Larry Flynt

Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr. was born on November 1, 1942, in Lakeville, a small isolated community in the hills of Magoffin County, in eastern Kentucky. He was the son of Edith (Arnett) and Larry Claxton Flynt, a sharecropper. His parents separated when he was ten, and he moved with his mother and brother to Hamlet, Indiana. Flynt ran away from home at age 16 in 1958 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. Discharged a year later, he took odd jobs as a farm picker, dishwasher and manual laborer. Moving on to Dayton, Ohio, he enlisted in the US Navy in 1960 and worked as a radar operator on the USS Enterprise until October 1962. His next experiment in strip clubs proved more of a success, in particular the Hustler Club which opened in 1968. By 1971 Flynt owned a string of Hustler strip clubs all over Ohio, in Dayton, Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, Cincinnati and Akron.