May 12th, 2010
For whatever reason, hands and hand strength have always fascinated me. Perhaps it began with seeing my maternal grandfather, Marvin Williams, break the shell of a native pecan by the pressure of the thumb and forefinger of one hand—a truly difficult stunt. In any case, my fascitation blossomed in my late teens and early 20s as I ploughed through the extensive collection of magazines about strength training assembled by my friend and mentor Professor Roy “Mac” McLean. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Holdings | 2 Comments »
April 14th, 2010
Following a month of complicated negotiations, the Stark Center is very pleased to announce the opening of a major traveling exhibit, which will be the inaugural presentation in the Joe and Betty Weider Museum of Physical Culture. Because of unanticipated hold-ups with the construction of several permanent displays for the Weider Museum, we decided to join forces with the owners of an exhibit–OUR BODY: The Universe Within-as a way to bring visitors to the Center, generate revenue, make use of the beautiful museum, and fulfill our mission of sharing knowledge about the history and importance of physical culture.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Weider Museum | 23 Comments »
March 24th, 2010
Sorry to be away for so long but the combination of our work here at the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports and the month-long run-up to the annual Arnold Strongman Classic we direct for Jim Lorimer at the unimaginably large Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio left us with little time for blogging. However, before my iron game-lifelong pal David Webster actually leaves Texas to his home in the bosky dells of seaside Scotland I wanted to share with readers how fortunate Jan and I feel to have had him with us at the Stark Center since the middle of January.
I first met David way back in 1964 in York, Pennsylvania, while I was living there and working as a managing editor of the York Barbell Company’s Strength and Health magazine, which by that time had been the leading iron game publication in the U.S. for over 30 years. As it happened, David was the organizer of a group of Highland Games athletes who were touring North America as part of a show made up of lesser-known sports such as synchronized motorcycle riding, cliff diving, and the Highland Games; and because the show was booked in Baltimore he had called the office of the York Barbell Company to say he would soon be in the area and would like to bring a group of his “heavies” to York to see the famous lifters and bodybuilders who trained there. As David was already a major figure in the strength sports he was invited to come, with “heavies,” and so the next morning he and his kilted laddies arrived at the York Gym for what turned out to be a fascinating visit.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in H.J. Lutcher Stark Center | 10 Comments »
February 22nd, 2010
One of the long-held dreams Jan and I have had for the Stark Center has been to share our materials—many of which have been given to us for that purpose–with the wider world of scholars and fans of physical culture and sports. For almost 30 years we’ve done that primarily by working personally with people who came to Austin to use the collection, although as time permitted we’ve also assisted people (who couldn’t make the trip) with research questions. However, now that the library side of the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports is operational, we’ve turned our attention to the process of making some of our holdings available as digital resources by scanning them so they can be viewed on-line and through the creation of “finding aids.” (A finding aid is a catalog and description of a collection used to assist scholars in planning a research visit.) Today, we’re launching a Research page on our website–a portal to these new digital resources. I suspect that you’ll find them just as amazing as I do. Since the general oversight of this aspect of our work at the Stark Center has been Jan’s responsibility, what follows is her explanation of how this has come about.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in H.J. Lutcher Stark Center | 3 Comments »
January 27th, 2010
In 1987, Jan and I acquired from the legendary Sig Klein a number of artifacts which had been in the Klein-Durlacher family for a very long time. Those artifacts included a copper-headed walking cane bearing the name of Professor Attila, which was the professional or “stage” name of Louis Durlacher, who taught Sandow much of what the famous strongman knew about strength and, especially, stagecraft. After he had helped launch Sandow’s career Attila left Europe and settled in North America in 1893. Another “Attila” artifact was a satin-smooth wooden wrist-roller Klein told me the Professor had brought from Europe. Much more significant, of course, was the remarkable scrapbook documenting the Professor’s long and successful career as a strongman and, later, as the owner of what for a time was arguably the most famous gym in the United States. The scrapbook has been scanned in its entirety, and will be made available to visitors to our website within the next couple weeks – check back soon for more information.
Even more significant, in the minds of some iron game experts, was the gilt-framed oil painting of Attila supposedly painted in 1887 by a “court painter” who did portraits of members of the royal family. The story I got from Klein, who got it from the Professor’s widow, was that one or more of the “royals” was grateful to Attila for the work he had done as a personal trainer and so he commissioned a particular court painter to produce a portrait of Attila as a present. In any case, the painting had come down to Klein and his wife (the Professor’s daughter Rose) and it was one of the very few things that Klein didn’t sell when he closed his landmark gym in Manhattan in the mid-1970s.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Holdings | 7 Comments »
January 15th, 2010
The most recent of these periodic submissions provided some detail about how pleased we were to have picked up on our recent road trip what we believe is the very first power rack ever built/invented—a rack built in the 1940s in the cellar of Bob’s farmhouse along a creek in the beautiful rolling hills of East Tennessee, outside of Johnson City. This posting will be very brief, but when a member of the staff here at the Stark Center came across last week an envelope containing a number of photos of Bob Peoples and some of his training gear nothing would do but to share some of them with the few, but stalwart, readers of this blog. The photos in question are part of the Peary and Mabel Rader/Iron Man Photo Collection, and it was a real case of serendipity to come upon it less than a week after we brought to the Stark Center the very rack depicted in several of the photos.
The photos were obviously sent to Peary Rader by Bob Peoples in regard to a story in Iron Man, and perhaps someone who reads this will remember from the photos when that article appeared. Should this happen, I’d appreciate having the citation as I haven’t taken the time to search through my back issues of that wonderful old magazine. I’ve seen some of these photos in Iron Man in the past, but certainly not all, and although I’m not going to include all of them today it was impossible not to call attention to the coincidence of finding the photos just as the famous rack arrived in the center.
