Retro Raunch Revisit

This month marks the 50th anniversay of the publication debut of HUSTLER magazine (1974) which initially started as a newsletter in January 1972 to promote & advertise a Cincinnati strip joint (Hustler Club) run by Larry Flynt & his brother Jimmy. It later extended to other Ohio club locations in Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, and Columbus, before moving to full magazine format. HUSTLER is credited as the first skin mag to show 'pink shots' (pics of spread vaginas).


JULY 1974 ON THE WORLD STAGE "You're going to see another first," Christine Chubbuck told her television audience during a live broadcast. Then she raised a .38-caliber revolver to her right temple and shot herself infront of an audience of thousands. The newswoman died 14hrs later without regaining consciousness. Miss Chubbuck, 29, was hosting an edition of "Suncoast Digest," a regular half hour program on Florida station WXLT for over a year, and it began uneventfully. The day's guest was a meteorologist waiting to tell the viewers about weather forecasting equipment. Chubbuck had just introduced a film clip of a shootout at a bar involving police but something went wrong; a technical difficulty and the clip did not appear on screen. After a few seconds of dead air, she skillfully covered the mechanical problem by reading a news item then said in a cool & calm demeanor at 9:38AM, "in keeping with channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in blood & guts in living color, you're going to see another first, an attempted suicide." She pulled the gun out from a shopping bag under the horseshoe-shaped news desk, raised it to her head, and before the two women in the camera crew or her guest could intervene, she fired, slumped forward, and the screen went black. Blood splattered on a carpet beneath her chair, and stained her notes. A minute or so later, with the station having switched programming, a movie came on the air. News director Mike Simmons said he found Chubbuck's script for the program included the shooting. The script was written in the third person and listed her condition after the shooting as "critical." He said, "She had written something like,'TV-40 news personality Christine Chubbuck shot herself in a live broadcast this morning on a Channel 40 talk program. She was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital where she remains in critical condition.'" He added that Chubbuck had told reporter Rob Smith a week ago that she had bought a gun and that she thought it would be "a neat idea to blow herself away on the broadcast, but she said it in a joking manner and as soon as she said it she laughed." Smith did not take her seriously. Horrified viewers who saw the shooting flooded the sheriff's department with phone calls. Once at the station, police took possession of the videotape recording. Chubbuck, an attractive native of Hudson,OH had formerly worked for tv stations in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Canton,OH. She was described by stunned & saddened coworkers as "a very nice girl, a dynamic sparkplug outspoken on some things, very liberal on some things... an easy person to get along with." Her heartbroken family have told investigators that she talked of suicide the previous weekend and how she mentioned being depressed but why she took her life in the manner she did was unknown. There has been suggestion that her having become upset due to a change in the talk show format that wanted to switch over to more crime news coverage, may have contributed to a disturbed mental state. It is believed Chubbuck holds the dubious morbid distinction of being the first person to ever commit suicide on live television.