High-school drop-out Larry Flynt, who got his start in Dayton and whose life was portrayed in the hit 1996 movie “The People vs Larry Flynt” has died.
Flynt, 78, was the publisher of Hustler magazine and chairman of an adult entertainment empire that also includes television and video services, retail stores — including one in Monroe — websites, and a Los Angeles-area casino.
Flynt’s youngest daughter, Theresa Flynt, told the Dayton Daily News that her father died Wednesday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was in the ICU and had been battling multiple health issues, including renal disease and more recently pancreatic cancer, and that his heart gave out. Theresa Flynt said she and her father’s wife, Elizabeth, were by his side.
“He died peacefully, it was peaceful,” she said.
Flynt grew up in Kentucky and came to Dayton in 1964. According to a 1997 Dayton Daily News profile, Flynt worked on a production line of General Motor Corp.’s Inland Division. He saved money and eventually bought his first bar, the Keewee, from his mother in the 500 block of Milburn Avenue in the McCook/Old North Dayton area and renamed it Larry’s Hillbilly Haven.
, who originally was from Kentucky, got his start in Dayton where ran Larry’s Hillbilly Haven on Milburn Avenue before he opened several more upscale Hustler Cocktail Lounge “go-go” bars during the mid-1960s. His first publication was a tabloid called Bachelor’s Beat he launched in 1968 in Dayton, according to Dayton Daily News archives.
He later started Hustler, which grew out of a newsletter to club members started in March 1972 and initially was printed in Dayton before Flynt moved his Hustler headquarters to Columbus and later to Los Angeles, the archives show.
As founder of Hustler, one of the most explicit adult magazines, Flynt challenged social mores, championed the First Amendment and was a target for the religious right and feminist groups, the AP reported.
A serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin tried to kill Flynt in 1978 in Lawrenceville, Georgia, in a shooting that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Franklin said he was upset by interracial photo spreads in Flynt’s magazine. More than 35 years later, Flynt tried to save Franklin from lethal injection in Missouri so he would instead spend the rest of his life in prison, according to an AP report. Franklin, who never was convicted in Flynt’s shooting, died by lethal injection on Nov. 20, 2013.
In 1988, Larry Flynt won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case on the First Amendment, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell.
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Originally Posted by pcosmar
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