The reemergence of Dr. Jim
26 May 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
One of my oldest friends contacted me a few days back after being incommunicado for nearly a year. Dr. James Wright was the science editor for Flex and Muscle & Fitness magazines for over a decade. Jim was instrumental in getting me in the door with Weider through his considerable influence with major domo Tom Deters. I cranked out over seventy articles on how the athletic elite trained.
I interviewed top athletes and quizzed them mercilessly about their training tactics. I would weave these interviews into body part how-to-do articles that were featured each month. Jim, Editor Bob Wolff, senior writer Julian Schmidt and I would all meet up at the Arnold Classic and Mr. Olympia each year and have more chuckles than a canned laugh track of a TV sitcom. Jim had a twenty year career in the US Army including Vietnam. He went on to do research for the army in developing the super-soldier and this professional interest in how best to extend the threshold of human performance (and as a direct result a concurrent improvement in the physique; i.e., more muscle/reduced body fat) led him to take a position with Joe Weider after he retired from the army as a Colonel. Jim went on to author several highly praised books pertaining to the art & science of physical transformation; with an emphasis on nutrition and supplementation. He was one of the first authority figures in the fitness world to write about how to use real science to arrive at ways to improve performance.
More often than not, supplement producers, equipment makers, fitness book sellers would reverse-engineer a rationale to arrive at a preordained conclusion: that their product was fabulous and absolutely essential for physical transformation. Being the serious scientist that he was, Jim said to the fitness world at large, Wait a cotton pickin minute we need to initiate a processes, scientific procedures to use when we come across a promising avenue of progress. Well follow it where it leads us well not pick a pre-ordained conclusion and use pseudo/voodoo science to arrive at that conclusion and justify a products existence for personal profit.
I used to pick his big brain relentlessly about any crazy nutrition/supplement/substance topic that came to my mind. Jim is originally from Little Rock Arkansas and my mothers kin are from northeast Arkansas on the Mississippi river so we had a natural mutual affinity for BBQ, catfish, Lone Star, hushpuppies and Moon Pies. A few years back Jim was involved in a motorcycle accident that jarred his brain lose from its casing and caused him to have to go on permanent disability. His recovery has been slow and some of his fine-motor skills and cognitive function still suffer. He is feeling better and contacted me letting me know how impressed he was with what were trying to do here on the website. He is writing again and we tentatively agreed to run articles of his on the site in the near future.
Though when he was at Weider, I called him The Stonecutter on account of how he agonized over every sentence. An article due in a month would create near-nervous breakdown deadline anxiety for him. He was a cursed perfectionist working in a world of ever-looming deadline. Jim was a long ball hitter whos columns were must read each month. If I can get him out of mothballs and post some of his musings, well all benefit. Jim has a counterintuitive sense and his topical conclusions continually poke sharp sticks in the eyeballs of the status quo. Jim, like me, could be classified (as Dorothy Parker self-described herself) a carefree psychotic. I want to bring him to the Mountain Compound to conduct a nutrition/training seminar. If you would be interested in attending drop me a note. Well limit class size to a half dozen and the seminar/workshop/cookout will last four hours.
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