Completely dressed. I had layers and layers and layers of clothes on. It's like playing strip poker.
And as I felt comfortable, I would take off a layer.
After about two to three hours of sipping Perrier and working through the layers of chiffon,
I got down to posing in the nude.
Did it get cold? Hot.
Lots of life.
We probably did, to get one centerfold shot, 700 pictures.
It affected my personal life tremendously, you can imagine, especially when it came to fellas and dating or whatever.
I became very distrustful of men.
Obscene letters. You still get some occasionally.
I was just young enough at the time. I couldn't judge and I didn't know and I was always suspicious of everyone.
Now, now that I am a news person, a news reporter, it draws attention.
You know, how can a credible news reporter possibly have ever been a playmate?
The drawbacks I see is just, I want people to see me as I am now.
And I don't know if I'll ever lose that playmate image.
I have to ask you, a person that loves candy always has the fantasy of wanting to work in a candy store.
But two weeks into the job, they hope they never see another piece of candy the rest of their life.
Does that relate at all to you?
If that's another way of asking if I'm jaded after all these years, no I'm not.
I can still get, I really have been, it's hard to express, but I really have been very moved by all of it.
You must have been a beautiful baby. You must have been a wonderful child.
When you were only starting to go to kindergarten, I'll bet you drove those little boys wild.
And when it comes to winning blue ribbons, you must have showed the other kids how.
I can see those judges' eyes as they handed you the prize. I'll bet you made the cutest ball.
You must have been a beautiful baby, because baby, look at you now.
Uncle I think you shouldn't have. You shouldn't have.
If anybody thinks Chrysler's having a problem with these cars today, they should have been around in 1957 when Ford came out with the Etzel.
America is a country that loves automobiles. Unfortunately, the cars wear out and end up in junkyards such as this.
The difference is all the cars in this junkyard are the same make and were manufactured during the two years just before I was born.
They went off the market the same year I came on the market.
The name of the car was the Etzel. And not all of them are here in this dump. A whole lot of them are still on the road and looking good.
The 1958 Etzel. The Etzel was born in 1958. It died in 1960.
It was a large luxury car full of all the expensive gadgets Americans loved.
The trouble was it was introduced during the recession when Americans were more interested in buying their first Volkswagen's.
And so that unmistakable Etzel grill quickly faded into the pages of automotive history.
During the three years Ford made Etzel, only a little over a hundred thousand came off the assembly line.
So today the car is quite a collector's item. Recently over a hundred Etzel collectors from all over the country gathered in Concord, California for their annual meet.
This being the 20th anniversary of the Etzel's demise, they met to pay their respects to the car that's been called the biggest loser in Detroit's history.
The word Etzel one of these days will be in the dictionary and the definition will be mistake.
People can always find a winner but the back of losers stay with them. You know he's losing until he becomes a winner. It's a hard thing to do but it's a lot more fun.
Having polished away the rust and humiliation of 20 years, these proud Etzel owners took their rangers, pacers and citations out of the closet and onto the nation's highways.
From east and west they came just to prove the Etzel can still take it. The car originally cost around $3,000 and today they can go for about $25,000 and more.
Well we just drove in from Texas. We didn't have any trouble but there is a matter of getting back.
Probably the most unusual aspect of this unlikely get together was the chairman of the convention. His name believe it or not is Etzel Henry Ford.
My name was to have been Henry Etzel Ford believe it or not but there was a cousin born before me and took my given name Henry Etzel Ford so that named me the Etzel Henry Ford.
The Etzel owners come from all walks of life. Doctors, lawyers, salesmen, even a part time stand up comedian named Stan Limpkill who decided to try and sell me a 1958 Etzel.
Hi there. I'm Stan Limpkill for Lemon Motors and we got a beauty for you today. Just look at this little beauty. This is a great car. We don't need that. It never did.
This is a 1958 Etzel citation with all the best goodies you've ever seen on a little car. It's got push button automatic, it's got head cabs, it's got headlights, it's got a bumper, none of which work.
We're going to also give you this pretty little bucket here to put all the parts in that fall off the car when you drive it down the road. It's only $12.95 to you and to you today.
Maybe tomorrow we'll knock a few bucks off but today $12.95. Charge on in.
And so let's hear it for the Etzel. After 20 years it's still the sweetest lemon to ever grow in the automotive orchards of Detroit.
Well we got a batch of signs in the mail this week and we had to look at them twice because they weren't really what they seemed to be. For example, from Bob Doggett in Oregon City, we find that 8 mile is really only 7 miles.
From Harry Letterman of Atlanta, the 4 mile Baptist Church is really 2 miles. From Kimmel Rowan in Las Vegas, he sent this one in. To get to Earrington, you have to go both ways at once. You could hurt yourself doing that.
From Darryl Marish of Beloit, Wisconsin, here's both a stop and a go sign.
Danny Nabel in Atlanta wrote us he didn't know whether to go 25 or 35 when he read this sign so he did both. He added them together and he went 60.
Finally, from Charlie Marshall of Lakewood, Colorado, you have to see it to believe it. Parking for the blind only.
I think I've moved that wall back a couple of feet too.
Anyway, don't forget, if you run across any funny items, send them in to us at Real People, P.O. Box 48396, Los Angeles, California 90048. And if we use it on the air, we'll send you a Real People t-shirt just like this one, okay?
