Bob Peoples: Deadlift Champion, Strength Theorist, Civic Leader – Iron Game History – November, 1992

As kids, when we headed out to lift weights, that’s what we did: lift weights. Nowadays a kid doesn’t head out to some icebox garage or dirt-floored cellar; more likely he’s off to a plush-carpeted spa with a blonde in spandex behind the instructor’s clipboard. And except in name, it isn’t “weightlifting” that he’s headed for; it’s bodybuilding or “pump- ing iron,” the (gorge-raising coinage that wouldn’t have meant beans to us when we were kids). So little real weightlifting, indeed, occurs in these plush emporia that it’s a common sight to see an “iron pumper” return his E-Z curl bar to the middle pin on the power rack to save himself from bending the whole way down to the distant floor to take his next set.