Girls! Girls! Girls! -- A special S.I. Swimsuit edition

Cover girl Carol Alt from the Feb. 8, 1982 issue

IN A WORLD WITHOUT the Internet, a dark time known as the '80s, there were only a couple of ways a clean-cut teenage boy could see pictures of beautiful, yet scantily-clad women.

You could find a sympathetic news stand cashier, willing to let you buy skin mags before you were old enough to shave. You could sneak a peak at your dad's stash of porn, or your big brother's or your degenerate friends, or your friends' dads and brothers, or you could wait patiently for that annual edition of Sports Illustrated issue that they too wanted to see: the Swimsuit Issue.

This was, back then, kind of a big deal... and a big departure from the magazine's steady winter diet of basketball and hockey, football and whatnot.. and for a teenage boy freed from not having to skulk around with contraband copies of Playboy, Penthouse and their smuttier kin, almost as good.

And so it was, in February 1982, that my treasured copy of S.I. arrived in the mail, with a cover photo devoted to lovely, one-piece-wearing Carol Alt, a supermodel who was, coincidentally, then married to star New York Rangers defenseman Ron Greschner. Joining Alt inside the covers was another future hockey wife, Kim Alexis, along with models Charissa Craig and Kathryn Redding, all cavorting in Kenya. 

The photos were inspiring, and even educational as I learned the French word for bathing suit is maillot (something my high school French teacher should have illustrated this way for mnemonic purposes). I also learned there are people who's job it was to design those barely-there outfits, among them Leah Gottlieb of Gottex fame and someone named Norma Kamali.

Charissa Craig in a Cole of California

Red-head Kathryn Redding in a
Marcia Friedman-designed
Le Bag maillot.

I also learned, as did S.I. editors, that not everybody appreciated the magazine's departure from its more standard fare, for sure as pitchers and catchers would soon arrive at Arizona and Florida spring training sites, Sports Illustrated's letters page would soon be populated with angry missives from folks expecting more wholesome, less immodest content.

Kim Alexis wearing Norma Kamali

But life moves on for teenagers and for supermodels, none of us being the static moments of our best selves for very long. Plus the web, being what it is, has effectively blunted whatever shock/moral outrage value accompanied a high bare skin-to-swim suit ratio of some S.I. photos.

Alexis, according to Wikipedia, was for a time married to Greschner's one-time Rangers teammate, Ron Duguay. Now she is a blogger at www.kimalexis.com. Alt too is writing at www.carolalt.com/blog.

Charissa Craig is a real estate agent in northern New Jersey. Kathryn Redding was briefly an actress, featured in the 1981 Albert Finney/Susan Dey modeling-meets-sci-fi movie ``Looker.'' Beyond that, the readily-available public trail goes cold.

Duguay and Greschner, had their own modeling gigs of a sort.

Both men appeared in TV commercials for Sassoon jeans with Rangers teammates Phil Esposito, Anders Hedberg and Don Maloney. Duguay suited up for a 1979 spot, while the Alt spouse displaced him a year later.

But you didn't come here to read this or to see them. You came to look at the pictures.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Sex and the Spider-Man

PETER PARKER was my hero.

It wasn't just because he was a geeky kid like me -- but better at math and science -- who suddenly had great powers and the concomitant great responsibility. And it wasn't just because he had super strength, could climb walls and shoot sticky web stuff from gadgets on his wrists (though I spent more time than I should have, strictly speaking, trying to figure out how to make my own web shooters).

Mary Jane and what's his name

It wasn't even that he could afford to live in New York City, the albeit scary 1970s version, on a freelance photo journalist's income because at nine, 10 or 11 years old, I didn't think about those things.

It was because this transformed super-geek was able to date hot babes, stacked, brick house babes a pre-pubescent ordinary geek like me could only think about and never possess.

Never, ever, ever.*

First there was the gorgeous, platinum blonde Gwen Stacy.

Sweet Gwen, with her headbands, short skirts and gogo boots, murdered by the original Green Goblin, Norman Osborn, right before he accidentally killed himself.

Parker, my grieving hero, immediately found comfort in the arms of fiery red-headed Mary Jane Watson. Now there, THERE, was a woman. They went out. They dated. I -- the vicarious, invisible, third wheel -- tagged along.

One night, Peter Parker took her back to his place and...

KARA--BOOM! (No, really, that's what it said right in the bottom panel of page 3 of The Amazing Spider-Man, number 136.)

Kara-boom!?! Well, yes.

An explosion. Peter's place was laid waste by a bomb planted by Norman Osborn's son, Harry, who was going through a bad phase.

The Green Goblin was alive. Sort of. Thirteen issues later, so was Gwen Stacy (T.A.S-M, 149). And she was naked.

Naked! Like, close the door, somebody might see, nude! Holy f*ck!

It was Autumn, 1975. Normal kids were probably watching Carl Yastrzemski, Fred Lynn and the Red Sox or Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and the Big Red Machine. I've read they played one heck of a World Series. Carlton Fisk willed a foul ball into a home run.

I missed it. I had other priorities.

Gwen. Gwen! (Shh... wait, I hear somebody coming up the stairs. Close the door!).

The stuff that pre-adolescent dreams are made of

Man, she was beautiful and, in retrospect, tastefully rendered. Just enough play of light and shadow to leave most everything to the imagination. I had one. It worked really really well.

Suddenly my comic book was contraband, right up their with dad's copies of Playboy and the cheaper, more explicit knockoffs occasionally brandished by my delinquent friend around the corner.

Turns out Gwen was cloned by some heartbroken college science professor who never got over her death. Said professor was a bit off, given to emotional outbursts, enamored of his godliness and -- driven mad by guilt after accidentally killing a colleague -- transformed into some evil, clone-happy critter who called himself the Jackal.

(So much death, grief and madness in this Marvel universe. It was like a Russian lit class, only you know, fun and with pictures.)

He cloned Spider-Man, kidnapped his boss and ultimately died along with one of the homo-arachnae when he blew up the scoreboard at Shea Stadium. (Mets finished third that year). Deliberately left vague: which version of Peter Parker lived and which perished in the blast.

Gwen Stacy Mark II had seen enough to know that maybe paling around with either one wasn't good for her health. She split.

Peter -- one of them at least -- went home to Mary Jane, saying he had something to show her.

Some guys had all the luck.

*  At least not until I met my wife.