gas out of our own pockets. That’s the way we pulled through.
The most necessary improvements, an enormous seven-strand barbed wire fence around our whole thirty-foud acres, a spacious dormitory, a sanitary toilet and a concrete swimming pool, had to be financed from dues and the balance of the pledges which both came in satisfactorily enough but did not permit us to make cash payments for the material needed which, therefore, we had billed to us rather than let down on the improvements. But we paid them by the end of the month anyway, and that set all the lumberman in the township back on their heels because they had to give even the biggest contractors eighteen months credit. So our credit rating moved up to A-1 right after the first month we were there.
We were not able to finish the swimming pool during the summer, and the lack of it was felt by all as a decided drawback. Many a prospective member may have been lost for that reason. Rather than risk the best part of another summer without swimming facilities, we decided by all means to finish the pool this year, and in doing so, took all the credit we could get. Finished in November and ready for use next spring, the pool has cost us between $600 and $700.
Heart of New York raid
Besides taking on the Farm, we moved into larger and more elegant, though also more expensive, city quarters after our original gym had long proved unsuitable and too small. And in the new gym an event took place which was to give occasion for another anniversary now.
On December 7th, 1931,2 a bunch of pedigreed Irish cops blasted our gym door and hailed twenty four of us, including seven women, to night court in two police “joy riders.” For good luck it was a Monday night. Had they come on a Wednesday or Fridya, they would have needed a whole caravan of those drafty vehicles to haul away a crowd of at least three times that size. Those who were with us that night will never in their lives forget that reeking dump that passed for a night court jail in the largest city in the world, with its endless rows of cafes full of howling and screaming bums, prostitutes, drunks, dopefiends and a lusty variety of other mugs. Nor will the whole American League for Physical Culture ever forget that hectic week following the raid, with its many special meetings and palavers with lawyers, and how the whole mess was solved so simply when, on December 14th, 1931, Magistrate Jonah Goldstein at Jefferson Market Court ruled that it is neither the public’s nor the polices’ business whether men and women, in their private gymnasium, were dressed or not while indulging in healthful exercises.
We cannot help noting with profound satisfaction that since this clashing victory, nudism ceased to be headlines and fancy pictures to “celebrate” the event. But to be entirely fair to the press, among the hundreds of clippings which we collected from papers nation-wide, although they poked plenty of fun at us, there was not one voice raised against nudism, but quite a few were of the opinion that it should be given a chance. And thus that raid, heart-breaking as it was with all its hideous byplay, turned out to be a blessing in disguise: it gave nudism a free ride from coast to coast.
In the State of New Jersey, where Sky Farm is located, the authorities of our county accepted us at our own terms. The chief of police, after having been invited by us, left us one fine Sunday in July with the verdict that we are “a damn fine crowd.” The sheriff offered to have one of our men deputized so that we could make arrests in our own right in case of too obstinate sightseers around the Farm. We declined with thanks because a naked fellow would look too funny with a six-shooter on his hip. And then, how were we going to pin the badge on the boy?
Nudism takes flight
And so we could, on our third anniversary, we returned with perfect satisfaction to our original spareribs and sauerkraut and proclaimed that the work begun three years ago had succeeded, and, judging from the progress made as far as the tolerance of the public is concerned, we had high hopes that in another three years nudism would spread from Maine to California.
In December 1931, possibly coinciding with our legal victory, Dr. Russell B. Abbott founded the Northern Ohio League of Naturists in a gymnasium in Cleveland, Ohio, and took his group outdoors the following summer near Sharon Center, Ohio.
In August 1932, three men from Chicago visited Sky Farm to learn firsthand how we had organized our movement. A month or so after their return, they sent us the minutes from the first business meeting of the Lake-o-the-Woods Club, which had already secured a gymnasium in Chicago and was considering a large property near Valparaiso, Indiana.
Around this time, a high school teacher from Monroe, New York, named Hobart Glassey, traveled to California, determined to start a nudist group there. They all faced various challenges, just as we had, but they managed to overcome them as we had done.3 At any rate, we wished them all the good luck in the world for the approaching year of 1933. 🪐
Don’t miss the latest episode of Naked Age!
Discover more of the story of Sky Farm, the historic nudist club, in Naked Age episode 15: Sky Farm Rising. Hear reflections from founding member Bill Meyer, who helped shape it alongside Kurt Barthel. Full podcast episode out now on all major podcast platforms or at www.nakedage.co.
More reading:
Published in England in 1933, Among the Nudists by the Merrills was not the first American book on nudism. The New Gymnosophy, published by Maurice Parmelee in 1927—and later republished as Nudism in Modern Life—was the first American book on the movement.
Barthel jumps backward in time a bit here, as by his own account (and others’), the Heart of New York Gym police raid on December 7th, 1931, occurred four months before they found Sky Farm in April 1932.
Hobart Glassey co-founded Elysian Fields, a nudist camp near Lake Elsinore, California, in the early 1930s. He appeared as himself in the 1933 film Elysia (Valley of the Nude), which was filmed at the camp and depicted nudist lifestyle activities. Tragically, Glassey passed away in 1938 at Elysia following a fall that broke his neck (source).
Nice beginnings story. Sky Farm closed last year, making Rock Lodge in Stockholm New Jersey the oldest continuously operating landed nudist club in the country. We picked up a lot of Sky Farm former members. You should look into the deep and rich history of Rock Lodge. We currently have second to fourth generation members among the current membership. We hear stories how 70 plus year old members were members from their first memories, and arguably their parents met at Rock Lodge. And we have fourth generation babies on through to tweens, teens and young adults.
I love that my home was the where nudism helped get started, right in Rockland.