Today we continue the series
in which award-winning nonfiction authors discuss the joys and challenges of
the research process with an essay by Don Tate. Thank you, Don.
Growing
up, I was a skinny kid. When my dad noticed my anxiety about it, he gave me a
copy of The Bodybuilder’s Nutrition Guide by bodybuilder Dr. Franco
Colombu. That book inspired a lifetime of exercise, physical fitness, and
nutrition with me.
Years
later, I went on to compete in natural, drug-free bodybuilding. I even won
two trophies—imagine that!
After that, I thought about how I might incorporate the sport
into my children’s literature work. But kids don’t compete in bodybuilding
shows, right? So I needed to find a true story to captivate them.
As I was researching, I discovered an old black-and-white
image of a young Victorian strongman lifting a giant barbell over his head. It
was Eugen Sandow, the boy who’d been born sickly but grew up to become known as
“The Strongest Man on Earth.” I had a story!
When writing Strong As Sandow: How Eugen Sandow Became the
Strongest Man on Earth, I relied heavily on Sandow’s own best-selling book
Strength and How to Obtain It (Gale & Polden, LTD.,1897). It
introduced early twentieth century exercise enthusiasts to Sandow’s workout
regimes.
Most importantly for me, however, it included autobiographical stories
about Sandow’s life—his early childhood, his defeat of the notorious strongmen
Sampson and Cyclops, and the time he wrestled a lion. I also gathered
information from a couple of other books, but my best discovery was a mountain
of Eugen Sandow memorabilia—practically in my own backyard.
The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports is a library, archive, and museum dedicated to the study and preservation of the physical-culture movement, and it’s located right here in downtown Austin, at the top of the University of Texas football stadium. Time for a research trip!
The
Stark Center is a dream world for researchers and physical fitness enthusiasts,
like me. It features The Joe and Betty Weider Physical Culture Museum, exhibits
related to physical fitness and weight training over the years, and an art
gallery with portraits of bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Lou Ferrigno.
I spent hours there snapping photos of 100-year-old copies of
Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture, which contained articles written
and edited by Sandow himself. There were also paintings of him! One of my
favorites, painted in 1893 by artist Aubrey Hunt, featured Sandow as a Roman
gladiator.
Spending time at the Stark Center was like stepping into a
time machine and visiting Sandow is his day. Those research trips (three in all!)
not only helped me write a more accurate story, they made me even more excited
about my subject.
When students are writing a report, encourage them to seek
out research sources in their own community. Possibilities include university
libraries, museums, and newspaper archives (when I researched my first book Say
Hey!: A Song of Willie Mays, I spent a day rummaging through Associated
Press photos at my hometown newspaper). They might be surprised at what’s lurking
in their
own backyard.
Don Tate is an award-winning author and the illustrator of
numerous critically acclaimed books for children, including Pigskins to
Paintbrushes: The Story of Football-Playing Artist Ernie Barnes (Abrams,
2021) and William Still and His Freedom Stories: The Father of the
Underground Railroad (Peachtree, 2020). Don, who lives in Austin, Texas, is
a founding host of the The
Brown Bookshelf—a blog
dedicated to books for African American young readers.
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