The Old School guys

[Bouncer]

This pic is from somewhere around 1959 when the only steroid available was Dbol and the common dose was 5-10mgs. Just something to think about..

[Bouncer]

A doctor's curiosity and a businessman's love of weightlifting set off a revolution in Steroids and Bodybuilding

Philadelphia Inquirer

YORK, Pa. – Then, as now, little packs of weary men gathered in downtown York to reminisce. Industrial jobs, like many of their dreams, were headed south. So, on sunny mornings in the early 1960s, they sat on benches, talked away the hours and observed everything.

Increasingly surrounded by empty storefronts, they must have wondered what it was that made Schultz's Drug Store so busy. All day long, it seemed, heavily muscled young men walked in and out of the pharmacy.

The old men, of course, had no way of knowing that the little store and their city, 100 miles west of Philadelphia, was at the nexus of a revolution destined to alter sports forever.

Even if they had been told why these big men – most of them weightlifters from York Barbell's nearby gym – were frequenting Schultz's, it's doubtful that the words anabolic steroids would have meant anything to them.

Few Americans recall that York served as the nation's capital after the Continental Congress fled Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War. Fewer still know of its link to a sordid piece of American history, the origins of the steroid boom in sports.

It was in this aging south-central Pennsylvania town that, more than 40 years ago, American athletes began experimenting with steroids, artificially produced derivatives of the male hormone testosterone that accelerate muscle growth.

The perilous connection started innocently enough, with the determination of a fitness-obsessed Pennsylvania businessman, the ambitions of weightlifters, the curiosity of a Maryland physician, and thousands of tiny pink pills.

It quickly led to results so spectacular that in little more than a decade, the popularity of anabolic steroids had moved far beyond York. They were being widely used, not just by weightlifters, but by track and field athletes, swimmers, and college and professional football players.

A 1972 survey revealed that 68 percent of Olympic competitors admitted using them. Track and Field News naively termed them the "Breakfast of Champions."

"The genie was out of the bottle," said Chuck Yesalis, a professor of sports science at Penn State.

Now, decades later, after a long, dark era in which they clouded the competitive landscape, anabolic steroids are a controlled substance in the United States and banned by most major sports organizations around the world. Yet the positive potential in this muscle-building magic potion continues to blind athletes to its serious health hazards.

"I wish to God I'd never done it," John Ziegler, the Olney, Md., physician who developed them and fed them willingly to York weightlifters, said before his death in 1984. "I'd like to go back and take that whole chapter out of my life."


• • •
Bob Hoffman was a Georgia-born partner in an oil-burner business that had its factory on North Broad Street in York.

A veteran of World War I, he became interested in weight training and threw himself into the pursuit. By 1923, at age 25, Hoffman had invented the barbell. Until then, lifters had used one-weight dumbbells. Barbells – circular weights that could be mounted on a bar – allowed a lifter to set his own burden.

Weightlifting quickly became not only Hoffman's passion but his full-time business. Soon, he had converted his oil-burner shop into a barbell-manufacturing plant, York Barbell Co.

By 1946, York Barbell employed 150 people, and was selling 50,000 barbell sets and grossing $1 million annually. The company published its own magazines, including the widely ready Strength and Health, and sold health and food supplements.

Hoffman was the dominant figure in U.S. weightlifting, coach of the Olympic team, and, through his magazines, the most vocal advocate and salesman for the sport. Lifters from across the nation flocked to York for training, first at the Broad Street facility and later at the firm's new gym, converted from an old Acme supermarket on Ridge Avenue.

Hoffman gave them jobs, in effect personally subsidizing the sport. In 1947, in Philadelphia's Convention Hall, he staged the first world championships. Weightlifters from the United States, which was to say from York Barbell, broke 12 world records.

"From the 1930s through the 1970s, York was Mecca for U.S. and world weightlifters," said John D. Fair, a history professor at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Ga., who has written and researched extensively on Hoffman and weightlifting.

In the years immediately after World War II, Ziegler, a gregarious, 6-foot-4 Gettysburg College graduate, was recuperating from a war wound. His rehabilitation regimen included weightlifting, and he, too, became a fanatic.

Ziegler went on to medical school, where his own experiences led him to specialize in physical rehabilitation. Working out in a gym in Silver Spring, Md., he became acquainted with John Grimek, a York employee and a world-class lifter. Ziegler soon made the pilgrimage to York to meet Hoffman.

The two hit it off and Ziegler became the American weightlifting team's physician. It was in that position that he made the discovery that would change his life – and those of many, many others in the years to come.

At the 1954 world championships in Vienna, Ziegler befriended a physician from the Soviet Union. Drinking in an Austrian beer hall one night, the Soviet doctor admitted that his team had been using a synthetic form of testosterone.

There had been widespread speculation in the lifting world about some sort of medical genie that Nazi scientists had uncovered during the war. There were always magic elixirs being touted, some concoction or training technique that could produce rapid improvement.

Hoffman, for example, sold Hi-Proteen, a powdered drink that he called "our secret weapon."

"It was," Fair said, "symptomatic of a perpetual search for ways to alter the body's chemistry to induce more effective muscular growth."

