What it's like to grow up surrounded by borderline Kryptonians.

Super Family Team

A few years ago my father and I watched a video collection of vintage Popeye cartoons together. Dad quite enjoyed it. I later realized why. The crazy feats of strength reminded him of what it was like growing up around his family.

For a long time now members of our family have been surprising the world with feats of strength beyond the norm. My great-grandfather, Gus, once chopped an iron wagon tire in two with a single stroke from an axe. His brother, Uncle Charlie, could lock his jaws around the back of a chair and, using only the muscles of his jaws and neck, lift the chair with two people sitting in it. He could loft an empty chair as high as the roof with a toss of his head.

My grandfather could drive a carpenter’s nail with one whack, and was noted for his ability to seemingly effortlessly lift grown men above his head and hurl them into the nearest body of water, comic-book brawler style (He wasn’t a brawler—this was just a favorite practical joke of his). He once uprooted a small sapling while trying to keep a family member from giving him a taste of his own medicine.

His youngest brother grew up to stand six-four, with a massive build to match—roughly the same size as Lou Ferrigno, best known for playing the title character of the 1970s “Incredible Hulk” TV series. Uncle Van had nine of the stoutest fingers I’ve ever seen, and could extend one arm to its full length while holding a concrete block that he was using as a pointer.

Dad created a bit of a stir in college when he approached a guy working out on a weight bench, casually grabbed the guy’s 120-pound weight bar, and lifted it over his own head with one hand. His older and younger brothers if anything startled people even more. Dad’s almost simian build has always made him look strong; his brothers were actually kind of scrawny in their youth. As a boy, the youngest brother routinely carried two concrete blocks in each hand. This was a load surpassing his own weight. He and Dad could move a piano over obstacles that defeated a quartet of college football players.

How did they get so strong? A lifetime of hard work, starting when they were kids. More than anything else they laid bricks in the family trade. A mason’s—or mason’s laborer’s—typical work day is essentially an eight-hour (or longer) workout with weights.

My brother and I learned this the summer after I turned thirteen. We’d already been introduced to heavy work at home. We spent a good deal of our time helping Dad mow a rather large yard with a push mower, clear brush with hatchets, cultivate large garden patches, build sheds, and haul and split firewood.

We didn’t just help Dad. One summer Mom has us kids join her in moving a huge stack of cinder blocks left over from the construction of the house from the front yard around back to a less conspicuous location in the edge of the woods. Some of them are still there. And Mom still impresses the ladies in her workout classes—though not so much the instructor, who happens to be a relative.

We found ourselves challenged at a new level that summer when Dad put us to work as his mason’s laborers. At thirteen and not-quite-twelve we were expected to do the work of a grown man. In a typical day Dad would go through several tons of mortar, bricks, blocks, or cinder blocks. We had to move all of this material around the job site to where Dad needed it, build scaffolds, stock the scaffolds, and “shake up” the mortar by stirring water into it to keep it from setting prematurely, all beneath a summer Arkansas sun in temperatures and relative humidity that often reached three digits. As the older and more responsible sibling I had the job of making mortar as well.

It was a real challenge. We had to handle bricks with tongs that held ten or eleven at a time—fifty pounds or more, depending on the size of the individual bricks. I had to make several batches of mortar a day, each requiring sand, water, and a seventy-pound sack of cement. The sacks were just too much for me. I had to cut each in two with a worn-out trowel and handle the halves separately. It was all I could do to carry a scaffold jack or a sixteen-foot solid oak scaffold board. Pushing a fresh batch of mortar in a wheelbarrow took everything I had.

As the summers passed I grew stronger. I could handle a tong-load of bricks with one hand, heft concrete blocks in pairs with each hand as my uncles had before me, and handle full sacks of mortar. I could carry twelve-inch chimney flue tiles around the job site, but had to let Dad hoist them up to the scaffold with a rope and pulley. It was physically impossible for me to do that with objects weighing as much as I did.

Through it all I regularly witnessed feats of strength by Dad that I could never hope to emulate. I saw my brother take an adolescent growth spurt and develop a build not unlike Dad’s. I never did develop much in the way of visible muscles. I was scrawny, and felt scrawny and weak. It wasn’t that I wanted to look like I’d been hanging out on Muscle Beach, really. But I was conspicuously tall and skinny, and self-conscious about it. I wasn’t the only one who noticed either—one of my nicknames at school was “Bone.” At college I met twin farmers’ daughters who, though a head shorter than I, were almost as strong and much more athletic. Friends and family never tried to make me feel like a weakling, but I did.

