LIFE

Communal porn, hippie fiends, Elvis — Indy in the ‘70s

Will Higgins
will.higgins@indystar.com
7/7/01 Flashback Two of the originators of a proposed domed sports arena for Indianapolis Bruce Flanagan (left) and Bill York (right) accept a petition on Jan. 31 1970 from Bill Bowman (second from left) and Kevin Cook. The boys gathered 10000 names backing the CAP-A-DOME project spearheaded by Flanagan and York. At the time Houston's Astrodome was the only domed stadium in the country but the men envisioned a domed facility for Downtown Indianapolis as well one that would seat about 50000 spectators and be large enough to host numerous sports including baseball. The ABA Pacers had been playing at the Indiana State Fairgrounds Coliseum since 1967 and the city was divided over building a domed stadium. But due in large part to Flanagan andYork's efforts momentum was built for a new facility. Each man put about $10000 into the project during 1969 and 1970 having plans drawn up and trying to get political backing. But when they saw that financing was not going to materialize the CAP-A-DOME project was dropped. Richard Lugar at that time the mayor of Indianapolis threw his support to a smaller-scale domed stadium which became Market Square Arena. The following year on Oct. 20 1971 groundbreaking ceremonies were held for MSA. It opened in 1974 and closed in 1999. Flanagan who lives in Indianapolis and is in sales says he hates to see MSA go away (tomorrow's implosion) but that "You don't ever progress without change." York who has coordinated the Pacers' stats crew going back to the Coliseum days also handles stats for the Firebirds Fever Ice Colts and the IHSAA. He is Media Center Manager at the Speedway and assists with stats for all other Indy Racing League events. York for whom the Conseco Fieldhouse media center is named says the Pacers played 1062 regular season and playoff games in MSA winning 646 of them. Indianapolis Star Photo / Jerry Clark (Editor?s note: this was originally published on Feb. 2 1970).

Earth, Wind and Fire is in town Sunday at Klipsch Music Center, along with Chicago with all their horns. That’s a fairly thin reason to do a report on Indianapolis in the ’70s, but it’s a reason.

Here, then, is a scattered but interesting attempt to make sense of that seminal though contradictory decade.

Sports town

The Colts were still in Baltimore, the Brickyard 400 hadn’t been conceived, and the Indianapolis Indians still played at Bush Stadium. But some of the groundwork for what would be the city’s new identity — sports town — was laid in the 1970s.

In 1971 ground was broken on Market Square Arena, the splashy new Downtown home of the Pacers that would double as a concert venue.

‘Pot-smoking hippie with a warped fiendish mind’

Market Square Arena was where in June 1977 Elvis Presley performed what would turn out to be his last concert. Two months later Presley was dead. His final performance was not great, according to a reviewer for The Indianapolis News, Zach Dunkin, who called the show “downright tacky and outdated.”

Presley fans were outraged. “You're obviously a pot-smoking hippie with a warped fiendish mind,” one of them wrote in a letter to the editor.

Elvis Presley is seen here in Market Square Arena on June 26, 1977, in what would be his final concert. Presley died two months later at age 42.

Probably the roughest treatment directed at a hippie in Indianapolis was directed at an 18-year-old Eastsider named Lester A. King. In January 1970 King, who had shoulder-length hair, huge sideburns and a mustache — plus he opposed the war in Vietnam, opposed President Nixon, played the guitar and read “The Hobbit” — was in his parents’ house in the 4600 block of East Washington Street when he saw thick smoke coming from the Avoca apartment building across the street.

The Avoca was populated by elderly women. King called the Fire Department but didn’t wait. He charged into the fire and carried to safety Mary L. Thomas, 75.

“Youth is hero in 2-alarm fire,” The Indianapolis Star reported the next day, alongside a photo of the anti-establishment-looking King. “Hero’s hair singed,” the caption said.

Soon the hero was bombarded with hate mail and harassing phone calls from people calling him a “dirty hippie.” Some accused him of setting the fire himself. A local TV talk show invited King to come on, as a hero, but he declined, fearing ridicule.

King died in 2011 at age 59. To the end he wore his hair long.

Speedway gets dramatically faster, and sideburns come to the fore

The fastest car in the 1970 Indy 500 qualified at 170 mph. By 1978, the fastest car went 202 mph. It was the largest jump in speed of any decade before or since.

Lester A. King, who in 1970 saved a woman’s life but was demonized because he had long hair.

Driver Al Unser dominated the decade, winning the 500 three times and finishing second once and third once. Photos of Unser taken 10 years apart, in 1968 and 1978, make an interesting study of the changing styles of the 1970s. They would seem to be proof of the growing mainstream acceptance of the grooming style practiced by Lester A. King, who as an early adopter was demonized.

Racial tensions ease

As the decade dawned, Indianapolis was not exactly a bastion of tolerance and inclusion. Country clubs didn’t allow blacks, and even many public schools were segregated until a U.S. District Court in 1971 ordered change.

Al Unser, wearing longish hair and the giant sideburns reminiscent of Lester King, looks perplexed as Mario Andretti kicks a soccer ball. The two race drivers were horsing around at the IMS in May, 1973. It happened to be the first year Indiana had a state soccer tournament for high school boys.

But even at integrated schools there was tension. Jan Ford Durnil, who is white, was a student at Tech High School in 1970 when she stumbled into a part of the large, leafy campus where the unwritten rule was: Black students only. She didn't know the code. The potentially tense situation was diffused, Durnil said in a recent interview, by the school's star basketball player, Frank Kendrick. Kendrick, who later starred at Purdue and played briefly in the NBA for Golden State, is black.

“Frank Kendrick just sort of reached in and plucked me out of there,” Durnil said.

