WI Hugh Hefner is killed on American Airlines Flight 191?

On May 25, 1979, American Airlines Flight 191, on takeoff from Chicago O'Hare airport to Los Angeles International Airport, lost one of its engines (as in, the engine literally fell off the left wing of the DC-10 (1)) and crashed just short of a trailer park near O'Hare. All 271 passengers and crew were killed, along with 2 people on the ground. To this day, it's still the worst passenger plane crash in American history.

Among the passengers were Playboy managing editor Sheldon Wax, his wife Judith (who contributed to the magazine; most notably for her "Christmas cards" that were satirical poems to various public figures) and Playboy magazine fiction editor Vicki Halder, along with several members of the American Booksellers Association on their way to a convention, where they were to have a joint party hosted by...Hugh Hefner.

So, here's the WI: Hugh Hefner is somehow aboard AA Flight 191 and is killed.

Effects, anyone?

(1) It was later determined to be improper maintenance of the engine. This and the Turkish Airlines DC-10 crash (caused by an door malfunction which had been warned about after a similar incident in the US two years earlier), which killed 346 people, helped ruin the reputation of the DC-10 as a whole...
 
Effects, anyone?

I'm gonna guess not much, unless Hefner's successor decides to make the magazine more sexually explicit in order to do a belated catch-up with Penthouse and Hustler. The story I've heard is that Hef was pretty reluctant about even showing pubic hair in the early 70s(allegedly stayed awake all night staring at the photos before agreeing to publish), and I guess it's possible he was still holding out on further raunchification in the late 70s.

At some point in the early 80s, of course, he handed the magazine over to his daughter, but I wonder what sort of editorial control he was still wielding behind the scenes. Would Christie have wanted to go for more explicit shots, but dad put the veto on it?
 
Apart from all the above, I don't think Hefner or even Playboy had much cultural influence after the early 70s, even in the world of porn. Industry players were tripping over themselves to all be raucnhier than the other guy, and there didn't seem to be a huge rush to emulate Hef's "Girl Next Door" brand, except maybe for some of the Paul Raymond stuff from the UK. And Playboy had stopped branching out into legitimate film(eg. Polanski's Macbeth) and TV, some time earlier.
 
Though on the level of personal image...

If Hef dies in '79, I believe that means he spent more of his professional life living in Chicago than in LA. We thus might not have quite the same received image of him as a cheesy old guy lounging by his pool with bikini-clad bimbos all day.

(I'm sure he was doing that kind of stuff in Chicago as well, but that kind of lifestyle, or at least our perception of it, tends to be accentuated by an association with SoCal culture.)
 
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