Holy Cow! My strange sense of schooling.

"Who told you that you were naked?"

I went to a prep school for my teenage years, from 1958-1963. As part of the goal of broadening our education, the school would have guest speakers come in from time to time. One mid-week morning, we gathered in what was called the Common Room where, unlike the auditorium, we could sit on the floor close to the speaker. As we entered, a man dressed smartly in a suit and tie, wearing glasses, as I recall, was waiting for us.

We had not been told beforehand what he was going to say. He had an easel next to him on which he unveiled pictures that illustrated his talk. He spoke to us about a subject that he was gravely concerned about, a very serious matter, indeed, he said.

That subject was the fact that all animals are naked. And this was very wrong.

He declared that it was indecent that animals walked around naked. And that we should rectify that wrong by clothing them. For modesty’s sake. His organization, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals—also known as SINA—was created to remedy this. The animals’ unclothed state was an affront—as it should be to everyone. He was, I recall, especially adamant about cows and horses. He said, I remember, “A nude horse is a rude horse.” It was, in the end, a matter of morality. It would also make the animals feel better about themselves. It was humiliating for them to be naked, he assured us. They knew.

We were enthralled. He was dead serious.

“Should all animals wear clothes?” one of us asked. “Even mice?”

(I am repeating the dialogue as best I remember it. It was a long time ago. Details may not be precise, but I’m not making anything up.)

“Any animal higher than 4 inches or longer than 6 inches,” he said.

“So, cats and dogs?” someone said.

“Yes, certainly. And, of course, horses and cows, the larger animals, especially.”

Not a hint of humor.

“How would you do that?” one boy asked. “Wouldn’t it cost a lot of money?”

“We have members that contribute to our organization,” the man replied, evenly. “That would pay for the cost.”

One of us asked him, “Well, if you put clothes on a cow, how do they go to the bathroom?”

“That’s a question everyone asks,” the man replied with a slight smile. “The clothes would be designed so as to allow the animal to perform their normal bodily functions.”

He had a poster of a horse wearing pants he presented. It was a drawing, not a photograph.

We sat and listened, rapt. I remember thinking something to the effect that, yes, we can clothe ourselves, but what about the poor animals who can’t? They must feel so embarrassed, naked and exposed like that. What’s wrong with us? The point is, I believed him. Or, I certainly wanted to. Clearly, this must be real. Besides, the school had sanctioned the visit, hadn’t they?

After answering a few more questions and distributing some information—I wish I still had that!—the man left. We prep school boys were already screwed up enough about sex and bodies, especially being at an all-male institution. Now, here was someone coming in and telling us that we should feel guilty about letting our pets walk around naked. We had enough guilt to contend with just about masturbation. Now, this?

I thought about all this for a while. And then, after a week or so, other matters came forward, and that day slowly receded in my mind.

Fast forward forward. Many many years later, recalling this talk when I was an adult, I asked myself, did I dream this? Did this actually happen? Did a man come to our school and advocate for animals wearing clothes? That it was indecent not to clothe them? When I told people the story, they were incredulous at best.

So, I did some research, and, lo and behold, I found a Wiki entry for Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. It turns out that this was real. It was a long-running hoax. But a hoax that people—including me, my fellow students, many others and even journalists—believed. For years. The “founder,” a certain Alan Abel, convinced the then young and unemployed actor, Buck Henry, to play the role of the organization’s president, G. Clifford Prout, Jr.

Recognize Buck Henry?

So, Buck Henry had been at our school! “Henry,” as Wiki explains, “who had improv training, was able to play Prout with an intense deadpan sincerity, as well as to stay in character through unscripted interviews.” And that’s what I remember. His utter deadpan seriousness. This is the same Buck Henry who, years later, participated in those remarkable Samurai skits with John Belushi on Saturday Night Live.

Decent Americans protest the indecency of naked animals.

SINA, I discovered, was taken seriously. After all, what could be more indecent to decent Americans than an animal’s private parts exposed to the world?!? Even the Harvard Crimson published a piece about SINA in 1963, titled, “College May Ban Animal Nudity.” Reading it today, it’s hard to determine if the writer was serious, or not. I think he was. If not, the piece probably would have appeared in the Lampoon. You decide.

I hadn’t been dreaming. This happened. What a crazy school I attended. Or at least one desperate for speakers of any sort.

SINA flourished from 1959-1963—my years at prep school—until it was finally unmasked by none other than Walter Cronkite, the most renowned television newscaster at the time. SINA’s founder, the aforementioned Alan Abel, was interviewed by NPR in 2014 and explained how this ruse worked and how he got away with it for so long. Indeed, for a while, there were a lot of true believers in the notion that we should clothe our fellow animals and save them from the indignity of having their naked selves exposed to the world.

I’ve encountered worse causes.