RIP Larry Flynt, son of Kentucky and Ohio, who is known for so much more than can fit in a tweet. I will remember him most for something he said when I saw him speak in college, c. 1976: "I think a woman's vagina has as much personality as her face."

This line ended up in "The People v. Larry Flynt," so presumably he said it a lot. I should do a thread on what it was like to be in Central Ohio when Hustler began making its mark; just the stories other journalists told about working in the same office as Hustler are amazing.

I knew so many people who worked there, mainly because of Ohio magazine, which Larry launched at the height of his fame, and planned as a worthy competitor for Texas Monthly. But I also had a friend who worked on one of the phone banks for Leasure Time Products, i.e., sex toys.

Leasure Time being named for Althea Leasure, his late wife, who had her own action-packed life. The sole survivor of a murder/suicide of her entire family, perpetrated by her father. (She hid under the bed.) She was raised in an institution, ran away at 14 and started stripping.

Ended up in one of Larry's clubs. There was one in downtown Columbus; my BIL used to eat lunch there. In the great tradition of strip clubs, they practically gave the food away, and he said if you got there early, you could get a sandwich cheap before the dancing started.

Anyway, if you saw the movie you know the story of how Hustler got started. Ohio mag was less well-known, mainly because it didn't last long. He started scooping up respected journos from Ohio papers with big salary offers, and they had quite a staff for about a year.

Mike Harden, former Dispatch columnist, worked there. Hustler and Ohio were on different sides of the same office floor. One of his colleagues went to the men's room and found a statuesque woman in there, nude but for her heels, putting on lipstick in the mirror.

Mike was sick one day and missed payday. The secretary told him he could pick up his check on the weekend, because Hustler was closing and she'd leave it at their reception desk. He walked in with his two little boys, about toddler age, and as he crossed the threshold realized...

...that the Hustler lobby had a mural-size photo of Althea, nude of course, bent over and, as he put it, "looking at the photographer the way the center looks at the quarterback in the shotgun formation." The boys were fascinated, then both bent over and did the same pose.

There were other stories. The Christmas parties were generally corporation-wide affairs, which meant Hustler and Ohio and Leasure Time employees, all drinking from a punch bowl with a giant dildo suspended over it.

My friend who worked at Leasure Time won employee of the month once. How? He suggested that they change the message on the overnight ans. machine. It had been a girl with a breathy voice, leaving a sexy message about how the call center was off "tending to their OWN pleasures..."

She told callers to leave their orders at the sound of the tone. Every morning the tape was filled with guys masturbating and talking dirty. My friend suggested changing it a guy with a straightforward, unsexy message. Soon the tape had actual orders on it. Employee of the month!

Reader, I tried to get in on the action. I actually wrote and asked for a summer internship. The rejection letter came on the company letterhead, which had a beaver in a hardhat on it.

Larry married Althea in a big white wedding in a downtown church, then whisked her home to his mansion in Bexley, which was across the street from the Columbus School for Girls, and you can just imagine how the parents felt about that. But they were good neighbors, I heard.

But soon they'd gone where all misfits end up -- Los Angeles. My only complaint with the movie was, for the sake of narrative smoothness, they relocated the whole story to Cincinnati. Cincinnati! A self-satisfied town run by German Catholics with giant logs up their butts.

And while Larry wasn't exactly embraced by Columbus, he was kind of genially tolerated. I'm proud of my hometown that way. When Larry was shot, Ohio was hit by layoffs and all that agony. Eventually sold to the Wolfe family, and it became a dull travel mag. RIP Larry and /fin.

OK, one more: When Althea died, a writer at the San Jose Mercury-News wrote a wonderful remembrance of her; he'd worked at Hustler when it was in L.A. Described how she'd demonstrate the poses she wanted for the pictorials. How she sold her Rolls one month to pay the printer.

The Rolls was a gift from Larry after she bet him she could make a better sloppy joe than any of his other wives. It had chinchilla upholstery. She wanted to publish a cookbook about, as she put it, "one hunnert thangs you kin do with hamburger."