Feeding eagles? Big box stores? Annexation? As Homer winter controversies go, if you ask anyone around in 1976-77, none of them compares with the famous Club Bar Incident — a story so notorious it was recounted in Joe McGinnis’ book on Alaska, “Going to Extremes.”

“It was just the biggest argument,” said Genny Lyda, then age 6.

Like now, it seemed every winter there would be some sort of blow out — “somebody’s feeble attempt to tweak somebody’s nose,” as former Homer mayor and Homer News publisher Gary Williams described them.

The Club Bar Incident was different.

“That event was so horrifying, it really slowed down that sort of thing,” Williams said.

Last year, Tim Mellen removed the Alice’s Champagne Palace signs, also painted by Hughes. Mellen is the son of Alice Cochrane, the namesake and former owner of Alice’s Champagne Palace. Cochrane died at age 68 in December 2001, and her family was given the signs as a keepsake when the bar sold to the English Bay Corporation. When Cochrane changed the name in 1980 and the Alice’s signs went up, Hughes painted over the Club Bar painting.

“It’s such a metaphorical ghost coming out of the past that this vague image is there,” Hughes said.

Hughes said his painting showed a woman with bare breasts on one side and a man with genitals on the other side, but that it wasn’t anything pornographic.

“It’s discrete, it’s stylized, just like in a lot of classical paintings,” he said.

Most of the old painting can be seen, but the controversial elements are painted over.

Lyda remembered her mom made her and her brother duck down in the back seat of their car when they drove by so they wouldn’t see the painting — not that it worked.

“I remember what the naked people looked like because I was peeking through my fingers,” Lyda said.

The Club Bar was owned by Billie Bedsworth before Cochrane. The first Club Bar burned down in the summer of 1976 and was rebuilt as the current structure, reopening on New Year’s Eve 1976. Hughes worked under a scaffolding and tarp, so people didn’t see the painting until mid-December of 1976. When people went down Pioneer Avenue — then the only road to the Homer Spit and East End Road from the Sterling Highway — and saw the art, the Homer News letter pages heated up.

“I can’t tolerate a nude man and a nude woman painted on a bar front without speaking out against it,” wrote Nancy Seljestad in the Dec. 22, 1976, issue of the Homer News. Seljestad asked for time to speak at a Jan. 10, 1977, Homer City Council meeting.

“If the people don’t like it, they can turn their heads and pretend they don’t see it,” Hobo Jim wrote in response the next week to Seljestad’s letter.

When people complained about the nudity, Bedsworth put boards over the private parts of the nude figures. Then somebody ripped the boards down and then somebody threw paint on the art.

As mayor, Williams stepped in and tried to cool things down.

“It was getting to the point where somebody was going to break the law,” he said.

Bedsworth agreed to temporarily cover the painting until the council meeting. Williams pointed out to religious groups opposed to public depictions of nudity that Homer didn’t have anti-obscenity ordinances. He allowed people to speak on the issue at the next city council meeting,

Three hundred showed up, and the meeting had to be moved from Homer City Hall to Paul Banks Elementary School.

“I bet it was the biggest public meeting Homer ever had,” Hughes said.

Before the meeting, though, a conservative minister, the Rev. Gordon Winrod, had sent out to every post office box a letter attacking the painting — and then some. He also attacked the Jewish people and the Talmud.

“He didn’t inflame anybody,” Williams said — at least in getting people mad about the art. They got angry at Winrod. Winrod showed how far that mindset could go, Williams said.

At the council meeting, “People spoke about the constitutional guarantees of free speech, religious implications of the problem, the need for an anti-obscenity ordinance and the desire to use love instead of hate to resolve problems,” the Homer News wrote of the meeting.

And then Cliff Calkins spoke. Hughes said it was like one of those moments in a movie where everything came together.

Calkins got up and said, “I’d rather have my children pass the painting on the Club Bar three or four times a day than be exposed to something like that letter once in their life,” the Homer News reported.

“The hall erupted in applause,” Williams said in an article about Winrod back in 2001. “It was amazing, that feeling in there. I’ll never forget it.”

“People actually cheered,” Hughes said. “People were like, ‘We all have our differences, but we’re not like those people,” he said, referring to Winrod.

Bedsworth agree to paint over the nude parts of the figures. She asked Hughes to do the job, but he refused, and another artist altered the painting.

The Club Bar incident led to a change in Homer’s community, Hughes said.

In the mid-1970s, there had been a real split in Homer among old-time homesteaders and fishermen and the newcomers of the late 1960s and early 1970s — the hippies and back-to-landers. Hippies who went into some local stores wouldn’t get served, Hughes said.

After Winrod’s letter and the big public meeting, Hughes said the level of antagonism died down.

“The homesteaders started to realize we were more like them than unlike them,” Hughes said. “The giant split started to heal up around that time.”

Winrod became a pariah after that, Williams said, and later left town. In 2001, according to a March 22 Homer News article, a Gainesville, Mo., court sent him to prison for 30 years for abducting six of his grandchildren, holding them against their will and indoctrinating them with his anti-Semitic beliefs.

Lyda couldn’t help noticing the irony behind the Club Bar sign re-emerging.

“If you think about it, (Winrod) he’s gone, and the naked people aren’t,” she said. “The naked people outlived the neo-Nazis.”

Williams said the Club Bar incident showed how seemingly benign actions like a painting can have unintended consequences.

“I don’t think it (Alice’s) can escape its history,” he said. “And nor should it, or the town forget.”