I know I'm a year late, but I just saw this article for the first time today. My 1972 Rice classmate, Jim Cagle (BA in English), opened Studz News and two other similar stores (one was called The Ball Park; the other was Talk of the Town), after a successful two or three year career as a technical writer and editor. He became *very* wealthy from those three stores, until a politically ambitious DA started harassing all the porno bookstores in town in a very public campaign, and Jim sold out to the Atlanta mafia sometime around the late 1970s. The DA stopped bothering the stores after the change of ownership. Jim went on to buy and then publish This Week In Texas magazine until his untimely death from AIDS in 1989. I worked in Studz as a clerk when Jim needed extra help and my wife sewed the curtains for the movie booths in the back. At that time each booth had an 8 mm film projector, and I remember long nights cutting and splicing film loops for them.Studz was originally on the NE corner of W. Mt. Vernon and Alabama, across the street from St. Thomas, in a strip center that was razed decades ago. The name may have migrated to another store; I had left Houston by then. I have fond memories of Jim, and of the eye-opening experience of being a very minor part of his wildly successful business. I'm sad to hear how decrepit Talk of the Town had been allowed to become; Jim always kept his stores very classy and inviting. Nowadays, of course, adult stores like Good Vibrations and Babes In Toyland are much more mainstream than such establishments were then, and all the major hotel chains have become the most prolific purveyors of pornography in the world. We never would have imagined that back in the day.
