What Holds Up the Steel? As a kid, I was tough and a grappler. I walked daily delivering newspapers. I never wore t-shirts and had never heard of a tank top. In the summer in Tennessee I wore blue jeans and a black long sleeve shirt with buttons. My feet were shorn in heavy black leather engineer boots with stacked heels. The heels had steel mule plates that struck sparks on the sidewalk or when I put my feet down to go through a mud puddle on my bike. In high school, I found out I could sprint. Hurdling was not my thing. There was a rope to climb but nobody climbed it. There were parallel bars but I found my shoulders pained me when I got up on them. No such thing as a horse. The real horse, a grey mare, had thrown me when I tried to control a raring up to chase the stallion roan that had just run off with the high school principal. My real estimate was that Chevrolet 265 V-8 engine block. I weighed 150 pounds (68 kilos) and as I find in references now so did the iron. I carried it into the house and down into the basement to be washed with Whisk and then dried and up the stairs to the first and then the landing up and finally to the second floor where my bedroom was. Onto the 2x4 skid it went, I had made, to wait for internals as I got the money. I could swim out into the Saginaw Bay after Red Cross swim training by the football coach. As summer of my last year in the Thumb passed I could swim out to the sand bar under the first set of breakers and then out to the second set and finally into the open water where no more sand built up. Freshman dorm found me with wrestlers down the hall and football players beneath me in the same house of the residence hall, Huber. The president of the house was a disk jockey on the university station, Harvey Kabaker. Jenkins and Johansson were the wrestlers from Waukegan, Illinois, the headquarters of the NCAA, and Cedar Rapids Iowa, in reverse order. Johansson was really short and wrestled in 137 pound (?) class in Amateur competition. Jenkins was up one class and average height. Knees was the vulnerable place on wrestlers. One day Johansson picked up, Franzen, the biggest of the football players beneath us and walked down the hall with him on his shoulders. They coached me in intramural wrestling and I began to play with feats of strength. The chair in my room had strong wooden arms and I would invert myself against the wall with my hands on the arms and do push-ups until finally I could stand on my hands and walk down the halls like the wrestlers. One day I walked across the Diag with my Physics lab partner on my hands talking with her as we went. She never let on anything was unusual. She was a nursing destined coed and I only saw her for one semester. Equal opportunity? Sandy was a tall coed who worked in the dining halls and showed us she could stand on her hands but not walk on them like the male cheer leaders who also had a mini trampoline to do flip stunts. I once tried to walk off a grassy slope onto beach sand and down a steep slope to get in the water without falling but the sand was just too loose as I entered the water and I twisted and fell. For the first semester physical education, I chose Archery. I had seen Bear Archery making arrows with a hot wire to trim the feathers at Boy Scout camp. I got lots of bull’s eyes with a 35 pound fiberglass bow. (there’s that material again!) Moving up to 55 pound bows gave very little time before the class was over. Second semester was Weightlifting. I’m not much for team sports. We began with a Sears bar and two 20 pound dumbbells to do flies. The bar had adjustable weight in the sense of interlocking plates for each end and a locking collar. It could go up to 150 pounds in Olympic style clean and jerk lifts. Once we had that up there was a Dar Lurie bar with gold painted iron plates of standard Olympic 20 kilogram (45 pound) size , 7 cm. (17.75 inches diameter). The bar was also 20 kilos and the locks were 5 pounds each (2.25 kg). The coach showed us the basic lifts and the equipment then went off to work on his thesis upstairs in the gym. Upstairs there was a cork 1/10-mile track on a balcony. At the end of the session he would return to write down what we had done. My best was matched by one other lifter in that class. The coach said he would have coached us for the upcoming Olympics if anyone lifted 300 pounds. I lifted 250 pounds and the class ended. I never came back to raise my total but I did come back to that cork track. I was amazed one day when I went a full mile of 10 laps and felt the “wall” open. Before that I was panting in the cinders and sand at ¼ mile in junior high. One of the other characters at the South Quadrangle dish room was the son of a Corpus Christi gynecologist who had once worked for the Center for Disease Control (CDC). He had a brother who was a Golden Gloves champion and he taught me how to cover and punch to move on from the boxer who had beat me up in grade school, punching my soft belly until I couldn’t get my breath. He dated a college English professor as he tried to get his grades up. She had some records by an English boy band she played for us at a party at her house one night. The Beetles became known to most on TV.