I have often been accused of exaggerating for shock effect the randy ambience of my hometown, but here are a couple of pieces of evidence in my favor.
First, here's a shot of the exterior of the old Rector's Bookstore in downtown Wichita, slated shortly for demolition. My old pal Krista D. was kind enough to go down and take this picture for me:
Rector's was the first bookstore I got to know really well. In the seventies it was also the first place I ever saw real porn, in the form of novels like these two gems, from Beeline Books:
(top image via Lynn Munroe Books)
It's hard for me to imagine how old hometown's city fathers allowed this kind of thing to be publicly displayed (this was in the days before dirty book stores opened in town) but I vividly remember bouts of furtive skulking amidst the racks toward the back of the store and devouring short bits of books like "Bondage Wife for Sale" before sweatily slipping them back onto the rack. Ah, adolescence.
The second delightful bit of kink, recently stumbled across, truly boggled my mind:
http://www.wffmunch.com/If anything like this was around when I still lived there I was sadly unaware of it. Wichita seems like a lot more fun than it was when I lived there.
