Pittsburg’s experience with nude dancing differs from others dealing with issue

March 29, 2008 09:15 pm

— By Greg Grisolano
ggrisolano@joplinglobe.com
PITTSBURG, Kan. — The clairvoyant was OK. The stripper was OK. But a Crawford County Sheriff drew the line at allowing a voodoo priestess to perform at Pat’s Lounge, which has provided totally-nude entertainment for more than 30 years in Pittsburg.
“They said ... everybody’s complaining about cow tails and ears being cut off,” recalled Pat Rohrbaugh, 68, the former owner. “I’m going, ‘Hey, she’s an old woman in her 60s. She puts some chicken bones down and drinks some tomato juice.’ I had to send her back to Kansas City.”
There also was the time Pat wanted a wrestling contest — in Jell-O.
“They told me wrestling in Kansas has to be sanctioned by the state,” she said.
In February, Rohrbaugh sold the club, just four blocks from downtown Pittsburg and smack-dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
“I think it’s time,” she said. “It was a way to make a good living. The money was good if you’re willing to put the hours in.”
The club’s new owner, David Yeamans, of Pleasanton, doesn’t plan on making changes, not even to the name.
“Everybody knows Pat,” Yeamans said. “They don’t know Dave. I’d have to do 27 years of owning a gentleman’s club to get that kind of reputation.”
Since buying the club, Yeamans said he appreciated the help and advice Pittsburg police and city officials have given him, going so far as to invite him to city hall and reviewing city rules and regulations for adult businesses.
“I have to give kudos to city officials and the police department, they’ve been just great,” he said. “They’ve been very receptive for a person not living in Pittsburg.”
Differing styles
Pittsburg’s approach to Pat’s Lounge differs from that of other areas, including Jasper County, where officials have been looking at ordinances to regulate sexually-oriented businesses proposed along Interstate 44 between Joplin and Sarcoxie.
Ernest Doyon, a Wichita businessman, initially applied for business licenses with the county last fall to open a Vegas Video franchise and a non-alcoholic “juice bar” to feature semi-nude dancing.
But amid grass-roots protests from neighbors and others concerned about the negative effects of adult businesses, the Jasper County Commission beefed up regulations to include HIV checks on all juice-bar employees and forbid the sale or display of pictorial sexual materials such as DVDs and photographs in the bar.
The new adult cabaret ordinance also stipulates that such businesses be set back 2,000 feet from any residence, park, church, school or other adult business, and requires septic tank capacity for at least 60 people.
A Jasper County ordinance passed in 2004 already prohibited adult cabarets from having live nude dancing within 10 feet of patrons and established 21 as the minimum age for patrons. It also required all employees at adult cabarets to undergo background checks for prostitution, drug and tax crimes, and money laundering.
Another proposal tightening controls on private viewing booths at adult video stores — modeled after a Jackson County ordinance — has been tabled, pending the outcome of a federal lawsuit filed by Erotic City, an adult-entertainment business that claims the restrictions violate the First and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Among other things, the proposed ordinance would require an adult-business license from the county, increased lighting and the removal of doors from booths where patrons view videos. It also could require that the booths be configured to make them more visible.
County officials said a business license has been issued, but the Jasper County Commission on Thursday opted to watch the federal lawsuit before adopting further restrictions on video stores based on the Jackson County statute.
“The issues in the lawsuit are the same as we’re facing here,” Jasper County Prosecutor Dean Dankelson said last week.
Civic minded?
Pat Rohrbaugh looks like anybody’s grandmother or Sunday School teacher.
Her husband, Don, whom she has been married to for more than 30 years, is vice chairman of the Crawford County Democratic Party.
While Pat’s Lounge is not a member of the Pittsburg Chamber of Commerce, the Rohrbaughs have been active in the community over the years, even advertising in the local convention and visitor’s bureau guide.
The bar also used to serve dinners on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“You’d be surprised how many lonely people there are on Christmas,” Pat said.
Her “girls” were brought in to serve water and pop for the annual Four State Farm Show, although on at least one occasion one of those girls lounging on a mower was photographed exposing her breasts while a man in the background gives an appreciative grin.
“We did the farm show for about six years,” Don said.
When she got into the bar business at the age of 19, Pat had no idea she’d make a career out of it, especially at a bar that was the only totally-nude strip club in Crawford County.
