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...

Every day or so, beginning today, I plan to breathe a metaphorical song into the air.  That song, as it does in the second and lesser-known stanza of a poem by H.W. Longfellow, will fall to earth “I know not where.”  I hope that my songs, like Longfellow’s, eventually fall to earth just as his did. For the most part, I plan to sing about what we’re doing, have done, and hope to do at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports here at the University of Texas.  As I do this, I ask for forbearance and...