In graduate school something unexpected happened. I accompanied groups of undergrads on spring break mission trips that sometimes involved construction and demolition. On one trip we tore down an old wooden structure and heaved the remains onto a dump truck for removal. The others in the group startled me by talking about how impressed they were at my ability to do this (They were also impressed when the dump truck’s driver hurt his foot and I was able to drive it. It was something one of my uncles had taught me).

On another trip we built a roof over an aging house trailer and covered it with roll roofing. While some of the group discussed how they were going to haul up the roofing, I hefted a roll onto my shoulder and carried it up a ladder. The head of the team’s reacted with a four-letter exclamation. I and a local young lady who had already done a good deal of work on such projects ended up hauling up all of the roofing between us.

One day we made a side trip to pour a stretch of concrete walkway to convey a wheelchair across a house’s chronically muddy yard. The guys on that team were surprised when I was able to mix the concrete by hand for about two hours on end. After occasionally making batches of mortar the same way (we had usually used a mixing machine), mixing bags of “Sack-Crete” was actually fairly easy. For me—the others who tried it could barely stir it. I didn’t tell them that it was as much about practice and technique as it was sheer strength.

And that’s how I, the weakling of the family, came to be known as the go-to set of muscles in that student group. I suppose I was as surprised by that development as anybody.

That was over twenty years ago. My strength has declined quite a bit over the years. But now and then my puny body still surprises somebody. A couple of years ago I participated in a community work day to demolish an old drive-in restaurant that had become an eyesore. One of the guys on the job told me that he didn’t know that a librarian could work like that. Shows how much he knows about librarians. We handle masses of heavy books on a regular basis, after all. It’s not a job for weaklings!

I think all our artists should submit costume ideas for your Superheroine identity.
You obviously got the chops!

Well, I have some of the strength part, anyway, and I can ride a motorcycle. Now if I just had good reflexes, speed, knowledge of martial arts, courage, etc.

You've got plenty of courage.

The martial arts thing could take some work...but given time to prepare, I'm sure you could accomplish it.

By the way, this guy is a LOT stronger than I ever dreamed of being:

http://worldsstrongestlibrarian.com/

I've heard him speak at a state conference before. He looks the part!

Yikes! When he tells people to shush, they shush, no doubt!

The most recent time I saw my brother he told me a story from his time in the Army. One day he and some other soldiers were unloading a large, heavy object from a truck. The LHO somehow overbalanced and began toppling toward them. The other guys fled for fear of it falling on them. He single-handedly caught it before it got completely out of control and held it in place. Then he demanded to know whether the others were going to just stand there and let him hold it up by himself all day. That shamed them into helping him set it in place. They couldn't believe he had managed to do that all by himself.

We talked some about our family reputation for strength. His take on it is that we aren't so much stronger than normal as simply more accustomed to handling heavy stuff. When you grow up doing that as a normal part of life, you develop a better understanding of what the human body is capable of. You're able to push the limits with confidence, while still knowing how not to push too far. In other words, people can usually do more than they think they can. Dad taught us that lesson early.

He also said he thought that when we were younger and working with Dad I was probably as strong as he was, just less confident about pushing the limits. All I know is that I'm glad HE was the one who had to catch that LHO in the Army!

Yokumberry tonic.

This is my explanation for these feats of strength.

Well, I WAS actually born in the Ozarks like Li'l Abner (In a town named Ozark, no less), but we didn't grow up there. I seem to remember taking Flintstones vitamins for a little while. Otherwise it was just a fairly balanced diet and clean living, I guess. Or maybe we've got Kryptonian genes. Or maybe it's a gamma ray thing--except none of us is green.

I guess the last time I picked up anything really heavy was sometime back when I ran out of bookshelf space at home (Again!) and bought a new prefabricated book case. The box weighed somewhat over 100 pounds and was very awkward. The guy at the store helped me haul it out to my vehicle. When I got home I had to carry it up four steps by myself to get it inside. It was a delicate operation. It's a far cry from when I used to carry my own weight in masonry around Dad's job sites.

Well, being slightly less superhuman than you were before is still better than being ordinary.

Dad was recently talking about how all the men in his family had a "bricklayer's hump." This is a prominent mass of dense muscle in the upper back developed by years of laying bricks. It made them look like they were standing hunched over when they really weren't. You can still see it in Dad. He said that one of his uncles had an even more prominent example. That peculiar muscle development may not have looked as impressive as the built-up biceps and such that bodybuilders develop, but it was a key part of Dad's and others' strength. I didn't work enough to develop anything like that, thank goodness.