Requiem in Pace: Harold Rubin, Porn King
Written by Alyx on March 24th, 2007 in culture.
A sad day in the pornography industry. Often arrested, sometimes imitated, never duplicated: Weird Harold. We’ll miss ya.
Chicago Tribune reports:
Harold Rubin was stuck with his nickname well before he opened the pornographic bookshop in the South Loop that kept police and prosecutors busy throughout the early 1970s.
Never a shy man, Mr. Rubin had gone to pick up a date for a costume party wearing only a helmet, and carrying a shield and sword.
“She opened the door and said, `You’re weird, Harold,’ and that was it,” said Mr. Rubin’s son, Jules.
Mr. Rubin, 67, onetime proprietor of Weird Harold’s, an adult bookstore, massage parlor and nude modeling studio, was found dead in his home in Galena on Jan. 30.
The death appeared to be from natural causes but an autopsy report has yet to be completed, said Bill Miller, coroner for Jo Daviess County.
Weird Harold’s, 541 S. Wabash Ave., featured all manner of pornography and also offered shapely young models for amateur shutterbugs. Police said these sessions sometimes veered into prostitution, and they regularly hustled Mr. Rubin off to be booked on an array of obscenity charges.
The press had great fun with the outspoken Mr. Rubin, whose run-ins with the law date at least to a 1969 arrest after he was caught behind the camera for a blue movie being shot at a Mannheim Road motel.
Authorities in subsequent years tried a number of novel approaches in their effort to squelch Mr. Rubin’s penchant for pornography. In 1975, after pleading guilty to an obscenity charge, Mr. Rubin was ordered by a Cook County judge to distribute more than 1,000 “non-sex” books to inmates at the Cook County Jail. He cheerfully accepted the sentence.
Mr. Rubin never apologized for his line of work, reveling in stories that dubbed him the “king of Chicago pornography.”
“I’m an entrepreneur,” he said in a 1974 Chicago Tribune story. “My girls make money and I make money also.”
He also rallied behind his 1st Amendment rights to free speech. “That was his cause. He believed in the 1st Amendment,” Jules Rubin said. “It’s people’s right to have [pornography], he believed that.”
His lease was canceled in 1975 after city inspectors found numerous code violations in the building that housed his store. That shut Weird Harold’s for good.
But the demise of the bookstore was not the end of controversy for Mr. Rubin. A native of Berwyn who attended Morton High School, he regularly found trouble with authorities in that city.
In 1975, a large pile of horse manure was dumped on the steps of Berwyn City Hall. Immediately a prime suspect, Mr. Rubin never owned up to the prank, although he told reporters it was “an ingenious idea.”
“Yes, he did do it,” his son acknowledged Wednesday.
Mr. Rubin engaged in a long-running battle to open a newsstand in the suburb, which apparently feared he’d stock his shelves with something other than the local papers. After numerous court hearings, he was allowed to open a stand on Cermak Road, which his son said he operated for several years.
A collector of antiques and organized-crime memorabilia, Mr. Rubin was a scavenger who in the early 1980s helped discover a concrete vault in the basement of the Lexington Hotel at Cermak Road and Michigan Avenue, Al Capone’s onetime headquarters. Geraldo Rivera swept in and the vault was opened on live TV, with disappointing results.
“He was a card, very outspoken,” said his son. “He always had a zest for whatever he went after.”
Moving to Galena about 15 years ago, Mr. Rubin became well-known around town for videotaping City Council meetings and even a local fair, for reasons that were never clear. That kind of behavior raised eyebrows in the bucolic community, but he was pretty much left alone.
“The town kind of got used to him,” said Galena Mayor Tom Brusch.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Nice article. Decent tribute to a colorful charactor. I stumbled on this article as I thought to re establish my friendship with my old friend and wondered what amazing things that he must be up to today. I am very sorry to hear that he has passed. Harry and I were friends at Morton. I was President of a club called the Cougars and while most people were afraid of Harry I felt pretty comfortable with him. And any time with Harry was going to be an adventure. One time we took off in Harry’s bright orange 1956 Ford convertible and with nothing else to do we went to Garfield Park around Western and 55th looking for Arlene Thomas who I had met at a youth rally. We were northbound on Rockwell approaching Garfield Blvd and the stop sign had been taken down. We did not see the 1949 Ford coming from the East at a high speed until the last minute. Harry hit the gas and the Ford hit us square on my door knocking me under the dashboard. As I was climbing out from under the dash we hit a parked 1954 Ford belonging to Ryerson Steel. Again I climbed from under the dash and there was the driver of the 1949 Ford laying in the middle of the intersection. His car was demolished and I said Holy Shit Harry you killed him! Harry was still stunned and jammed under the steering wheel. We had not killed the guy he just sustained a severe concussion. He was a railroad detective for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The lawyers must have had a heyday with that one. I remember hearing once that Harry had designed a front end part for the Ford car and received a patent while he was still at Morton. The last time I saw Harry he was living in a large studio in a three flat off of Harlem and about 18th or so. I was there with my girlfriend Vicki Bates and he invited me to join him in a scheme to make a great deal of money. Certain people would become tellers at a local bank. They only had to close out their cash drawers at the end of each month. We would have our people make withdrawals during the month and Harry would turn the money over to syndicate loan sharks. We would get a return on the money inside of the month and redeposit it before the teller had to account for their drawer. We would share in the high interest rates the syndicate was making and thus make a profit. The only reservation that I had is that Harry already had too many people involved. Sure enough he was caught and charged. I also remember a story about Harry being in the service as a pilot and flying a plane unauthorized into Mexico. Whatever was true or not you tended to believe things about what Harry was up to because he was so colorful. My Mother was in Seneca’s Restaurant one time when they were on Oak Park and Cermak. Harry drove up in a Cadillac and parked diagonally on the corner. He made no bones about the fact that there was a naked girl in the back seat in case any of the guys were interested. Louis was my barber on Cermak and 59th and told me that the police were trying to find my buddy Harry because he was driving around town in his Cadillac in which he had installed a siren and was using it all over town. God Bless him I will never forget him.