NOTE; IF YOU HAVE SHORT ATTENTION SPAN OR GET BORED EASILY … DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING……..
This one goes back to the very beginning of my memory bank so you gotta excuse me if you think I’m lieing.
I won’t bE lieing but I might be forgetting how it all exactly happened.
My dad was born and raised across the Bay from San Francisco on some country land a few miles east of Oakland.
My dad was a tree cutter when he was a kid (yea a lumber-jack but only when school allowed, and Yea, he cut down redwood trees which he came to regret later on in his lifetime.)
He knew Steve and he also knew George Eifferman and a couple of the other weight lifting pioneers back in them good old days.
So when I was real young we somehow all got together at a lake in the Oakland Hills for a picnic or some other friendly gathering.
That’s when I met Steve and that’s when he said, “Get big, kid!”. I was so young that I was sitting at the water’s edge with a shovel and a bucket. (Wild guess here but he must have been 18, 19, or 20).
A few years later we spent the summer months in a poplar spot called RIO NIDO on the Russian River. Out cabin was on the river and we knew just about everyone in Rio Nido,
But on the weekends it seemed that the whole of Northern California would arrive in Rio Nido for fun, dancing, romance and a lot of hard core drinking.
I was the kid that was always there so eveeybody sort of knew me as 'the kid who's always here!'
I had a great tan!
So one weekend evening Reeves and his power-lifting buddy showed up to have a good time and some friends came by the cabin to tell me that there was a big fignt going on and Reeves was involved.
The ‘fight’ must have lasted all of 12 seconds because by the time I got there the participants were long gone but everyone was talking about how Reeves got sucker punched by some obnoxious asshole and so did his friend by another obnoxious asshole . (Their words, not mine.)
I put two and two together and figured it was a coordinated sucker punch due to some form of jealousy because Steve was not the type of guy who went looking for trouble.
Reeves was sort of a popular teenager because of the publicity he got in one of the Oakland newspapers when his mother gave an interview about her son and the fact that he never had a cold nor a cavity and his class-mates always did a lot of bragging about knowing him and what a good guy he was.
The next time I saw Reeves was while I was doing some heavy bench-presses at a small gym called American Health Studio in the downtown area of San Francisco before heading off to work in the SF Post office as a nixie picker. (That's the guy who goes around picking up all the mail that was sorted incorrectly. A monkey could do it if he could count to 10.)
My math was good so I got that job.
I finished a heavy set and looked up and there he was with a kind of congratulatory nod. After my final set, I looked up and he was gone.
Then many years later I called him and invited him to be our Special Guest at a show we were promoting.
He agreed and did show up and spend a week meeting people he had never met before.
I gotta admit that that was a memorial get together because a few short years later he would pass away.
We discussed many things ,,,, the present ‘condition’ of the bodybuilding world as he saw it, the use of roids which he felt was ruining it, and a lot about his movie career. We even had to take a break at a function that was showing his first Hercules film so he could sit down for a few minutes and watch it. But once the credits rolled he got up and shook hands with everyone in the room.
There’s much more to this because I have neglected Eifferman and a couple of other of Steve Reeves’ friends, and passing bys on numerous occasions, but they were all great and colorful characters and I’m glad that I had the chance to know them a little bit while they were all here on Planet Earth.
So that’s the facts with no exaggeration.
I hope it didn’t bore no one to death.