Point of Interest: Bob Peoples - By Osmo Kiiha

Bob Peoples was one of the most amazing men ever to take up weight lifting. He started lifting in the mountains of Upper East Tennessee, where no one else was interested in the sport. He got all his information from magazines, and many of his weights were made from scrap metal and concrete. He was one of the first people known to do negative-type lifting. He had the weight rigged up on the back of a lift extending from a tractor. He would raise the weight up with a switch and allow the system to collapse under him. Bob was a tremendous innovator, there are very few lifters today performing on any type of machine that Bob didn't invent and build by hand in his carpentry shop. Even though they were cumbersome and quite awkward, they did the job
very well. To give the readers an idea of his difficulties and handicaps, Bob worked eight hours a day in a rayon mill. The temperatures were over 90 degrees, and the fumes were horrible. Besides this, he ran quite a sizeable farm - doing all the work himself - and still built himself into a world class deadlift specialist.