Talk:Gloria Root

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The Social Security Death Index search at http://ssdi.rootsweb.com returns a listing for a Gloria M. Root with a birth date matching the Playmate data and a date of death of January 8, 2006 (not 2005 as was previously shown). Place of death isn't shown, but last place of residence is given as San Francisco. --Southportav 16:06, 4 July 2006 (UTC)southportav

What is the citation for Gloria Root's death? I have found no verification of this information, nor was it listed in the newest edition of The Playmate Book, which was published late last year. --3finger 21:34, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

gloria root was the student of richard dodson at the department of city and regional planning, UC Berkeley, circa 1975. fiercely independent, modern and insatiably curious, some mystery remains as to how she was wooed by the courtly, southern richard in the late 1970s. richard was a ladies man and even bird dogged me one night when I took him with me and my date for dinner at the old Ordinary in Oakland. after they were an item, I flew in from new york and went into SF for dinner. we took two cars, and she drove mine on the way back to berkeley. we found it abandoned on the top ribbon of the interchange at the oakland side of the bay bridge. I waited there in a windy squall and he went home to monitor his phone. she had merely taken a ride from an older black man in a very old pontiac to get gas, thinking that was the problem. she called me a fat, male, chauvist, capitalist pig once on christmas 1980 at lake tahoe. phil armstrong, philarmstro@yahoo.com

Drug Smuggling Playmate

When her centerfold was published in late 1969, Gloria Root was in no position to run down to the local newsstand and buy a copy.

She was serving 10 months in a Greek prison for drug smuggling.

According to a Chicago Daily News article (reprinted in the LA Times, 18 Jan 1970, p. A7), Gloria was arrested along with a boyfriend for smuggling almost 40 pounds of hashish valued at $50,000 (about $280,000 in 2006 dollars; see Tom's Inflation Calculator at: http://www.halfhill.com/inflation.html)

Gloria was sentenced to 18 months (later reduced).Her boyfriend, Corry Parker, 20, who she said she loved, was sentenced to five years. (He reduced his own sentence to nothing by escaping shortly after the trial.)

"I myself feel compassion for her," said the prison warden. "But her past is against her. She's been running around the world with different boys."

Gloria called the warden's prison "a slum" and said that mice jump across the beds.

Meanwhile, the December 1969 Playboy made the rounds of the US Embassy in Greece, as officials there "made jokes about who might be the first to visit her."

Asked by a Greek-American visitor if she was guilty, Gloria, averting her eyes, replied: "I didn't know about.... Even if I'd known it, I wouldn't have done anything about it. I'm not sorry we did it. I'm sorry we got caught."

The 21-year-old former telephone service sales rep told her visitor that she was using the money from the Playboy shoot to tour Europe with her boyfriend, eventually arriving in Afghanistan, where hashish was legal. Their drug-ladened VW was stopped in Greece, where hashish is illegal.

Asked how she got into "this mess," Gloria replied: "It all started when I was working for the telephone company. I was bored to death. I couldn't stand it. Then one day I tried methadrine (a trademark name for methamphatamine; see the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary athttp://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary) and I just never went back to work again." Around mid-July 1970, Gloria was released and returned to the US. (LA Times, 25 July 1970, p. 3.)

She eventually went on to earn multiple advanced college degrees and to distinguish herself in the world of business. (See the SF Chronicle's obituary at the link on this page.)

Hezekiah-1812 21:57, 24 August 2006 (UTC)