Bob Perata | Bob's Gym in Fremont, California and his long friendship with Ed Corney


	Bob Perata - talks about his friendship with Ed and his gym in Fremont, California Joel Brandwein: How did you get into the gym business? Bob Perata: It was 1963 and I was working for the phone company. There was a little gym in Fremont and the owner wanted to sell it. I was working out there and I wound up buying it from him. My wife and I took it over and started running it with three days a week for men to train and three separate days a week for women to workout. The business grew because Fremont grew, so I gave up fourteen years at the phone company and started working full-time at my gym. It was nearly a decade later that we expanded and built our own building which included four racquetball courts. We were the first one to have anything like that. In fact, Arnold would come visit us often, and around that time he brought a German couple in to see the gym. They wanted to try and replicate what we were doing at our club back home in Europe. We were still a “hard iron” gym but we also had racquetball. It was a real "first". JB: When did you meet Ed? BP: In 1965 these three guys, who were all working at General Motors together, came in and joined my gym. They were Phil Schacht, Jerry Davis and Ed. I had only been in business a couple of years at the time. They were pretty much just “regular” guys except for Phil who was kind of the “big one” of the bunch. We became closer and closer friends over time and then in 1967 the guys at the gym said, “Why don’t we have a bodybuilding show?" We put on our very first contest in a rented grammar school auditorium with about fifteen guys who were all members of my gym. That was the first Mr. Fremont competition. JB: Ed has always claimed that he was sort of “talked into” doing that first Mr. Fremont show. Is that how you remember it? BP: Well, in a way they all were. None of them had ever been on the stage before. In fact, we didn’t really know too much about it. We had the first show and it was so successful. We filled that little grammar school auditorium right up to the top with over 200 people. Bodybuilding shows, at that time, used to be held after a weight lifting event on a basketball court under a floodlight with a white backdrop behind it . . . and here we had our show in a real auditorium and it went over so big. The following year, in 1968, Eddie guest posed at the show . . . as he did for 24 consecutive years after he won that first event. Here it was the second year of the contest . . . we had a Hawaiian musical group called the Milea family in our gym . . . I got a call from them and they said, “Would you mind if we played some background music tonight when Eddie poses at the show?” They came down to the show, set up and played a Hawaiian love song. Eddie just took off to it . . . just posed to it. Then the following year, all the kids who wanted to enter the show requested that they be allowed to have music too. Not too many people, at that point, used music for bodybuilding. So we played a tape through the whole contest that year and they all posed to the same music. In 1970 the guys began asking me if they could bring their own music to the contest. That’s how we started the tradition of using individually selected music for each contestant's posing routine. I taught posing to all the kids before the show. They’d get onstage and they were just great. We eventually moved the show to a country club and we'd follow the bodybuilding show with a dinner and a dance. JB: So, no matter where Ed was during the 24 years that followed his Mr. Fremont contest win, he would come back to town and guest pose annually for the competition? BP: I don’t care where he was, he'd be there for that show every year. In fact, he was up in Oregon one year and came down for the contest looking like a lumberjack. I was in the gym and saw this guy walk into the parking lot . . . all I could think was, “Who the heck is this bum walking into my gym and how am I going to get rid of him” . . . it was Eddie, in full beard and long hair, back from the 'mountains' because he knew the show was coming up and he was going to guest pose for it. JB: In a 1989 interview, in the British edition of Muscle and Fitness Magazine, Ed recalled, “I was training at Bob’s Athletic Club in Fremont. The owner, Bob Perata, came up with this idea to hold a contest. I said ‘What’s a contest?’ He said, ‘Well, all you guys put on a bikini and get up onstage and we’ll decide who the best is.’ Sounded good to me. We trained together, tanned together and helped each other with posing, although it wasn’t posing like you have today. Then we competed together, and we were all so nervous it was pretty funny. It was a packed house. Anyway, I won by half a point, but the feeling of competition, the feeling of training and dieting with a purpose, those were feelings I liked.” Ed has said many times that he had never considered competing until you brought it up. So he really credits you, without reservation, as a major impetus for him to begin his competitive career as a bodybuilder. How does it feel to have played such a key role in starting one of the greatest bodybuilding careers in the history of the sport? BP: Well, I have a lot of sore bones and muscles now because we trained together for ten years . . . he was an animal. And anytime someone would want to come down to the gym and train with us to get ready for a show, like Paul Love or someone, Eddie would just double it up. He would turn up his training intensity even one more notch. He was probably the best training partner anybody could ever have if they wanted to be a bodybuilder. From the beginning, I definitely saw Eddie as someone who was going to go way beyond Mr. Fremont. We went down to Fresno in 1967 and he did really well at the Central California show . . . so I thought, “Man, there’s just no end to what he can do”. During the next few years, as long as he trained with heavy weights and stayed with heavy weights right up to contest time, he was unbeatable. If he got too lean before a show, it just didn’t work for him. He didn’t have to worry about “leaning out”. He’d just explode with heavy weights. So, you know it was a learning curve, but he just kept getting better and better. JB: It’s not that uncommon today for bodybuilders to remain very competitive into their forties and beyond. But at the time that you were training with Ed, he was a bit of an anomaly by being substantially older than the majority of his competitors. BP: Yes, as we went on into the various shows following the Mr. Fremont, he was always a lot older than the rest of the guys. But I always said he was a fifty-year-old in a twenty-year-old body. His skin was fantastic . . . his coloring was always great. Most importantly, his mind was always young. Age never bothered him. JB: You’ve stayed in touch with Ed all these years. BP: Yes, we're like brothers. We couldn’t be any closer if we WERE brothers. His daughter Dody even lived with my girlfriend and I for a while when Ed had to travel for competition. We go back to the early days at my gym . . . and to the days when he was a bouncer at his club. I didn’t actually work with Eddie, but I was there at the club all of the time. I actually met my future wife there. Any time he got into trouble I always had his back. JB: Were you there the infamous night that he hospitalized that particularly “troublesome” patron? BP: No, I missed that night, but I was there once when a guy yelled at Eddie, “I know Karate!” JB: He said this to Ed, who holds a black belt? BP: Yes! JB: You had a lot of great guys come out of Bob’s Gym in Fremont. Just the fact that you were able to put together a respectable show like the Mr. Fremont, when participation was initially limited to members of your club, is just amazing. It sounds like it was a very special place. BP: Yeah, we had Ed, Bill Hogarty, Casey Schneider and Wayne Andersen all come out of our gym. They all went on to do real well. Even my son, David Perata, won his weight class in the AAU Mr. California in the late 1980s. JB: You also had a lot of other sporting activities that you organized with the guys from your gym. How did that start? BP: I belonged to the Fremont Chamber of Commerce and every year they have a thing called Pathfinder Day. Someone at the Chamber meeting one night suggested that as part of the Pathfinder events we should include a tug of war competition. So I said, “Shoot, I’ll put it together”. We put together a Bob's Gym team, the Police department put a team together and so did the Fire Department. There was another team made up completely of Hawaiian guys from Hayward who did their pulling barefoot. There were six or seven teams in total. We'd practice our pulling on a telephone pole. We also used girls as "callers" so that we could pull in unison. We were really organized and we whipped them all! We also had a flag football team from the gym for a while. We had fun doing that too . . . but it got a little rough. JB: I’ve been working out at various gyms for 26 years and I’ve never been at one that had the sense of community that you’re describing. BP: Yeah, My gym was almost like a family. They eventually began calling my gym “Cheers”, like the television show. It was a place where everybody came together and felt like they were at their second home.