Penthouse Magazine Founder Bob Guccione Dead At 79

AP via CBS 11 ^ | October 20, 2010 | AP

[John W]

PLANO, Texas (AP) ― Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione has died in a suburban Dallas hospital at age 79. A statement issued by the Guccione family says he died Wednesday at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano after a long battle with cancer. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Guccione introduced Penthouse to the American public in 1969, at the height of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution.

[Artemis Webb]

lol

[skully]

RIP Bob...Thanks for the mammar...I mean memories.

[hampdenkid]

What a freak! Don’t any wealthy celeb types age with even the slightest grace anymore?

[Rebelbase]

Someone told this joke here before, but now’s a good a time as any to tell it again.

Bob Guccione goes to Hell, the devil says,”We’re booked up here and I’m gonna have to let someone go to make room. I’ll even let you pick the one, there’s three that can leave”

Devil opens a door, Bob looks in and see’s Fat Teddy Kennedy in a swimming pool continuously diving to the bottom and coming up empty handed then diving again. Bob says, “I’m not a good swimmer, so I’ll pass on this one”.

Next room is Al Gore. The room climate is constantly changing between 120 desert heat to -50 below. Gore is continuously taking off or putting on his clothes. Bob says, “Nah, this doesn’t look good either, I’ll pass”.

Devil opens the last door and Bill Clinton is tied up spread eagle nekked on a bed, huge grin on his face with Monica Lewinsky over him doing what Monica does best. Bob says, “Oh, yeah, I can live with this, I want this one”, Devil says:

“Hey Monica, you can leave now.”

[muawiyah]

Once upon a time Bob had a problem with the mail. So he called me ~ having been given my name by informants in the field who said I COULD FIX ANYTHING.

Well, whatever his mail problem had been, that was a trivial matter and was dealt with instantly. However, Bob was one of these guys always good for a story. His was about mailing Penthouse to West Virginia. He said he'd tried everything including THICK WALLED plain brown wrappers hand addressed even and still the rural letter carriers in the state continued to figure things out and they'd open a Penthouse they found in the mail to read at lunch (easy to do since they were out in the countryside driving around on their own with no supervision).

And no, he didn't mind the guys and gals carrying the mail reading his magazine. His problem was they'd stick the magazine back into the wrapper a month or so later, and after it'd been passed around to hundreds of others!

It cost him a fortune answering complains about lost copies in West Virginia and he didn't like that. His solution was to simply stop sending Penthouse to West Virginia addresses ~ because it was costing him more than he made on the subscriptions.

Good ol' Bob. Everybody knows his forwarding address eh!

[SkyPilot]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Guccione

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini "Bob" Guccione [pronounced goo-chi-OHN-nee] (December 17, 1930 – October 20, 2010) was the founder and publisher of the adult magazine Penthouse. He resigned from his publisher position in November 2003. Guccione was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Bergenfield, New Jersey. He attended high school at Blair Academy, a prep school in Blairstown, New Jersey. He came from a Sicilian family. His father was an accountant. He was married for the first time before the age of 20, and had his first child, Toni. He left wife and child to go to Europe, were he wanted to be a painter. He traveled widely, and had adventures with friends like William S. Burroughs in Tangier. He eventually met an English girl, Muriel, moved to London with her, and married her. They had two children, Bob Jr. and Tony. To support her he managed a chain of Laundromats. He eventually got work as a cartoonist on an American weekly newspaper, The London American, while Muriel started a business selling pinup posters. He sometimes created cartoons for Bill Box's humorous greeting card company, Box Cards.

The magazine's pictorials offered more sexually explicit content than was commonly seen in most openly sold men's magazines of the era, being the first to show female pubic hair, then full-frontal nudity, and then the exposed clitoris and anus.

Hey - there is something you hope they read about your life at your funeral in front of the your grandchildren.

[Frantzie]

He died and probably still owes Malcolm McDowell his pay for the “movie” Caligula. I once heard McDowell on Johnny Carson probably 15 years ago asking for him to pay him.

I do remember one cool BW picture of Bob in Road & Track on the side of the road in probably Long Island. On a damp day he drove his Ferrari 512 Berlinetta Boxer off the road and was waiting for a tow truck.

http://www.transportspecs.com/images/decades/ferrari_512_bb.jpg

Enjoy your dirt nap Bob.

[bereanway]

Yeah, Omni was one of his startups noted in the article. Had a lot of business failures including a casino and the Caligula film after initial success. Worth about $400mm in 1982 and pretty well broke by 03. Evidently in seminary for a while before he got into porn.

Very unrighteous man who has just realized the sum of his worst fears.

[Revolting cat!]

Good articles.

[Ol' Sparky]

They die in threes? Barbara Billingsley, Tom Boswell and this creep?

[Ol' Sparky]

Flynt should die a slow and agonizing death IMHO.

Maybe he could be left to be pecked to death by a chicken.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Dear Penthouse:

You’re NEVER going to believe this, but this really DID happen to me...(insert perv story about a guy and two chicks who just COULDN’T get enough of him, ‘AT THE SAME TIME!’, a guy and his girlfriend’s daughter, a guy and his vacuum cleaner, a guy and a woman he met in the local Grocery Produce Aisle, etc.)

*SMIRK-BARF*

[Last Dakotan]

Don’t any wealthy celeb types age with even the slightest grace anymore?

Some do.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I am actually sad at his passing, because dirty pictures aside, he made some daring innovations that had an impact, like OMNI magazine.

For those not familiar with it, it was like popular science for intelligent non-scientists. Think of it as a progenitor of Wired magazine today. Informative, not too dumbed down, and not just full of new gadgets, but ground breaking ideas and discoveries.

As far as Penthouse Magazine, it started the post Vietnam War dialogue with veterans, in its Vietnam Veterans Adviser column, that ran 20 years and was about the only well read public forum for veterans for much of that time. It also gets credit for being among the first to note and highlight those veterans suffering from exposure to Agent Orange.

So credit where credit is due. It’s a pity that the good stuff never really made it.

[boop]

Al Goldstein still publishes “Screw” magazine. I thought Hugh Hefner would go first at 85. I still don’t know haow Larry Flynt is alive, being in the whelchair since 1976.

[hampdenkid]

You got it, buddy. Well done!

[montanajoe]

So where are the pictures...

[tickmeister]

Lot of condemnation going around, guess nobody around here ever looked at any of these magazines. As Dennis Miller once said, let he who has a free hand cast the first stone.

[OrangeHoof]

Ok, this is one funeral I wouldn’t mind watching the nutburgers picket. Better him than our fine soldiers.

Could be a fun-filled service too if the eulogy is written like the Penthouse Letters...

[I Drive Too Fast]

Well, you could count Simon MacCorkindale (was in Falcon Crest) who died on the 14th of October. 58 years old.