I’ve written extensively in the past about the many contributions Bob made through the years to training theory and equipment, and although I’m not going to rehash this information now, it seemed appropriate to share with readers/viewers some of these historic, eye-opening training devices.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Physical Culture | 2 Comments »
January 8th, 2010
Jan and I returned last night from a ten-day road trip that was one of the most interesting and rewarding we have ever made. The trip originated when Mark Henry and his wife, Jana, told us that the birth of their second child was scheduled for the morning of December 30th in New York City and that they’d like for us to be there just as we were for the arrival of their son, Jacob Todd Henry, who arrived four years and two months earlier. Accordingly, we booked plane tickets, but as we thought about the trip we began to wonder if it might be better for us to drive up to New York so that we could also drop off a large collection of nitrate-based films and film-clips in the New York area for restoration and transfer to a DVD format. Readers might wonder why we couldn’t just ship the films with our luggage, but the reason is that nitrate-based film is considered hazardous material and, as such, cannot be shipped without special permits and very expensive packaging.
In addition to our need to get the films to New York, we also realized that after the birth of Baby Henry we could drive from the New York City area over to State College, Pennsylvania, to pick up the books, files, and papers of Dr. Charles Yesalis, a prominent researcher in the area of anabolic/androgenic steroids who had recently retired from the faculty at Penn State. Probably the most widely-quoted steroid expert over the past 20 years, Dr. Yesalis had told us a month or six weeks ago that he wanted his collection to be housed at the Stark Center, and that it would fill about 40 “banker’s boxes.” What’s more, we thought, if we drove up in a truck there were several other items in the northeastern and eastern U.S. that we might be able to collect either going there or coming home.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in H.J. Lutcher Stark Center | 11 Comments »
December 11th, 2009
In earlier blogs, several photos of Mark Henry have appeared and Joe Roark, the creator of a fascinating and authoritative forum-IronHistory- suggested that some sort of measurement of Mark’s shoulders should be made as it appeared that he might have the broadest shoulders on record in the iron game. Mark, not Joe! No laughing. Anyway, since Mark was in town yesterday for a brief visit I prevailed on him to drop by the Stark Center so we could make an attempt to measure his shoulder-width.
As a thoughtful person might imagine, getting an accurate shoulder-width measurement isn’t easy because—for one thing–it’s important to place any measuring device neither too high nor too low on the deltoids. An inch too high or an inch too low can make a significant difference. It’s also important for the arms to be held against the sides and not flared out by a flexing of the lats and the related shoulder-girdle muscles. Since we have a device here at the Stark Center that David P. Willoughby used to measure shoulder-width I hoped to use it, but it was too narrow. Undaunted, foraged through our work-rooms and found two straight pieces of wood, placed them at what I thought was the appropriate place on Mark’s shoulders. For my part, I attempted to keep the pieces of wood parallel to each other as Mark stood against a wall, held his arms straight, and placed his palms against his thighs. I actually believe that the pieces of wood which touched the wall were a bit closer together than they were when they were touching Mark’s shoulders. I tried not to fudge the measurement so that his shoulders would seem broader than they actually are, and in that effort I was pushing the sticks against his shoulders tightly—perhaps even depressing the flesh to a small extent.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments »
December 4th, 2009
One of the most important gifts the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports has received over the past several years came to us from Doris Barrilleaux, a Florida great-grandmother with the energy level of a hyperactive hummingbird. What she gave us was her very large and invaluable collection of correspondence, magazines, posters, videotapes, audiotapes, and many thousands of photographs. Without question, the Barrilleaux Collection contains enough raw material for ten doctoral dissertations, and we hope to see at least one fairly soon. One of the most wonderful aspects of the gift of the Barrilleaux collection is that Doris, who’s a whiz with computers, digitized virtually all of the rare primary documents she’s gifting to us. It took Doris approximately six months of long days to meticulously scan every newspaper article about herself, every magazine article she wrote, every photograph of hers that appeared in a magazine, and most of her correspondence. Visitors to the Stark Center will be able to quickly access her collection because of the organizational work she did; it was an enormous effort for her –and we at the Stark Center are deeply grateful to her for this tremendous gift to generations of future scholars.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in H.J. Lutcher Stark Center, Physical Culture | 4 Comments »
November 27th, 2009
Last week, the Stark Center was involved in two functions involving the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System. Those functions may prove to be very important to the future growth of the Center. This is so because the Board of Regents (BOR) governs more than 200,000 students and 84,000 employees spread across the sixteen campuses in the University of Texas System, including U. T.-Austin, the system’s flagship institution.
How these functions came about is that someone on the BOR apparently heard about the Stark Center and asked us to make a formal presentation to the BOR about Lutcher Stark, who served on the Board of Regents for 24 years, and was Chairman of the Board for 12 years. We agreed, of course, and so a member of the BOR’s staff came to the Stark Center to talk about the presentation. During that visit Jan gave the staff member a tour of the finished as well as the unfinished parts of the Center and the staff member liked what she saw. Several weeks later she brought another staff member for another look, and these two visits led the two staffers to propose to the Chairman of the BOR, James Huffines, that the Board have a reception and tour at the Stark Center the evening before our formal presentation. We were told that after looking at photos and learning more about the Center, Chairman Huffines decided that the Center would probably be of interest to the BOR and that such a tour and reception should be scheduled. Accordingly, we stepped up the pace of our preparations and tried to make the Center look as good as we could in the time we had. As last Wednesday night approached, the BOR sent teams of party planners, caterers, and florists to decide how best to accommodate the approximately 150 guests we expected to have. Finally, the night arrived, and we’ve chosen a few photos to illustrate how things looked.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in H.J. Lutcher Stark Center, Physical Culture | 4 Comments »
