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Sunday, February 9, 2020

Dan Lurie, Paul Como, Barton Horvath, and Bert Goodrich posed for this group photo about 1940.  (The person who posted this photo on an athletic history website misspelled Bert's surname.)  Como and Lurie were both known to have posed nude for Earle Forbes, but the style and staging of those photos don't resemble my nudes of Barton Horvath enough for me to think Forbes took them.

11 comments:

  1. All wonderfully solid men..if only they were all nude.

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  2. Do you possibly have a date for this photo? I'm interested because of the style(s) of the posing trunks.

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    1. Sorry, no date came with the photo, but I checked a bodybuilding history website that says these men were champion level competitors in the early 1940's. Hope that helps.

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  3. Yes, indeed. Many thanks. That would tally for Lurie, Como and Horvath. Goodrich, however, is sporting a much briefer style - a "three-quarter-back" - which ostensibly came into fashion in the late 1940s to early 1950s, when the short-lived fashions became very brief - certainly in Britain. As the conservatism of the enfolding decade took hold, the styles reverted to the box trunks of the 1920s to promote modesty. Another way to date is to go by hairstyles... and those of the early 1950s are discernibly longer than in the previous decade. Interesting.

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    1. You obviously know a lot about this subject, but it's worth mentioning that I've seen a version of Goodrich's shorts in strong man photos from the 1900's and 1910's, albeit in white. As my granny used to say, "If you wait long enough almost anything will come back into style."

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    2. Some 20 years ago, I wrote a series of articles on the history of men's sportswear as "brand publicity" for a well-known international sportswear manufacturer. They covered most of the different sporting disciplines, many of which came out of Victorian England. When I accepted the contract, I had in fact no idea of the colossal amount of research that would be needed, but was fortunate enough to have the use of the comprehensive archives of International HQ of the YMCA in London to assist me. Much of the development of sportswear and the popularity of certain sports boiled down to social class as a result of cost, washing facilities and hygiene - in an age before antibiotics. Hygiene also accounted for the heavily varnished gym equipment, which allowed it to be hosed down with discinfectant and resulted in a lot of sports initially being played in very brief attire or completely naked - hence all the swimming in the nude. The Victorians were not just merely aping the Ancient Greeks - the word gymnasium derives via the Latin from the Greek γυμνός (gymnos), which means "naked". Indoor soccer, badminton and tennis were initially played in very small, high cut briefs we would call today bikinis; weightlifters and acrobats wore wide-waisted pouches for abdominal as well as genital support using the new rubber-elastic, and runners wore tight fitting breeches to the knee using a cavalry twill with long wool stockings. Gymnasia were all-male spaces - women used to compete at archery, just about the only activity possible in a bustle - in an age when every man was deemed to be heterosexual, so there was no room for false modesty. It is quite astounding to us even today just how unconcerned the Victorians were about male nudity and modesty in the appropriate social space. This obsession only came into vogue later, on the back of Victorian revivalist Evangelical influence and the 1920s and 1930s saw - much as the assaults on the internet today - successive waves of legislation controlling the publishing industry and photography. Initially, photography was without any restrictions at all. Fashions are indeed recycled but in reference to the photo above, there was a brief respite - pun intended - in the late 1940s to early 1950s when the morality police clamped down and by the middle of the decade, bodybuilders were in trunks twice the size again, which were deliberately designed to hide the family jewels. (This, however, contrasted with men's underwear which became very brief and often sheer in the 1950s - the Jockey Skants bikini went on the market in 1958.) It is interesting to note that on a social basis, men are once again expected to cover up. Shorts to the knee seem to be de rigueur in public whilst the women seem able to wear next-to-nothing. Familiarity with the subject matter does indeed facilitate the dating of a photograph by means of the evolving styles in sportswear.

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  4. Fascinating information! Thanks for sharing your research. Are any of the articles you wrote available on line? I would love to read them and learn more.

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  5. No, I don't believe I have ever seen any of my work online. The series was long over before the internet went "commercial" in any big way and although I own the intellectual property rights, I'm afraid copyright law would probably mean I would have to rewrite to edit out the references to that one particular manufacturing brand which were woven into the text. I originally qualified in modern languages and linguistics and my initial pitch for the contract was the history of the word "jock" into which I inserted the history of the jockstrap as a sub-theme. The company's marketing department had clearly never seen anything based on linguistics before because the word "jock" in fact represents the perfect example of something called "semantic shift" which is when a word changes its meaning over time. The word "jock" - a late Mediaeval Scottish variant of the English "Jack" before the onset of the Great Vowel Shift - emerges in the late 15th century and over 500 years gradually changes its meaning to return full circle by the mid-1950s in American English. My lecturer in linguistics happened to be a resentful, petulant and crabby feminist who clearly thought that I was the very personification of all her oppressions. When tasked to write an essay on an example of semantic shift, nothing gave me greater pleasure than to immerse her delicate, ideological sensibilities into the sweat of a male locker room. She couldn't fault my argument and I took stoic satisfaction in the loathing that ensued. Little did I then know that the satisfaction would become pure joy when I was able to bank a very good fee on the back of my testosterone fuelled audcacity. I can certainly give you the history of the word "jock"... it would not be inappropriate for this blog.

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  6. Yes, I am interested, partly because I grew up with a group of older Scottish-American ranch workers in Texas who used the word "jock" as yet another slang term for penis. I never heard it used exactly that way anywhere else. Loved the story about the crabby lecturer, btw!

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  7. How so very interesting... Yet another albeit anecdotal piece of evidence. I will most certainly oblige. Give me a couple of days to consult my notes for dates and I'll cobble something together.

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    1. Thanks! I'll be looking forward to it. Also, I've published some pieces with corporate or trade names embedded in them. My publisher told me that under U.S. copyright law, which would apply should I publish anything here, it is OK to use them as long as a disclaimer/disclosure is made insofar as respecting trademarks. This can be done by placement of the notation TM with or without a circle around it after each mention or by a blanket statement indicating that XYZ is a registered trademark of ABC corporation. A major caveat, however, is mentioning in a negative light or "dilution" of a trademark by genericizing or misapplying it.

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