The following year the little fellow went to the city, and joined a Y.M.C.A. gymnasium. There was plenty of good apparatus here, and he watched the other fellows and tried their tricks. A year or two in this gymnasium, with daily rowing in the summer, began to tell. The little fellow stripped at 123 pounds now; his arms were brown and sinewy; he could hold a good steady stroke for ten or fifteen miles in a working boat; could run several miles at a dog-trot; and had learned to “handle his body” on the bar.
Then he went to college, and in the gymnasium his arms, brown to the shoulders from rowing in the sun, won him among his classmates the sobriquet of “Athlete.” This was very agreeable to the little fellow.
Four years of work and practice in a college gymnasium could have only one result. At the end of that time the little fellow was no longer a little fellow. He weighed in his clothes 150 pounds, and every muscle in his body was hard and well trained. The friends who came down to college to see him get his diploma were greatly surprised to see him on the programme as Captain of the Gymnastic Team, and still more astonished to see him no longer a little fellow, but a stout gymnast circling the bar, swinging gaily on the trapezes, and building pyramids with his nimble confreres. That is not very long ago, and now the little fellow is surprised to find himself spoken of as about the best gymnast in one of the largest amateur athletic clubs in the country.
So much for our “Ex-Little Fellow”; and now we may recount how Mr. E. Lawrence Levy became the amateur champion weight lifter of the world. Although when a boy at school he was proficient in nearly every branch of athletics, and an adept at all games, it was not until later years that he turned his attention to gymnastics. It came about in this way. When twenty-five years old, Mr. Levy, having passed from school-boy to tutor, started a school of his own, and with a genuine love of athletics and a knowledge of the benefit which boys may gain from them by following them within reason, he had fitted up in his school-room a trapeze on which he was wont to practise with his pupils. Finding that it was scarcely safe to do this without skilled tuition, he sent for Professor Hubbard, the instructor of the Birmingham Athletic Club. The result was that the trapeze was removed from the school-room to the playground, where other appliances such as horizontal and parallel bars were also fixed. Here Mr. Levy again joined his pupils, and then, after three or four lessons, he, to the instructor’s surprise, accomplished several feats which are, as a rule, only achieved by practised gymnasts. Finding that he was outstripping his boys, he determined to join the Birmingham Athletic Club. Here he was able to measure himself against men of his own age and strength.
It was at the club gymnasium that he one night saw the heavy dumb-bells belonging to two professional “strong men.” He tried to lift the bells, but failed. This seems to have shaped his future course. Instead of being discouraged by failure, he determined to overcome all obstacles and go in for heavy dumb-bell exercise. He began with comparatively light bells, and with these he practised in the solitude of his school-room for hours at a time. Then he bought two new bells weighing 28 lbs. each, using them assiduously until he could do almost anything with them—holding them out at arms’ length, bringing them down to the sides of his legs and up again.
When he had thoroughly mastered the “twenty-eights,” he tried two “fifty-sixes.” These he retained for months, being determined not to attempt the heavier bells until he was quite perfect with the lighter ones. At length Mr. Levy was able to put up the 112 lb. dumb-bell. This was more than any member of the Birmingham Gymnasium had ever done, and it then became necessary to add two 84 lb. dumb-bells to the collection. With these Mr. Levy began quietly practising, one at a time. Then he took to using them together, and gradually overcoming the difficulties of the harder work, succeeded one evening in putting them up simultaneously.
From that point he never went back. Having done as much with the dumb-bells as at the time seemed possible, he decided to add the lifting of bar-bells to his exercises. He bought three, weighing 140 lbs., 165 lbs. and 180 lbs. He practised assiduously with these, but all the time he was yearning to do still bigger feats with dumb-bells. At last his opportunity came. One Friday evening, on visiting the Gymnasium, he found a dumb-bell weighing 150 lbs. It had been sent there for exhibition by some professionals who were visiting the city. He tried to put it up, and failed; but the dogged perseverance which marked his whole career came once again to his aid. Finding that the huge plaything was to be left at the gymnasium till the following Tuesday, he began practising indefatigably, and on the Tuesday evening, in the presence of his club fellows, he achieved his self-imposed task. The next week a dumb-bell of the same weight (150 lbs.) was added to his private collection, and he used it regularly. This private collection now consisted of two 28 lbs., two 56 lbs., two 84 lbs., two 100 lbs., one 112 lbs., and one 150 lbs. in dumb-bells, the three bar-bells already mentioned, and two iron bars, one 70 lbs. and one 120 lbs.—all these, together with two ring weights of 56 lbs. each, representing a total weight of nearly sixteen hundred pounds.
Mr. Levy appeared constantly in public. In 1891 he won the contest, held then for the first time, for the amateur weight-lifting championship, and afterwards he succeeded, at Northampton, in establishing a new record by putting up above his head no fewer than ten times a bar-bell weighing in all 170 lbs.
Of the recognised records for weight-lifting he held as many as nine; but Mr. Levy did not confine himself to one branch of gymnastics, nor made gymnastics his only athletic exercise. Each year at the grand “display” of the Birmingham Athletic Club he figured as a leader in exercises on the horizontal and parallel bars and on the rings. He was also an enthusiastic and expert cyclist, and took an intelligent interest in nearly every form of manly sport. He was, too, a busy brain worker.
His height was 5 feet 3½ inches; his chest measurement 41 inches; he weighed 11 st. 4 lbs., and had biceps measuring 16 inches and a forearm of 12¼ inches. At twenty-five years of age, before he took to gymnastics, his chest measurement was 34 inches, and the circumference of his biceps was twelve inches.