Up in Wisconsin, there's a factory that churns out some of the nicest women you'd ever want to meet. Uncomplicated, guileless, fresh-faced and outdoorsy. How they do it is anybody's guess, but we're thankful it's in operation. Otherwise, we'd never have met Sandy Cagle. The secret may lie in the loc
...ation: Smack in the middle of North America, far enough from both coasts to avoid being overwhelmed by pop-culture trivia, Wisconsin quietly goes about its business of producing milk, cheese, heavy machinery and, in its largest city, Milwaukee, the gentle brew that's synonymous with its name. Milwaukee also produced Sandy and she still lives in its southern suburb of Franklin.
A few years ago, Sandy left Wisconsin and came to Chicago. She was a little frustrated. She had tried secretarial work in a hospital and found satisfaction lacking. "Believe it or not," she says, "I just couldn't stand the paper cuts." A short stint as a Playboy Bunny at the Playboy Resort and Country Club at Lake Geneva was too confining. Another job, making carburetors, proved no more suitable. Somebody has to make carburetors, but Sandy Cagle making carburetors is an obvious waste.
She was not wasted in Chicago. As soon as she crossed the state line, the alarm went off in Playboy's 11th-floor Photo Studio and her career was launched as a photographic model. Before long, Sandy was all over the magazine. You may have seen her many times as one of the beautiful but nameless models in a product shot or a fashion layout. Anything that called for her special brand of Wisconsin freshness. While we found her captivating, our colleagues in Japan found her practically irresistible. So much so that she was used as the cover girl of our Japanese edition four times in one year.
When the Overseas Press Club magazine, Dateline, was produced as a Playboy look-alike (see The World of Playboy, February 1979), Sandy got the call for that cover, too.
If all that exposure conjures up images of an aggressive, big-city mannequin, think again. Miss Cagle is soft-spoken almost to the point of being inaudible and so timid only her closest friends know what she's really like. Big-city living, she thinks, is for making money. For fun, Sandy takes to the country, where she winds up a snowmobile to the red line through the Wisconsin countryside. Or she'll take off for a camping trip, horseback riding or bicycling. Any activity that puts her in touch with nature and, through the solitude, with herself.
Because she's in such great shape, she's often called for modeling duties that require athleticism. Such as the jeans commercial she shot in Alpine Valley that required that she fall down a hill on skis, wearing the client's jeans, of course. They did 20 takes of her falling, plus 12 takes of her on the towrope. The shot they finally used: Sandy walking upright, skis on her shoulder.
It's no wonder she likes to get away. Back to the country, where things makes sense. "Wisconsin is the most beautiful place in the world in the fall. And year round there's so much to do, everything from skiing to sun-bathing." Which doesn't mean she's going to give up modeling. Clients will just have to call her in America's Dairyland. That's where she'll be for the near future, planning her modeling career, saving money for her own health spa and communing with nature. City slickers, eat your hearts out.
