Modern Living: The Decline of Nudism

Balmy Southern California has long been a natural habitat for nudists. But now the new permissiveness has caught up with this once-daring tribe. After visiting a former citadel of the cult near Los Angeles, TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler reports:

Mel Hocker, one of the alltime great American nudists, is still out there in the nude. But he is not smiling and carefree, the way you would imagine a nudist to be. At 60, Mel sits alone in his little office, a mass of naked wrinkles, glum, dispirited, forlorn. Forlorn because just outside Mel’s screen door, his own twelve-acre nudist club—the Oakdale Guest Ranch—is going silently to seed in the dry heat of the San Bernardino Mountains. In fact, the club’s membership in two years has plummeted from 300 to 60 couples, and it continues to plummet as the elderly members die off. Another nudist camp near by recently closed up for good.

“It’s the sexual revolution that’s killing us,” moans Mel, who has been nude nonstop now for 18 years. “The pornographic movies, the topless-bottomless bars, the dirty magazines—they’re making nudism in America passé.” To show what he means, Mel slips into shower clogs and takes us on a tour of his camp, mercifully letting us keep our pants on. The layout of the place hints of its past grandeur: 16 rustic cabins idling on a hillside, and down on the flat, dozens of vacant trailer slips where you can almost envision happy, laughing naked people swarming around gaily decorated mobile homes. But now, Mel says, the remaining members are mostly middle-aged and elderly couples who come out only on the warm weekends. The grandiose pool is empty, tennis and volleyball courts are unused, nets hanging limp in the sun.

The only sounds of life come from a screened hut with a sign on it that says CORNER NUDE STAND. Inside, a pretty young woman is dancing nude to a jukebox; the other patrons, mostly older males, sit drinking beer, droning apathetically and ignoring the woman. A sign on the wall says NUDI BURGERS. MORE MEAT LESS DRESSING. Hocker sits down, sips a Coke and brightens somewhat. “I pioneered in nudism, you know” he shouts over the music. “We were the first nudist place to serve beer, and we were first with nude dancing. This place has attracted your professional people, right down to the honorable janitor who pushes the broom.”

Hard to Upstage. Hocker’s mind slips gradually back into nudism’s past, and he glowingly recalls how he became a nudist in the sedate year of 1953. That was back when he was living in Long Beach and nudism was still considered risqué. In their search for an outdoor health spa, Hocker and his wife Ann stumbled on nudism. “We were the talk of Long Beach for a long time,” recalls Ann (equally nude), her eyes gleaming with a certain mischievous pride. After four years Hocker quit his job as a cost analyst with the Ford Motor Co., bought Oakdale, an established nudist club just outside San Bernardino, and made nudism a full-time way of life. “You can’t beat it,” says Hocker. “It’s so — natural. It just seems right not to wear clothes. You can’t upstage anybody around here with a mink coat or a good suit. Haha. And then there’s the sun. Believe me, after a weekend out here in the nude, you can really kill ’em on your job.”

But in the last few years, as the sexual revolution progressed, the once tantalizing concept of prancing nude through the woods came to seem tame indeed to Southern Californians. Even last year’s special event—nude skydiving with music by 15 bare members of the Long Beach Municipal Band—was sparsely attended. Just as well, perhaps, since one hapless skydiver was badly scratched when he landed in a buckthorn patch.

Looking for Longhairs. Now, it appears, Oakdale has only one slim chance left for survival: a transfusion of good old American public relations techniques. Earlier this year Hocker decided to hire Sparky Blaine, a promoter and manager of topless dancing girls, to push Oakdale back into the big time. For Sparky, 43, Oakdale was a revelation. He abandoned his Beverly Hills office, together with his clothes, philosophizing that “I do most of my work by phone anyway,” and moved right into one of the Oakdale cabins. “Out here,” he mused, “I can float nude in the pool while my nude secretary sits on the edge and takes a letter—working conditions are marvelous.”

Sparky’s big job is to promote the Miss Nude Cosmos Pageant, a nude beauty contest held at Oakdale each summer. His first change has been to bill the pageant “The Woodstock of the Nudist Movement.” He explains: “We’ve got to get the longhairs in here. Only way to save the place. And why not? They took their clothes off at Woodstock. Why can’t they do it here?

“The old nudes have got to step aside or this place is going to die. What we should do, we should let all the good-looking girls join free, then we’d have something. It’s youth, baby, that’s where it’s at. The old blood’s dying with the trees.” Sparky continues ecstatically: “Just give me ten showgirls out here, and varoom, the young guys’ll come out of Los Angeles in first gear. I’m putting up a big stand; I’m gonna have two go-go girls dancing on top of it at night, with spotlights on ’em, so people can see ’em from the highway.”

At 60, Mel Hocker sits alone in his little office, a mass of naked wrinkles, glum, dispirited, forlorn, brooding about the passing of the golden age of nudism and wearily watching Sparky Blaine trying to create a last varoom.