Hugh Hefner built his empire in Chicago, then changed the world

Some years ago, sitting in his castlelike mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, Hugh Hefner was telling a visitor about the Halloween party taking place there in a few days. It would be - what? - the 7,435th party of Hefner's exceptional charmed and successful life, a lavish bash for 1,000 or so of his closet and most comely friends.

"Now, this is a costume party," said Hefner. "You will have to wear a costume."

"I was thinking," said the visitor, "that, with all due respect, I might get some pajamas, a robe, a pipe, slippers and a Pepsi and going as, well, the young Hugh Hefner."

The then 73-year-old Hefner laughed. He gave a sly smile and said, "I'm sorry. That won't work. I'm going as the young Hugh Hefner."

Influential and controversial, admired and vilified, and seemingly forever young, the Chicago-born publisher of Playboy magazine and the Bunny-emblazoned empire that it spawned, Hugh Marston Hefner died peacefully at home Wednesday from natural causes. He was 91.

That life started on April 9, 1926, at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, where he was born the first of the two children_younger brother Keith was born in 1929; he died in 2016 at 87 - of Grace and Glenn Hefner, she a schoolteacher and he an accountant and both originally from Nebraska.

The family lived in Chicago at 1922 N. New England Ave. in the Galewood neighborhood on the Northwest Side, where they attended Methodist church and the children went to Sayre Elementary School. When he was 8 years old, Hugh Hefner started a school newspaper called The Pepper, despite a warning from a concerned teacher that "if he continues to waste time on this, he will never amount to anything."

"But I was a smart little boy," he told a Tribune reporter in 1999.

He attended Steinmetz High School and later recalled, "The best time of my life before Playboy was my last two years at Steinmetz. It was a coming-of-age time. It was the first time I went steady. I was a class leader, writing and performing in plays and shows, working on the paper. The things I enjoyed were the things between classes."

One of his passions was cartooning, and as a teenager he created a magazine called Shudder and had a Shudder Club for all of his pals. He also started a cartoon autobiography called "School Daze," which he