16
Friday, October 22,1976
University Daily Kansan
Photo by JOHN HARRINGTON
This sign advertises for one of three massage parlors on the Topeka outskirts
Law officials still unable to close 3 massage parlors near Topeka
By DARYL COOK
Staff Writer
By DARYL C
Staff Writer
To the uninitiated, they're barely noticeable driving south from Topeka.
In fact, the entire stretch of highway looks much like any piece of road in Kansas. Farm implement stores and mobs tend to buy the most expensive sex for sale on the outskirts of Topeka.
But it is there, all the same.
Massage parliers, in the words of one Topeka policeman who wished not to be identified, "rub people the wrong way." And they have flourished just outside the capital of Kansas in spite of recent attempts this year to close them.
THEY SURVIVE because Kansas law doesn't acknowledge the sex for hire from the parlers as prostitution, say law enforcement officials.
Three parlor can be found on Highway
1 Country Club Massage A-1 Health
Club; and
2
Another, the French Health Spa, is farther south in Pauline. Three Wichita massage parlor advertise in the Topeka phone book as well.
The appearances of the massage parlors are barely reminiscent of stereotypes of old Europe.
the three on Highway 75 are housed in mobile homes, possibly indicative of their uncertain future, and the one in Pauline is located in buildings next to a local insurance business.
CUSTOMERS ARE greeted at the doors either by a burly doorman or by a masseuse, invariably a woman dressed in a short nighttown.
With a businesslike and sometimes tired
air, the women explain the types of massages available and the prices.
The prices usually range from $20 to more than $100, depending on the duration of the massages and the massseuse's state of undress.
Whether for manual sex (intercourse is strictly forbidden, said one masseur) or just someone to tell one's troubles to, travelers and a group of regular customers, mostly in their 40s and 50s, keep the parlors thriving.
BUT HOW LONG they will remain open will depend on the Shawnee county commissioners who are still trying to write a letter to Mayor Topeka area of the parlors permanently.
The parlers were forced to the outskirts of Topeka by a city ordinance passed in June that prohibited massages involving contact between members of the obese sex.
However, Shawne county authorities have been unable to close the parlers because there aren't any county statutes specifically forbid the parlers to operate.
JIM CHAFFEE, Shawnee county sheriff,
said Monday that although the Kansas
legislature had empowered county
governments to act against the pardons,
the state attorney general did not
written any statutes that would stop
the parlers from operating.
Chaffee said that the parliers allegedly had employed runaway juvenile girls, but there was no evidence to close the parlers on charges of moral corruption of minors.
THE KANSAS attorney general's office tried unsuccessfully this summer to close
one parters by attempting to define them as cosmetology or beauty salons.
Under Kansas law, cosmetologists are the building and a $100 license fee for the building, and a $100 license fee for the building.
But District Court Judge E. Newton Vickers ruled against the attorney general's case because cosmetologists weren't aware of the risks to the waist as the masseuses in question do.
"When someone is required to get a license from the state, that person must be trained for what they will be doing." Vickers added.
BECAUSE THE massage parlor don't perform the same types of massages that cosmologist do, they aren't eligible for a massage therapist's license. The prosecuted for not having one, Vickers said.
Only a few massage parlors have been closed in Kansas in the past decade, Detective Kenneth Harmon of the Lawrence police department said.
one, in Lawrence, was closed about 10
years, but the case is no longer in the
city record.
SINCE THEN, state morality statutes governing parlor parlors have changed enough so that the case couldn't act as a precedent, Harmon said.
The problems of closing the parlors were recently summed up in a statement by Shawnee County District Attity. Gene Olander, who has been working with the county commissioners for the past year on a way to close the parlors:
"I don't know of any movement to close the parlor and I see nothing under the present statutes of the law that could close them."
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