Name Ilsley Boone Died 1968 | Education Brown University | |
The Reverend Ilsley Silias Boone, known to relatives and friends as "Uncle Danny" (alluding to Daniel Boone), was born in 1879 in Brooklyn, New York and died in 1968 in Whitehouse, Ohio. He was a charismatic speaker, a powerful organizer, and was the founding father of the American Sunbathing Association (ASA), later reorganized as the American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR).
Contents
Early life
His father was Silas Ilsley Boone (1846-1900), who was the older brother to his future father-in-law Christopher Columbus Boone (1863-1926). His mother was Agnes Ferris Turnbull Eldridge (1849-1940). Little is known of Boone's early life, other than he lived in Brooklyn with his two brothers and two sisters. In Rhode Island 1904, he graduated from Brown University, and married Alice M Barragar. They soon moved to Newton, Massachusetts where he obtained a divinity degree from Newton Theological Institute. Originally ordained as a Baptist, in 1921 Boone became pastor of the Ponds Reformed Church (Dutch Reformed) in Oakland, New Jersey. In the mid-1920's, he developed the concept of visual education under contract with the New York City Public School System. With the onset of the Great Depression, the city canceled Boon's contract, but his interest in education continued, serving with the Oakland Public School system. Also, in the mid-20's, he divorced his first wife, and married his paternal first cousin, Ella Murray "Mae" Boone. They had three children, Bradford Ilsley Boone, Nancy Adeline Boone, and Berton Maxfield Boone. In 1931, he became interested in naturism, and traveled to Germany to visit Freilichtpark (Free-Light Park), near Hamburg. This was the world's first naturist resort, which had opened nearly three decades earlier. During this period, he also became a member of both the New York and Royal Microscopy Societies.
Nudist activism
In 1930, Kurt Barthel had formed The American League for Physical Culture (ALPC), America's first nudist organization, and the following year Boone became the ALPC Executive Secretary. Soon after, Barthel asked him to take his place as President of the ALPC, which Boone continued on as for 20 years, until August 1952 (when the organization was then The American Sunbathing Association).
In 1936, Boone opened "Sunshine Park" in the Mays Landing section of Hamilton Township, New Jersey (near Atlantic City), and established the national headquarters of the American Sunbathing Association there. As a faithful adherent to Barthel’s original ideals and behavior guidelines, "Uncle Danny" advocated the development of new nudist clubs, often leading legal challenges fighting local officials trying to block nudist centers in their area. He encouraged regimens of calisthenics, abstinence (alcohol), nudity regardless of the weather, and vegetarianism for all members and their guests, in addition to his beliefs of healthful benefits derived from nudity, sunbathing, and exercise. In 1965, the park was purchased by Psychologist Oliver York for $120,000. It continued on for another two decades until health violations of the aging buildings forced its closure by the city.
Publications
Following his ordination, Boone served a number of pastorates and wrote a number of books dealing with the divine, the most notable being "The Conquering Christ". By 1933, however, Boone's interest in nudism led to publishing the first American nudist magazine, The Nudist (with Henry S. Huntington as its editor) which later became Sunshine & Health, published by his Sunshine Publishing Company. Even with the genitalia airbrushed out of the photos of nudists, the United States Postal Service decided the materials were obscene and could not be distributed through the U.S. mail, but Boone challenged the decision and took his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
In 1958, he ultimately won the right to distribute uncensored nudist materials through the mail. The victory enabled not only legitimate nudist magazines and men's magazines to feature full frontal nudity (including Hugh Hefner's Playboy Magazine), but also unintentionally helped make possible the later oncoming flood of explicit adult publications during the 1960s Sexual Revolution.
Boone's second wife died in 1960, and he became a widower for the last eight years of his life. Due to the proliferation of more successful competing nudist and adult publications, his Sunshine Publishing Company finally went out of business in 1963. Nearly broke, Boone lived his last years in the Ohio home of National Nudist Council member Edith Church, where he died on Thanksgiving Day in 1968 at age 89. But his magazine Sunshine & Health was continued on by another publisher for several more years into the 1980s, making it the longest published nudist magazine in America.