SALYERSVILLE, Ky. - The easiest way up to the Flynt family graveyard is Althea's way.
The dead get carried. The living have to negotiate a dirt-and-gravel drive so steep the
Pearly Gates might wait at the top.
This is the last road Larry Flynt will travel. When the notorious publisher of Hustler
magazine dies, he'll follow his late, beloved wife, Althea, down Kentucky 1090 and up one last
hill.
Not far from the Mountain Parkway, high on a lonesome knoll in Appalachia, is a monument
with two heart-shaped marble gravestones. One bears Althea's name. The other, waiting, is
inscribed with the name Lawrence Claxton Flynt.
His presence lingers
Imagine: The controversial pornographer buried beneath a sappy Valentine. It's the only
predictable journey, the only direction foretold, in a life of wild rides and left turns.
It's coming home.
Larry Flynt, America's flamboyant king of raunch, was born here, in a county where the men
wear white socks.
Magoffin Countians are conservative and unassuming. Salyersville, a town of 1,300, is as
unadorned as its residents. The town doesn't even have a theater where folks can go watch The
People Vs. Larry Flynt. And there's only one place in town - the East Kentucky Liquor Barn out
on the Mountain Parkway - that sells Mr. Flynt's controversial skin magazine.
But his presence lingers, and it is welcome here. He's one of Salyersville's own. Tom and
Pat Frazier, longtime friends of Mr. Flynt, had a movie poster hanging in the window of their
Salyersville drug store for a while.
''There's an old saying in the mountains,'' said Tim Bostic, editor of The Salyersville
Independent and an old friend of Mr. Flynt's. ''The rascal might be a damn rascal, but he's
our rascal.''
Though there are many churches in Magoffin County - some in trailers, several in
cinder-block buildings - not a single preacher has taken on Claxton Flynt's boy.
''I certainly disagree with his products, the pornographic material,'' said the Rev. Wayne
Mead of the Stinson Free Will Baptist Church near where Mr. Flynt grew up.
''But I'm not going to be somebody's ax to chop on Larry.''
The family name
The Flynt name is respected in Magoffin County. Larry's cousin Teddy Flynt has a law office
downtown on East Maple Street, right across from the courthouse. Larry's father, Claxton,
still plays Rook in the back of the B&R Grocery out on Kentucky 7.
And Jimmy Flynt, who in the late 1970s tried to have his famous brother and business
partner declared incompetent and removed from corporate office, maintains a huge home out near
the Lakeville Trading Post.
The house, an imposing wood structure that resembles a ski lodge, stands out among the
mobile homes, shacks and modest ranch houses along Kentucky 1090.
Even by Eastern Kentucky standards, Magoffin County is poor. It has the third-highest
unemployment rate in Kentucky, at 16.5 percent. Many men drive off each morning to work in the
coal mines in Pike and Martin counties. There aren't many jobs left in Magoffin.
Folks here think it's great that a local boy made it big - no matter how Larry Flynt did
it.
''He left a one-horse town to make a living,'' Larry Salyer said as he plunked down his
money at Kozy Korner Kitchen.
Seeing the show
Many younger Magoffin County residents, perhaps feeling a certain kinship with the rebel in
the wheelchair, plan to see the movie. Some just want to see how Salyersville and her people
are depicted.
But catching the movie required driving to Pikeville or Lexington.
Brenda Williams, who works the lunch counter at the Kozy Korner, called the big theater in
Paintsville last week to see when it would start showing the Flynt movie. It was to start this
weekend, they told her. She planned to go.
Surena Minix spoke almost defiantly of her desire to see the movie.
''I want to watch it because he was born and raised here, and he made it,'' she said,
arching her eyebrows.
Two weeks ago, 200 Magoffin County residents traveled to Cincinnati to attend the premiere
of the movie. No church pastors were there, but the county judge-executive and a few other
movers and shakers made the show.
''The People for Larry Flynt,'' said a headline last week in The Salyersville
Independent.
Most famous son
The turnout surprised Mr. Bostic. Until then, townsfolk at the Kozy Korner or out at the
Liquor Barn had said very little about the movie or Mr. Flynt.
''Most of the people have ignored it,'' Mrs. Frazier said.
That's not surprising - even though Mr. Flynt is easily the most famous person Magoffin
County has produced.
''Ever since his name became synonymous with smut or porn, and even with the success he's
acquired, the people here never have really openly responded,'' Mr. Bostic said.
The old men who hang out talking on the handicapped ramp outside the Magoffin County
Courthouse just aren't interested.
''He made a lot of money, by gawd, with them dirty books, by gawd,'' T.J. Harnick said,
clutching a Styrofoam cup full of brown tobacco juice.
Said Mr. Bostic: ''The people here, their greatest attribute is that they're unpretentious.
They're not easily impressed.
''When you leave here, it doesn't matter what you accomplish while you're gone. When you
come back, you're still somebody's boy.''
Coming home
That Salyersville achieved national exposure because of a man who's widely reviled seems
fitting. Magoffin County has gained statewide notoriety for all manner of dubious
distinction.
In 1989, a Magoffin man threatened to sue social workers who had accused him of sexually
abusing his young daughter - despite a court's ruling upholding dismissal of the suit.
In 1988, four men, including the brother-in-law of the county judge-executive, were charged
with election fraud. And the schools superintendent was hit with a federal civil-rights
lawsuit alleging that he had improperly used his powers to suppress political dissent.
In 1987, the county shut down when a divided fiscal court failed to pass a new budget,
causing the electric bill and a few others to go unpaid.
In 1986, 17 members of seven related families were indicted on charges of sexual abuse and
criminal abuse of children in a case that shocked authorities.
And in 1981, the sheriff was indicted in an election scandal.
Perhaps no other Kentucky county could have sent forth Larry Flynt. And no other will claim
him when his strange journey is done.
His life followed the unpredictable, zig-zag-crazy path of the Licking River, which starts
out trickling from a mountainside near Salyersville and flows north until it empties into the
Ohio River across from Cincinnati, where Mr. Flynt hit it big.
But he will return for good one day, headed up the hillside past that red, metal gate
beside Kentucky 1090.
''I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received,'' reads the
inscription on his heart-shaped gravestone.
It's the only predictable journey, the only direction foretold, in a life of wild rides and
left turns.
It's Althea's way.
Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears on Sundays and
Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.