But at higher levels, racial barriers were coming down. Barbara Boyd and Jerry Harkness became the first blacks on local TV newscasts in 1969. The first Indiana Black Expo was held in 1971, and then-Mayor Richard Lugar attended. The Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce was one of Expo’s sponsors. Eli Lilly & Co. had a booth. Later, in 1978, Lugar’s successor, William Hudnut, appointed Joe Slash the city’s first black deputy mayor.

‘I Am Woman’

Women advanced. The local chapter of the National Organization for Women lobbied intensely for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. At meetings they would whip up enthusiasm by singing songs, such as Helen Reddy’s 1972 hit “I Am Woman.” And in 1977 the Indiana General Assembly passed the ERA.

Janet Guthrie, who in 1977 became the first woman to drive in the Indy 500. That same year the Indiana General Assembly passed the Equal Rights Amendment.

That same year Janet Guthrie became the first woman to qualify for the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race.

In 1976 the Indiana High School Athletic Association held its first state basketball tournament for girls.

And in 1979 Ann Meyers, who played college ball at UCLA, got a tryout with the Indiana Pacers. She didn’t make the team.

Water quality? What’s that?

As the ’70s dawned, the natural environment was not front and center. Gas-guzzling muscle cars were the height of cool. (The 1971 hit movie “Vanishing Point” actually essentially starred a 1970 Dodge Challenger with a 7.2 liter V-8.)

The first nationwide Earth Day was in April 1970. John Winters was a biologist with the Indiana State Health Department’s Stream Pollution Control Board and an expert on the White River’s sorry condition.

A fish-shaped raft is paddled down White River during the 1978 WNAP Raft Race

For Earth Day, Winters was assigned to give a public presentation on local water quality. “I went to this library in Castleton,” he said in a 2009 interview, “and no one was there. Not one person.”

People seemed largely blind to the issue. And on July 28, 1974, en masse they immersed themselves in the toxic waters of the White River for a day of bacchanalian fun for the inaugural WNAP Raft Race. Thousands of mostly hammered young people in shag haircuts and cutoff jeans made their way down the river on imaginative but not really seaworthy craft of their own design — rafts you paddled, rafts you pedaled, fish-shaped rafts, a raft shaped like a sneaker, one that looked like a pirate ship.

At the finish line, in Broad Ripple Park, a rock concert was waiting. And all of this with a corporate sponsor, the radio station WNAP.

Somehow it all went smoothly. Police records from 40 years ago are spotty, but in 1976, Year Three of the raft race, when an estimated 50,000 people attended, there were but two arrests (disorderly conduct), according to an Indianapolis Star report. The raft race became an annual thing before ceasing in 1984.

Communal porn

In the 1970s, before the Internet, Indianapolis like other cities watched porn communally — in seedy old movie theaters that had lost out to the new suburban multiplexes and were desperate for business, any business.

Even the Vogue, in Broad Ripple, went blue before being converted to a concert hall in 1977, a move that signaled the rebranding of Broad Ripple from fading shopping district to nighttime entertainment hub.

Charles Chulchian, who owned the Rivoli Theater during its porno years and was also the projectionist.

The 1,500-seat Rivoli, on East 10th Street, had a foot in both worlds. Throughout the ’70s it was a rock ’n’ roll venue, hosting bands like Spirit, REO Speedwagon and Mahogany Rush. But other nights it screened skin flicks. For the movies, the Rivoli was open 15 hours a day. Customers paid $10 and could stay as long as they wanted.

But with the passage of the Indiana Indecent Nuisance Act of 1983, the porn theaters’ days were numbered. The Rivoli, owned by the never-say-die Charles Chulchian, fought the hardest before finally throwing in the towel and shutting his doors in 1991.

A stand-up-and-be-counted moment made possible by Anita Bryant

There have long been gay bars in Indianapolis (the Varsity, 1517 N. Pennsylvania St., goes back to World War II), but gay people stayed in the shadows until the 1970s. A coming out moment was in October 1977 and was in reaction to the spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, a former Miss USA named Anita Bryant.

Bryant, by then a nationally known anti-gay crusader, led a rally at the Indiana State Fairgrounds to promote a bill in the Indiana General Assembly that would criminalize sodomy.

About 800 gays and their sympathizers turned out, many carrying placards. One said, “Heil Anita Gay-Stop-O.”

At gay bars, orange juice was no longer served because of Bryant's affiliation with the Florida growers. A purely symbolic gesture, perhaps, but representative of a new militancy that later would force the Indianapolis Police Department to hire a liaison to the gay community. In 1981 the first local Gay Pride event was held, a dinner in a Downtown hotel. And in 1984 Indianapolis MayorHudnut, a former Presbyterian minister, issued a proclamation declaring it was city policy not to discriminate against gays.

A decade of startling suburban sprawl

Castleton Square Mall, which triggered massive Northeastside development, was built in 1972, the same year as the Pyramids on the Northwestside. The Fashion Mall came the next year, built on what had been farmland.

The area around Geist Reservoir remained a blend of forests and cornfields throughout the decade, but the planning was well underway for its development. By 1980 construction of the first two of what would be dozens and dozens of subdivisions was underway.

Some stars were born, sort of

A handful of local musicians had a measure of success in the 1970s. Most notably, Jinx Dawson of the band Coven did the vocals on “One Tin Soldier,” the countercultural anthem and theme song for the movie “Billy Jack” that became a nationwide hit.

Later, the Faith Band had success with “Dancin’ Shoes,” though it was a cover of Faith’s song by an Englishman, Elton John sideman Nigel Olsson, that became famous, cracking the Top 20 in 1978.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.