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...

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...

Several blogs ago, I provided some information as to why we use the term “Physical Culture” in the name of our research facility—The Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports—and why we’ve used the term for 20 years in the title of our journal—Iron Game History—The Journal of Physical Culture. A number of emails arrived with comments about what I’d written, and I thought I’d use one of those emails as a springboard to expand the conversation and to share with readers how one thing can sometimes lead to another, better thing—“paying it forward,” as they say.  In any...

Apologies for returning to the same subject as the one used in the previous blog, but our 10-16-09 visitors were so unexpected, so diverse, so prominent, and so interesting that I ask for your forbearance as I briefly (for me, anyway) recount who came, why they came, and what happened.  It all got started when I received a call on Wednesday from Joe Hood, a local doctor I’ve known for over 30 years now.  Joe is a genuinely unusual man with one of the most remarkable memories I’ve ever seen in action.  He was also a very gifted strength athlete...

Now that we’re at least partly open and thus able to show people around, we’ve been having visitors to the Stark Center.  Sometimes the visitors are expected; sometimes they’re either not or at least not expected in the particular way they come.  For example, just over a week ago I was very surprised as I walked past the elevator lobby where our full-size copy of the Farnese Hercules is displayed.  What surprised me was that approximately 40 UT students were either sitting on benches or the floor or just standing in front of the immense, slowly-turning statue.  They were not...

Today, as I was showing a rent-house of mine to a potential tenant I noticed and then pointed out the built-in mission-style, glass-fronted bookcases on either side of the fireplace. I mentioned that those bookcases—built by my paternal grandparents and used by them as well as by my father and my Uncle Walter—were the birthplace of my lifelong fascination with books, with reading. Not only the information in the books but the books themselves—their feel, their look, their smell, and their heft. Once I realized that books were the keys to many kingdoms, they soon held me in their sway...

We are pleased to announce that the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports is now open in our new location. After realizing many years ago that our growing collection was becoming too large for its current home in Anna Hiss Gym, my wife Jan and I began work on identifying a new location because we felt that the developing area of sports and exercise studies required it. When we learned that the administration here at The University of Texas was discussing plans to renovate the Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium, we hoped that our plans for a world-class...

Twenty years ago, when we began publishing our journal, Iron Game History, we affixed a subtitle: “the Journal of Physical Culture.”  We did this because “Physical Culture” is an older and somewhat broader term than is “Physical Fitness,” although the latter is now much more widely used.  Sometimes people speak or write about “total fitness” or of becoming “totally fit,” which, when you think about it, is impossible.  In fact, it could be argued that the only time a person is totally fit is when that person is dead—at which point he/she is totally fit to be buried, cremated, or...

My first message dealt with one aspect of the practical side of the Stark Center—the two miles of compacting shelves that are now being installed in our Archives area.  Today I’d like to touch on the aesthetic side of the Center—the side that speaks to beauty.  As most of you probably know, considerations of beauty, broadly defined, have been a part of physical culture for millennia, and as we’ve worked with the people who are helping with the design of our space we’ve done our best to make the Center beautiful as well as practically useful. For this reason, I...