It may come as no small irony that former Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner’s most enduring contribution to New Trier High School was to help girls to take off their skirts.

Hefner, a member of the class of 1970, played a crucial role in helping change the strict dress code at her alma mater.

“When I started as a freshman, girls had to wear skirts,” she said, sipping on white wine and mingling at the school’s first Alumni Achievement Award banquet on March 22, for which she was one of 10 honorees.

Hefner, with a grin that evidenced a pride in her actions more than 40 years ago, recalled organizing a protest with some of her friends at school — they’d all wear pants the next day.

“Well, only about half of them did,” she remembered.

The others? They brought skirts in their bags — just in case.

Not Hefner. She was marched to the principal’s office, where she argued her case.

She wasn’t impressed with the principal’s rationale.

“He said, ‘If we don’t have a dress code, the kids will turn up in bathing suits,’” Hefner remembers.

The following year, the requirement that girls wear skirts was lifted, much to Hefner’s delight.

Hefner said she was “surprised and honored” to be among the first group of alumni honored by the school — a fundraising effort sponsored by the New Trier Educational Foundation.

Tickets to the event cost $75, and the 300 seats quickly sold out for the event, held at the Sunset Ridge Country Club in Northfield.

Hefner was honored alongside fellow alumni cancer researcher Todd Golub ’81; postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin ’38; market research guru Arthur Nielsen Jr. ’37; former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ’50; Nobel Prize winning physicist Jack Steinberger ’38; U.S. diplomat Richard Williamson ’67; Holocaust survivor and educator Sam Harris ’54; ophthalmologist Geoffrey Tabin ’74, who has “spent his career working to prevent cataract  blindness in developing nations; and television actor Rainn Wilson ’84.

Halprin, Rumsfeld and Wilson were not able to attend the ceremony.

When the honorees were announced in December, a movement of alumni joined together to protest Rumsfeld’s inclusion, some calling him a “war criminal” for his  tenure in the President George W. Bush administration.

There were no protests at the event itself, however, which began with a cocktail hour while members of the New Trier Symphony Orchestra performed. Members of the press were not invited to the awards ceremony which followed.

But four of the seven attending honorees agreed to speak to journalists before the event began.

Hefner said New Trier High School may not have played a role in her specific career path, but it laid a good foundation.

“I really didn’t expect to go into business or go to work for my father,” she said. “I definitely think the education in terms of the intellectual rigor of it and the engendering of intellectual curiosity was very important for me.”

After graduating summa cum laude from Brandeis University, Hefner began working at her father’s company, Playboy Enterprises. She served as CEO from 1988-2009, when she stepped down to devote more time to charitable work.

Jack Steinberger

Jack Steinberger, a member of the New Trier class of 1938, later went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988.

He later donated the medal to his alma mater’s science department. He traveled from his home in Switzerland to attend the high school’s Achievement Awards ceremony.

“If I had a Nobel Prize, it was because I’ve had a lot of luck in my life, and a lot of that was due to the education I’ve gotten, especially here at New Trier,” Steinberger said.

Todd Golub

Todd Golub graduated from New Trier in 1981 before going on to become a leading cancer researcher.

But while New Trier gave Golub his first exposure to biology and scientific curiosity, it almost veered him toward a different career path.

During his tenure at the school, Golub was also part of the backstage crew and did lighting design for the drama department.

“It was so intense during New Trier that I even flirted with, ‘Do I want to do this? Go to college and major in lighting design?’” Golub recalled.

In the end he stuck with his first love — science. He’s never returned to drama.

“It’s something you can’t really dabble in,” Golub said.

And now, he’s glad he did. He said his field is on the verge of important discoveries.

“This is a real tipping point in cancer research,” he said, noting the advancements made by the Human Genome Project which his lab works on.

“There are reasons for patients to be excited,” Golub said.

Sam Harris

Sam Harris was raised in Northbrook, where he was adopted as a 12-year-old after escaping Nazi-occupied Poland. His parents there paid New Trier to allow him to attend high school even though he didn’t live in the district.

“New Trier was probably appreciated by me more than anyone else who ever went there,” Harris said.

He likened it to “not even eating chocolate for 20 years to being dropped off at the chocolate factory.”

Harris gleefully remembered consuming himself in as many of the school’s activities as possible.

“I tried it all — football, baseball, wrestling, student council. You name it, I tried it all,” he said.

He was even elected president of his sophomore class — an accomplishment that still brings a smile to his face.

A former insurance executive, Harris is also an author and public speaker about his Holocaust experiences, as well as one of the driving forces behind the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, which opened in 2009.

He said he owes his successes in life to New Trier. And returning as part of the first group of alumni to receive an award made him especially proud.

“For me, this was probably one of the best honors I could receive anywhere,” Harris said.