Nancy Jo Hooper Bio
Nancy Jo Hooper was an American glamour and nude model. Born Nancy Ann Harrison on July 17, 1943, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, she has also been credited as Nancy Hooper. Playboy named her its February 1964 Playmate at 20. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Hooper had natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 36-21-36.
Nancy Jo Hooper’s route to Playboy began far from the usual modeling circuit. She had spent her life in the same small Georgia town and had travelled no farther than Savannah when strangers at a local drugstore suggested she looked like someone who belonged in Playboy. The encounter stayed with her. Realizing that magazine scouts were unlikely to discover her by accident, Hooper decided to make the first move herself and sent photographs to Playboy for consideration.
The response carried her considerably farther than she had ever been before. Playboy invited Hooper to Chicago for test photographs and supplied the plane ticket, making the trip her first experience of air travel as well as her first real encounter with the magazine world. For someone who described herself as naturally shy, the leap from small-town Georgia to a Chicago photo studio was substantial. She later viewed becoming a Playmate less as the beginning of a carefully planned modeling career than as an experience she would remember as an important part of her youth.
Home remained close even while everything around her was suddenly unfamiliar. Hooper was particularly close to her sister Doris and made a point of calling her from Chicago to share what was happening. She joked that the telephone probably suited her personality anyway: being shy, she thought she sometimes made a better impression when she could talk without standing face-to-face with someone.
Water was where Hooper felt considerably less reserved. Swimming, boating, fishing and water skiing ranked among her favorite pursuits, giving her an active life far removed from photo studios and city streets. That contrast is what gives her Playboy story its charm: there was no long modeling apprenticeship or calculated pursuit of celebrity, just a suggestion overheard in a Georgia drugstore, a packet of snapshots sent north and a first airplane ride that unexpectedly carried her into Playboy.