Rohrbaugh was waitressing one night for Ray Barto when one of the bar’s regulars got up on a table and started taking her clothes off, unnerving Pat so much that she told her boss she was quitting.
“I said, ‘Ray, I can’t work for you no more,’” she said. “That woman took her clothes off, and I can’t work anywhere they take their clothes off.”
Rohrbaugh said she never drinks or smokes, and is personally modest.
“I could not get nude in front of a bunch of people,” she said. “But there’s people who can, and they make a good living off it.”
Making a living was what it was all about when Pat and Don opened their original Triple R, a honky-tonk on Fourth Street. As a way to distinguish their business, Pat said she found a female entertainer from Joplin to perform in 1975.
“I found a dancer in Joplin who was a nurse,” she said. “She would come up and dance go-go, too.”
Her appearances became such a hit that Pat decided to start running showgirls from Kansas City.
In 1980, she sold the Triple R, moved to her current location at 501 E. Seventh St. and opened up Pat’s Lounge. She also purchased a two-bedroom house just across the street from the lounge, which would become the family home.
“When I first moved over here, people were telling me, ‘Oh, that’s a bad part of town,’” she said. “I said if I can work there and make my money there, I can live there.”
Over time, many of her family, including her son and some of her grandchildren, moved into the neighborhood and at one time or another worked at the lounge. As the lounge made money, Pat said she and Don were able to expand and remodel it and their home. They also acquired some of the dilapidated lots in the neighborhood and razed some of the old buildings.
“It has been a family business,” she said. “We cleaned up this area. We’d go down the block, picking up trash.”
‘Bad places’
Although Pat said she has managed to clean up the neighborhood, opponents of Vegas Video and the bar in Jasper County argue the impact of sex businesses on the surrounding community is devastating.
During a recent meeting of Citizens for A Decent Environment, the opposition group, members outlined what they said would be some of the fallout if the bar and video store aren’t stopped. Among them: Increases in all sorts of property and personal crimes, a drop in property values of 10 percent, and further decay of community and moral standards.
“These are bad places,” Pete Connelly, a member of the group, said at the meeting.
Those same consequences were raised last week in Kansas, when Phillip Cosby testified before a Kansas House committee that is considering a bill to regulate sexually-oriented businesses.
Cosby is executive director for the Kansas City office of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, a Christian-based organization with a mission to “preserve and advance the truth of biblical sexuality.”
Cosby said cleaning up sex shops in Times Square in New York City led to a decrease in crime and an increase in tourism.
Cosby also testified, “... the lawful regulation of the sex industry is based on real negative effects on communities and has been constitutionally upheld for over 30 years. Those documented effects are primarily increased crime, increased STDs, blight, property devaluation, prostitution, human trafficking and drug trafficking.”
One of the leaders of the movement opposing the adult businesses in Jasper County is a local Republican Party committeeman, John Putnam, of Carthage.
“We don’t want them at all,” Putnam said. “But the law seems to have been skewed to where we can’t stop them from coming in. The best we can hope for is try to make them behave when they’re here.”
Opponents also point to a recent sting at a Vegas Video store in Wichita, Kan. That store also is owned by Doyon.
The sting netted 10 arrests, and police in Wichita said the store has been the subject of at least 30 other calls regarding sex-related incidents in the past two years.
“We received several complaints from citizens who live near the area about behavior and the kind of traffic at the store,” said Gordon Bassham, assistant to the Wichita police chief.
Two plainclothes police officers entered the business on March 6 and spent five hours in arcade video booths, according to Bassham.
In that time, 10 men allegedly entered the officers’ booths and propositioned or fondled the officers.
“The problem was the behavior was very aggressive,” Bassham said.
“ ... It happens everywhere these businesses go,” Putnam has said. “It’s all documented in the attorney general’s report on pornography. It’s in land-use studies. That’s why we need to regulate these kinds of businesses on a county level.”
Citizens for a Decent Environment cites as its sources studies conducted on the effects of sex businesses, including the Meese Report, a 1986 study of pornography by former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese.
‘Fly swatter’
Pittsburg Mayor Bill Rushton, a former police officer, said there were few problems with Pat’s Lounge.