As you know, we've been conducting our own Nielsen TV survey by talking to Real People families around the country named Nielsen.
Last week, I went to Lemington, Utah to a family reunion of 500 Nielsen's. After getting their reactions to certain television shows, I asked if any of them had ever been contacted by a national television rating service.
The two Nielsen's who stood were Debbie and Carol, mother and daughter. There are seven in their family. Carol's husband, Alan, is a 39-year-old farmer who built their 21-room big house on the prairie with his bare hands.
I just went through 500 of them.
Debbie, who is 20, said eight years earlier the family had been sent a diary at random by the A.C. Nielsen Company for a small fee they were supposed to record in that diary, the shows that they watched.
The Nielsen rating sent us 50 cents and a diary to fill out what we watched all day.
Well, we didn't want them to know that we watched football because we didn't watch football on TV all day.
So as long as Debbie got to fill out the diary, we'd go through the TV guide and find out it was the opposite.
We had Gilligan Island on there about five times a day.
Maybe that's the reason why the kids shows are what's on most of the time because they're the ones that's doing the rating.
What do you think about the Nielsen ratings?
I think they're a farce.
I like the name.
I've always hoped that somebody would come and ask us what we liked and didn't like on TV because I don't think the ratings reflect what real people want to see and what real people like.
I pick a show like you pick the president. I don't pick the best one, but I eliminate the worst ones.
I really like Life Line. How come they take it off?
Not enough Nielsen family watching it.
I thought it was a good show.
In those situation comedies, everybody tries to look like Mary Tyler Moore and really in our minds we're all like Ted Baxter.
We just, you know, kind of clutchy.
I like action, cop shows and that, but I don't watch Barney Miller because all they do is sit around the office and I never get out of there.
No wonder New York's in such bad shape.
Vernon Shirley's kind of just a Looney Tunes show.
I think Three's Company is a disgrace to the morals of the United States. I think it's crazy. People don't live like that. They don't have to.
There's too many kids that think, well, TV's the real world. My mom and dad are crazy.
I'd like to try to see sex take over the airwaves in violence because to me it's more natural.
Charlie's Angels. I think they are the worst actresses I've ever seen. Maybe Kate Jackson will pass.
Charlie's Angels, I think now what they're doing to women is telling them that they can be successful if they're attractive.
Because look at Kojak. They'd make him a bald man, bald old man into a sex man.
You know, and if they can do that to Kojak, why can't they get some ugly woman and do it to her?
There'll be so much of the audience out there that'll watch him that her man wants to see them.
Same with Three's Company?
Yeah, but the point is, a little while ago, Alan, you said that's why some of the shows are on, because kids are watching.
Now you're turning around and saying you're watching Charlie's Angels because the man is controlling the television set.
When there's a choice between Charlie's Angels and some kid's show, the man's interested enough there, probably, he throws the kid out of sight.
Who's the biggest win, Steve?
TV bores me, you know. I'd like to listen to music.
Then how come you have three television sets in the house?
You don't feel like you're just completely alone when you're here with other people at work and doing their other thing.
How can anybody named Nielsen feel alone in this?
We watch the CBS Morning News at 6 o'clock in the morning. We watch the Today Show from 7 till 9.
Jane Pauley, by the way, she's a awful good to wake up to.
We watch ABC News at 4.30, NBC News at 5, and CBS News at 5.30, and then the local news, and then the 10 o'clock news.
Now really, that's all we really turn it on for. We know those are the shows that are going to be on.
I like TV to make me laugh. I like Saturday Night Live.
Every time I watch Prime Time or watch Tom Snyder on tomorrow, I can just see Dan Aykroyd.
I just can't take him serious because I can hear Dan Aykroyd doing that laugh.
It's almost like Tom Snyder did a takeoff on Dan Aykroyd.
The things that I would like to see on TV are historical things. I think that Holocaust, that was really good.
It makes the people, I think, reflect back on history and learn from it.
The thing I like the most is documentary type stuff that really educates you to something, not just entertainment.
You watch the salt pots all the way through on PBS, come in, stay in all day to watch those, the hearings, the Senate hearings on salt.
Everything used to have a moral. I think that's become too rare to have a definite right and a definite wrong. It's always a definite maybe.
I think it could be improved by taking off some of the garbage, and I think the radio systems.
Somebody's got to find out who's got those black boxes and where they are and how they work them,
because I really think it needs to be a more valid way. I don't think 1,200 people, I'll determine what 1,000,000 people watch.
Again, it's time to say goodnight. It's such a regretful sound, but before we go, we'd like to leave a few thoughts to kick around.
Some say that we need nuclear power, that solar can't carry the load, but remember, if a technician makes a mistake, the sun ain't going to explode.
We gave it away in Panama. It hurts every American guy and gal, because when Panama asks us where we're going, we must say, up your canal.
More Russians defected to the West, democracy their objective. It confirms what we've known all along, Russia is very defective.
A New York City policeman protecting Fidel Castro couldn't get within a yard. Later he said, this guy doesn't need us for protection, he needs a little right guard.
We'll be back next Wednesday, same time, we hope to see you then. Join us live here on NBC and we'll get it on again. Good night.
Thank you.