Returning home and garnering the research assistance of Ciba Pharmaceuticals in Summit, N.J., Ziegler began to hunt for an artificial substance that would mimic testosterone. Ciba supplied him not only with the testosterone, but with records of Nazi research the United States had confiscated after the war.

"He got into this whole thing not for any diabolical reasons, but merely out of a desire to experiment," Fair said. "He began using it with burn victims and the physically disabled. And at some point, he said, 'What if I gave this stuff to athletes?' "

By 1958, he had developed Dianabol, which was the first mass-produced anabolic steroid and the brand name for the chemical compound methandrostenolone. Within a few years, Ziegler was administering it, either through injection or by pill, to lifters on his regular visits to York. He was by then on the company's payroll.

Lifters were amazed at the results – though it took time for them to convince themselves that their increased performance was almost solely due to Ziegler's pills.

"This was a more innocent era," Fair said. "No one could quite believe these pills could make you a superstar almost overnight. They were raised on the Horatio Alger ethic: Hard work, sacrifice, physical training. Those were the things that made you a success. Not some pill."

According to Fair, around this time, Hoffman had discovered isometrics – exerting force against a stationary object. He pitched this new training regimen hard in his magazine, and it quickly became a national exercise phenomenon.

There is still some dispute as to how much Hoffman knew about the steroid experimentation. It's clear, Fair said, that there was confusion as to whether it was the isometrics or steroids causing the improved performances of U.S. lifters in York.

Bill March and Louis Riecke, according to Fair, had displayed great and rapid progress. Hoffman ballyhooed the two lifters as proof of isometrics' benefits.

Later, they admitted to having used steroids.

"If [Ziegler] had told me to eat grass, I would have done so to get strong," March later told Fair.

Ziegler typically prescribed 10 milligrams a day. One of the first York lifters to try steroids, according to Fair, added 100 pounds to his best three-lift total in two months.

Terry Todd, now the coordinator of strength training at the University of Texas, was a young weightlifter then. Reading about the records that were falling, and which Hoffman was attributing to isometrics, he grew curious.

"I was using isometrics to no avail," he said. "So I went to York to learn why. [A lifter] there showed me a little brown bottle with 100 5-milligram tabs of Dianabol, these little pink pills."

Once others came to understand that connection, lifters began to press Ziegler for prescriptions, most of which, Fair said, were filled at Schultz's. In time, the store was shipping anabolic steroids to weightlifters throughout the United States. One of York's trainers would frequently take station-wagon loads of men to Ziegler's Maryland office for the treatments.

Ziegler gave Dianabol to the entire U.S. Olympic team in Rome in 1960. They still lost to the Soviets, leading to the belief that the Soviet scientists were ahead in more than just manned-space-travel technology.

It was all perfectly legal and, at that time, few foresaw the drug's potential dangers.

In time, many of York's lifters went on to become strength and conditioning coaches for football and track teams. They took their secret with them.

"You can see the appeal," Yesalis said. "No matter the sport, a good big man is almost always going to beat a good little man."

Ziegler and others gradually became aware of Dianabol's hazardous impact on the liver and heart. As news of steroids' beneficial impact and harmful side effects leaked into the general public, the debate over their use gained force.

Ziegler began to backtrack, cautioning lifters against indiscriminate steroid use.

"These guys were all young and strong and not really thinking about the drug's consequences," Fair said. "This concerned Ziegler. Things had gotten out of his control."

In 1967, the International Olympic Committee funded its own medical commission to perform drug tests on athletes. By the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, it was testing specifically for anabolic steroids. In 1991, the U.S. government placed them on its controlled-substance list.

Still, anabolic steroids, and the similar drugs that followed, were being used.

Hoffman died in 1985, the extent of his knowledge about his company's links to steroid abuse still unknown.

A year earlier, Ziegler had passed away. By then, despite their notorious reputation, anabolic steroids were being used even by high school athletes.

"All those young kids," he said in an interview shortly before his death, "what a terrible price they'll pay. If only I'd known it would come to this."

[Bouncer]

Didn't realize the the start of steroids and the first mecca came out of a Philadelphia Gym and Ciba labs in jersey!! I knew I was royalty!

[auri]

Cool read.

[Mr I]

Good read yeah I said many times on here there was evidence that hitler had some of his soldiers on test. I swear though the first dbol I eva took was like nothing I have seen since, first was pure denial them the next was pronabol5, both were great. Nowadays dbol is pie shit and has a totally different effect in me.

[Mr I]

Just to add the first time I'm tried dbol I used about 20 mg ed and it just about blew my head off

[Bouncer]

gonna talk to my jersey boys about bringing back Ciba labs! :D

[Mr I]

gonna talk to my jersey boys about bringing back Ciba labs! :D

if real good dbol was around I'd be more temped

[henry]

good read

[Ashop]

This pic is from somewhere around 1959 when the only steroid available was Dbol and the common dose was 5-10mgs. Just something to think about..

I recognize Larry Scott,, he was always ahead of the time physique wise. I have a ton of respect for these old school guys.