“Back when it first started, people thought it would be Sodom and Gomorrah,” Rushton said. “But it turned out it wasn’t like that.”
Rushton, who served as an evening police captain in the Pittsburg Police Department for 15 years, said he can remember “only a handful” of instances in which police responded to the lounge.
“She’d call us and let us know if she was getting rid of somebody who’d be a problem,” he said. “Nobody messed with Pat, if they knew what was good for them. It didn’t matter who you were. You started messing around and your drink got thrown out and so did you.”
Pat said she never hired a bouncer, instead relying on a 3-foot long “flyswatter” to reprimand rowdy clientele.
“I’ve given out too many, too many of these,” she said, fingering the flyswatter. “That’s when you knew you had to go.”
A strict code for employees, including no drinking on the job and no females in the bar without an escort, kept problems to a minimum, she said.
Pittsburg’s Planning and Zoning Director, Todd Kennemer, said: “Pat ran a tight ship. She cleaned the place up, and the property values in that neighborhood actually increased.”
Kennemer said that when the city passed its most recent ordinance regulating adult businesses in 2005, it solicited input from Pat when crafting the ordinance.
The relationship wasn’t always that cordial. In 1994, the Pittsburg City Commission approved an ordinance similar to the Jasper County regulations.
The Rohrbaughs spent four years fighting it, and scored a victory in the state’s appellate court in 1998. Don said he and his wife did not receive compensatory damages, however.
“We just got the ordinance stopped,” he said. “The court ruled it was too broad.”
When crafting the city’s current ordinance, Kennemer said the focus was on land-use rules and establishing set-backs.
“When I did my research, I checked all over the country,” he said. “The big question we had here was can you enforce (the ordinance)? If you can’t enforce it, doesn’t do you any good.”
The current city ordinance in Pittsburg stipulates that adult-oriented businesses cannot open within 500 feet of residential areas, schools and day cares, or another adult business. Pat’s, however, was grandfathered in.
Pat said she’s been following the Jasper County issue through the news, and believes that eventually the businesses should be permitted to open.
“I don’t know who they have for attorneys or how they’re going about it, but I always found a way,” she said.
1,500 signatures
John Bartosh, Jasper County presiding commissioner, said verifying the constitutionality of the proposed ordinance is why it was tabled.
“We want to make sure that we can win in court if we pass it,” he said. “There’s no question they’re going to be able to open. I just want to make sure they’re going to abide by the rules.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on one community’s adult-business ordinance.
In a 2000 case, Erie, Pa., vs. Pap’s A.M., doing business as Kandyland, the court ruled 6-3 that nude dancing, while a form of artistic expression within the realm of First Amendment protection, could be regulated based on secondary concerns, said Mark Arbuckle, associate professor of communication at Pittsburg (Kan.) State University. He is a First Amendment scholar.
“The Supreme Court has basically said that governments can prohibit nude dancing, even though it has some First Amendment protection, because of those secondary effects,” he said. “But the court didn’t say it could be entirely prohibited, it just said they had to put on something like pasties or a g-string.”
Bartosh plans to continue the fight.
“Here’s the deal, I’m representing the people,” said Bartosh, who is the only Jasper County commissioner not up for re-election this year. “We’ve got 1,500 signatures against this thing, and I’ve got to represent them. If I had 1,500 the other way, I’d be going with them.”
Bill Fleischaker, a Joplin attorney representing Doyon, said they would consider litigation if necessary to open the business.
“If the restrictions are the ones proposed by the U.S. Supreme Court, my client’s prepared to live with it,” he said. “If they try to go above and beyond that, I’m sure at some point (we’ll litigate).”

Election year
A committee in the Kansas House of Representatives also is considering a bill that would impose statewide restrictions on sexually-oriented businesses, including 1,000-foot setbacks from schools, churches, homes and other sexually-oriented businesses.
While it’s still a possibility that House Bill 2835 could make it out of the Federal and State Affairs committee, state Rep. Julie Menghini, D-Pittsburg, said she believes the bill will most likely suffer the fate of a bill proposing a 10 percent tax on sexually-oriented businesses that her House Taxation Committee did not approve in 2006.
“It’s an election year, and this is your typical, ‘gotcha’ issue,” she said. “There are people who feel very strongly about this issue, but it always seems to surface during an election year.”

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