The untold history of America’s oldest nudist magazine
The untold history of America’s oldest nudist magazine
The dramatic conflict that established The Bulletin as the official journal of American nudism
Editor’s note: We’re still celebrating #NudistHistoryMonth! We’re resharing this history post from last year which is all about the history of AANR’s magazine The Bulletin. This was first released (in a significantly shorter form) in The Bulletin, September 2020, and then an expanded version was released last year on Planet Nude just for paid subscribers only. Now it’s open to the public. Thank you for supporting Planet Nude, and if you’re not already, become an AANR member to gain access to this historic Bulletin.
The AANR Bulletin has a storied history that is closely intertwined with the history of America’s nudism movement. The Bulletin has featured articles chronicling this history at different junctures over the years. These generally go back to 1951, when The Bulletin began as a standalone publication. However, the magazine’s roots actually reach back nearly twenty years earlier to the very beginning of the nudism movement. Interestingly, what many of its previous written histories omit is a dramatic story of political conflict and upheaval within the nudist movement—a quarrel that led The Bulletin to be established in the first place.
The Bulletin first appeared as an infrequent column in America’s first nudist magazine, The Nudist, in 1933.
At the time, AANR was still known as the International Nudist Conference. In its first iteration, the written feature was called The INC Bulletin Board, and it served as a space for camps and clubs to share news with the nudist community.
In 1935 The INC Bulletin became a regular monthly installment featuring “President’s Message,”—in which the sitting INC president offered words on the state of nudism in America or whatever else he or she felt pertinent to discuss with members.
Not long after this, leaders in the movement began to move away from the term “nudist”—which had already been co-opted by burlesque clubs and pornographers, and the term was being used disparagingly in the media. In 1936, the INC changed its name to the American Sunbathing Association, and The INC Bulletin accordingly became The ASA Bulletin. By 1940 The Nudist magazine had completed its incremental change to the title Sunshine & Health.
‘The Bulletin’ breaks out
Over the next decade, political turmoil grew within ASA membership over Founder and Executive Director Ilsley Boone’s autocratic grip over the voting board of directors. While Boone had stacked the board with loyalists, other members wanted more democratic representation from other regions.
At a national convention at Zoro Nature Park in 1946, members demanded an independent audit of the ASA’s finances, questioning the financial transparency under Boone’s leadership. Boone, wielding his network of proxies, managed to quash the proposal, arguing against it on the grounds of unjustified expense.
At the same convention, the membership managed to elect Pennsylvania’s Reed Suplee as ASA president. Reed had been one of the most vocal critics of the Executive Director. Just a few weeks after Suplee was inaugurated, he abruptly resigned, claiming that Boone had obstructed his access to the membership rolls or the financial books. Many members began to publicly call for Boone’s resignation.
Boone abruptly relented in 1949, assigning a man named Norval Packwood as his successor, believing Packwood to be a loyalist. However, Boone kept a board spot, and significant sway over the voting board with his controversial use of member proxy votes to control the outcomes of elections.
Norval Packwood soon came to align with the complaints about Boone’s unfair control over the organization he’d founded.
Tensions boiled over at the 1951 annual meeting at PennSylvan Health Society. Having communicated in secret and planned for months, an insurgent group of members (including Norval Packwood and ASA secretary Rose Holroyd) managed to enact a vote bringing a substantial change to the organizational bylaws, which they’d prepared in secret and surprised the board with, during the annual organizational meeting.1 The bylaw change would effectively hobble Boone’s power over the ASA.
Furious, Boone launched his own rump convention on the other side of PennSylvan, holding competing meetings and selecting a whole other president by nomination. The ASA subsequently fractured into two camps—the reformists represented by ASA Director Norval Packwood and the Boone-backed old guard—with both sides claiming to be the true ASA.
Since the ousted Ilsley Boone controlled Sunshine & Health—the ASA’s longstanding “official organ,” the reformists appropriated The ASA Bulletin’s title and logo for their membership communique.
On the west coast, publisher Mervin Mounce—who supported the reformists—began running another similar version of The ASA Bulletin in his magazine American Nudist Leader. Meanwhile, Norval Packwood launched an all-new ASA Bulletin as a standalone newsletter.
Unremitting, Boone continued his original version within Sunshine & Health. For over a year, three different versions of The ASA Bulletin circulated, thoroughly confusing nudists around the country. Mounce’s and Packwood’s versions featured a president’s report from the reformist president (my 2x great grandfather, Rudolph Johnson), while Boone’s featured a report from his faction’s president-by-nomination (Alois Knapp).
Boone soon filed suit against Packwood’s ASA in a New Jersey court. The legal battle was long and vicious, with no small amount of mudslinging from the pages of one group’s Bulletin to the other. Ultimately, the judge determined that all of the ASA’s bylaws going back to the beginning in 1931 were non-binding “legal gobbledegook” and said the whole organization would have to be restructured. He placed the ASA into temporary receivership in the name of Norval Packwood and ordered that the organization have a court-supervised election by popular vote of membership to occur at Boone’s Sunshine Park in Mays Landing, New Jersey.
On that sweltering July day, supervised by a fully dressed court appointee, the defendants legally won control. Mervin Mounce was elected ASA President, and Packwood’s journal became the organization’s official periodical.
Having lost, Boone soon launched the National Nudist Council (NNC), modeled after his original version of the ASA.
Not long after, when the dust settled, the ASA Bulletin rebranded to simply The Bulletin.
Later years
The Bulletin has experimented with different designs and formats, but has always remained a constant in the nudist movement. When the ASA relocated to Florida in 1970, The Bulletin went with it. In 1994, when The ASA changed its name to the American Association for Nude Recreation, The Bulletin informed members of the change. In January 2020, it became the digitally distributed eBulletin, marking the latest in a long line of evolutions. 🪐
This meeting was actually presided over by my own great great grandfather Rudolph Johnson, who had been elected ASA president the previous year during the 1950 convention, which took place at the nudist club he owned, the Cobblestone Suntanners Club.
This article was incredibly interesting. However, It is amazing how many times the old newspaper article poked fun at nudism, an unfortunate occurrence seen in a fair amount of nudism reporting. I'd love to see a study that compares the number of articles discussing nudism in a serious fashion vs. those that mock or disparage.
So often you see Naturism portrayed as a homogeneous group, who all view the world the same, have no disagreements, and exist in some type of clothes free harmonious utopia. Obviously, not the case. This is a fair reminder that there have always been some divisions.
As always, thanks for the research and sharing Evan.