The Man Who Gave America a Rock-Hard Six-Pack

The Man Who Gave America a Rock-Hard Six-Pack.Joe Gold lived by metal—and almost died by metal. The iron-pumping, machine-welding body-builder, exercise-machine maven, and gym genius who helped turn America buff barely survived a paralyzing torpedo injury in the Philippines during World War II.

Young men today feel incredibly pressured to look “cut,” with sharply defined delts and perfect “six-packs,” because Los Angeles’ mid-century Muscle Beach created the 21st century’s Muscle Nation. That broad-shouldered, taut strut, once limited to an urban subculture of gym rats, has lured millions of suburban teenagers into bench-pressing and abdominal-crunching. People usually claim Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone created the modern American male’s body image. But before Ah-nold, there was Joe.

Joe Gold was born in 1922 in East Los Angeles, the son of a junk dealer. One of many American Jews who, contrary to the stereotypes, made it thanks to Max Baer/Hank Greenberg brawn not Woody Allen/Henry Kissinger brains, Gold and some buddies established the “Dugout Repair Shop” in junior high school. They lifted barbells in a garage while fiddling with cars and other machines. As a teenager, Gold started hanging out on the Santa Monica Pier’s Muscle Beach, mixing with Hollywood stuntmen, circus acrobats, and the city’s body-builders.

Always balancing his loves of body-building and seafaring, Gold moved to New Orleans as a member of the Merchant Marine. He opened his first gym there, then shipped off to the Philippines during World War II. Alas, his ship was torpedoed, his body crushed. Gold survived, enduring a six-month hospital stay. (The pain lingered for the rest of his life. In the years before he died in 1982, he returned to the wheelchair some doctors in the 1940s thought he’d never leave.)

After a detour in Las Vegas in 1956 to flank Mae West in an all-male musclebound chorus line, Gold returned to Muscle Beach. When a spate of sexual-abuse cases among the body-builders prompted the city fathers to banish exercise equipment from the beach in 1959, Gold, who was already investing in local real estate, started planning his gym.

The usual dank and dirty sweat shack was not for Joe Gold. He was a body sculptor, chiseling muscles with precision-guided exhortations, expertly devised workouts, compulsively crafted machines, and obsessively managed Spartan environments. Gold made his own machines, going far beyond dumbbells and barbells.

Gold’s Gym opened on Venice Beach in 1965. For $60 a year, some Californians unwittingly became the Sons of Liberty of America’s Fitness Revolution, rebelling against flabby muscles and pot bellies.