Schvitz’n with Norm

These days it’s pretty easy to find a place to grab a workout. Gyms are everywhere and exercise equipment is infinitely available.  

But it wasn’t always like this. Much of recreational exercise, strength training in particular, was counterculture. Weightlifting was frowned upon, discouraged, and demonized. Nowadays the weight room is a mandatory part of practice, but once upon a time it was considered counterproductive to athletic performance.

The few, the proud, the bohemian dissenters who embraced working out were referred to as physical culturists. This designation was a catchall description based on their leisure time activities but it also characterized a certain ethos and lifestyle.

Physical culturists would meet and connect with their fellow brethren and form workout groups. Some group members would pool their resources and many basement gyms were formed this way.

One such spot was New Bedford’s legendary George’s Gym. The gym’s namesake, George Sylvia, was a physical culturist/bodybuilder who historically trained at the Y. George’s nephew, and his nephew’s friend, were your classic 20-pound weaklings who were getting their lunch money taken at school. They had come across the iconic Charles Atlas dynamic training system advertisement that depicted a skinny kid getting bullied by a meathead at the beach. They asked George for some help in this area, so he wrote them a workout and struck up a deal. If the two scrawny lads were to faithfully follow his prescribed workout for six weeks, he would then buy them their very own weight set. The weight set ended up in George’s basement, a triple tenement in New Bedford’s South End. This was the inadvertent start to what became George’s Gym.

Shortly after this genesis, friend and local weightlifting devotee Armand “Peewee” Turgeon got wind of these basement sessions and wanted in on the action. Peewee was a student of the Olympic lifts and required a regulation Olympic bar and the overhead clearance that most basements couldn’t accommodate. He was given the green light to smash through the foundation and dig a weightlifting pit and added an Olympic set to the modest but soon to be burgeoning stockpile of equipment.

Peewee taught the art of Olympic style weightlifting to the basement crew and soon became the de facto coach. George’s Gym became a registered weightlifting club and would enter weightlifting competitions with an original team of four.

Local newspapers would publish meet results and the success of these first-generation lifters helped spread interest. Another impromptu pipeline to the gym was the municipal beach. Many local physical culturists were beach stalwarts. Some were lifeguards, some were guys who liked flexing in public, and there was also a faction of hand balancers who enjoyed showing off with handstands and other feats of gymnastic athleticism. At one point there was even a section of the beach dubbed “muscle beach.” Peewee worked at the beach and was an incidental promotor casually heralding the gym while enlightening these kindred spirits to his secret workout lair.

The early days of George’s Gym had no membership fees, but members did share some of the expenses. George eventually implemented a charge of $2 a month but would often cut people slack if they were short on funds. At one point he installed a shower and charged a dime per shower just to cover water usage. To join the gym, you couldn’t just walk in off the street, you needed someone to sponsor you and more specifically vouch for your character. George would often make an appearance watching workouts and was known to suspend people for various infractions. If he had not seen a person for a week or so, he was so deeply offended by this lack of commitment that you would be put on probation. Pretty much the exact opposite of today’s gym business model. The gym produced many state and New England weightlifting champions. Dave Ashman, a world record holder and silver medalist in the 1958 world championships was known to sometimes stop by George’s Gym for a workout.

The location of the one-time gym is a rather unremarkable dwelling that doesn’t really stand out in any noticeable way. To think that such a beehive of activity, a vestige of the birth of a movement, can exist in such relative obscurity has a sadness about it. Even in its heyday as a hotbed of emerging strength sports, it was hiding in plain sight. Perhaps it’s a fitting eventuality that an oasis once brimming with a tableau of characters would recede back into an ordinary residential property with little physical evidence of its wondrous existence.

Article originally published in The New Bedford Light