By Rolf Holbach
Besides being a prolific writer and editor for some of the late sixties and seventies nudist magazines like Arcadia and Ankh, Dr. Cec Cinder wrote the definitive history of nudism that traced the movement from its earliest beginnings up through about 1995 in “The Nudist Idea”. Along with TNSF founder Lee Baxandall and beach activist Eugene Callen, Dr. Cinder helped found the free beach movement on the west coast, which eventually became the Beachfront USA organization in the mid-seventies.
Last year, Dr. Cinder donated his huge collection of nudist material that he had amassed over the years to the Western Nudist Research Library (WNRL) located at Glen Eden. Cec had named his collection the Archives of the Institute for Nudist Studies, which he used in research for his book. In going through some of his papers he mentioned how he had been working with the Pomona Public Library Special Collections Librarian David Streeter to create a “Special California Nudist Collection” that focused on the Free Beach Movement at that time. This was before the first nudist library, The American Nudist Research Library located at Cypress Cove, was established in 1979. David Streeter contacted many key people involved in the Free Beach Movement and the nudist community in the seventies and eighties and solicited donations of material to create this collection.
Nudist Researcher, Associate Professor at Alaska Pacific University, and friend of the WNRL, Dr. Carl Hild, contacted the current Special Collections Librarian at the Pomona Library making an appointment to assess and analyze what was in this collection. On October 24th Dr. Hild, WNRL President Dr. Mark Pavelchak, and myself met at the Pomona Library to go through the “Special California Nudist Collection”. We discovered eight boxes of newsletters, correspondence, photos, and magazines, from that era. We spent the next four hours investigating and cataloging the contents of those boxes, plus two more loose piles of similar material that we boxed up before we left.
One example of what we found was a box of materials and writing from John Jefferson Poland, an early activist who founded the Sexual Freedom League, and who staged a public “Nude Wade-In” in 1965 at a beach in San Francisco. Although many of Poland’s papers are archived in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley most were destroyed in a fire. This box of his writings is instrumental in filling in any historical gaps that exist in his archives from that time.
We urge anyone interested in the history of nudism to visit the WNRL (open 10am – 2pm Sat.& Sun.) the next time you visit Glen Eden. Even better would be for you to become a supporting member of the WNRL ($25 Basic Level, $100 Diamond Level). If you can donate time rather than money, the library is always looking for volunteers to help with various projects.
Please visit www.wnrl.org to get involved in any of these ways.
Pomona Public Library https://www.pomonalibraryfoundation.org
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