A SHORT HISTORY OF STERN'S GYM

exerpt fron San Diego Union Tribune article By Jeanne F. Brooks

In the 1980's, Leo Stern made a huge concession to modern expectations of climate control at his second-floor walk-up gym in North Park. He did so after 40 years of Hot-as-blazes summers and nothing but windows shoved up air.
New fitness centers that had spung up around the city boasted central air conditioning. They pumped waves of coolness over their members, men and women in color-coordinated Spandex.
Stern bought a few electric fans. This is the kind of hew-to-the-corse management style that,dispite a half century of gusting trends, has preserved Stern's Gym in a pristine state-its decore what you might call ambience de iron.
From its inception, the place had been a lodestone for hardcore bodybuilders.
At the end of its first year, Stern's Gym needed more space. Stern leased the second floor of a building on Grenada Avenue in North Park. Only the previous tenents refused to vacate the premesis.
Stern and his pals bided their time. When the ex-tenent left the building one day, they moved his bowling alley and pool hall out, and moved the gym in-where it has remaind ever since.Below the gym in those days a kosher chicken slaughter house. "the oder was so bad in the summertime that people walked on the other side of the street,: Stern remembered. "but the rent was cheap. at 5 p.m. each day, when the rendering truck drove up, weightlifters rushed acress the gym flooe to shut the windows to the stink of it.

Worked 90 hours a week

Sterns first opened the gym for business May 13, 1946, on Menlo Avenue near Hoover High School."I worked 90 hours a week for the first month," he recalled, "and I made $50." It would be an understatment to say weightlifting was not popular. In fact, Stern said, "it was frowed upon. People didn't understand it. We were ridiculed for working out with weights." But Stern said a small group of friends persisted. "we did it because we enjoyed it. We believed in what we were doing." And, in any case, "I didn't give a damn what anybody else thought."
To promote the gym and the sport, he arranged weightlifting demonstrations like "The Symphony of Strength," performed as an assembly program at Hoover in 1947.
For about 20 years, Stern's Gym had no heat. "It was so cold in the winter, sometimes the gyms had to wear gloves," Stern recalled. Otherwise, when they sweated, the palms of their hands would stick to the iron bars.
"I had to put heat in about the '60s, " he said. "There were so many complaints, and the membership dropped."
The 1970s brought large mirrors to Stern's Gym, a fashion that had begun in New York in the 1920s.
The 80's brought music - for a while, until the aggrevation got to be too much for Stern. "I'd be walking down the street, "he explained, "and somebody'd come out to the fire escape and yell at me to change the music. I wasn't running a music hall."
He yanked the music out instead.

Schwarzenegger was here

Over the years, serious bodybuilders came through the doors of the Stern's Gym regularly. Lou Ferrigno, who once starred on television as "The Incredible Hulk," has worked out here. So has John Davis, a 1940s world champion weightlifter, and bodybuilder/movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. And Bill Pearl, of course. And a lot of San Diego Chargers. And so did Shannon Brown, a former competitive bodybuilder and member of the Detoit Lions, who bought the gym on April 15, 1994. Brown was a kid in Jackson, Mississippi, when he first came across the name Leo Stern in a muscle magazine. Later, in Michigan, he lifted in Leo Stern-sponsored competitions.Stern's Gym, Brown said, is known across the country.

Read another article about Leo Stern.

Read About Shannon Brown.