Ottley Coulter

6 June 1890 – 17 December 1976 · Parkman, Ohio → Lemont Furnace, Pennsylvania

Ottley Russell Coulter was a circus strongman, amateur lifter, police officer and one of the founders of organised American weightlifting. He was also a lifelong collector: his photographs, books and magazines are now held by the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin.

Origins

Coulter was born on 6 June 1890 in Parkman, Ohio. He spent two years at Hiram College before leaving to perform.

The work

From 1912 to 1916 Coulter worked as a circus strongman, including a spell with the Ringling Bros. circus; Jan Todd and Michael Murphy reconstructed this part of his career in Iron Game History in 2001. He later worked for U.S. Steel, and in the late 1910s became a municipal police officer in Lemont Furnace, Pennsylvania, where he taught the force hand-to-hand methods to reduce the use of firearms. He also wrestled and lifted.

In the 1920s Coulter, with George F. Jowett and David P. Willoughby, founded the American Continental Weight-Lifters Association, one of the first attempts to give American lifting fixed rules and recorded results. He was an early advocate of keeping careful records of lifters' performances, and he wrote for Alan Calvert's Strength magazine in the 1920s. In 1952 he published How to Perform Strongman Stunts.

Collector

Coulter collected physical-culture books, magazines and photographs throughout his life, and corresponded widely with lifters and writers. The collection is now at the Stark Center in Austin, which publishes a finding aid to the Ottley R. Coulter Sport Photography Collection; it is one of the principal sources for the history of early twentieth-century American strength culture.

Personal life

Coulter married Ethel Alexander, who was born in Scotland; they had three children and lived in Lemont Furnace. She died in 1972. Coulter died in Lemont Furnace on 17 December 1976, aged eighty-six, and was buried in Sylvan Heights Cemetery.