Arnold Schwarzenegger & Worthington Ohio mayor Jim Lorimer
Arnold & Me
Even in 1970, a 13-year old Ohio boy couldn’t get by with a measly 25¢ allowance. After all, cigarettes cost almost 50 cents a pack and gas was 36 cents a gallon. To achieve my long-term goal of buying a Corvette and subscription to Playboy by the age of 18, it was clear I was going to require a lot more income … and a whole lot quicker.
A total lack of experience and height provided few income options, limited to cutting the neighbors grass, babysitting for parents who couldn’t find a wanna-be cheerleader or a paper route. Within the next month, I was flinging newspapers and fresh cut grass all over Colonial Hills.
It was 6:30 am on a typical cold, snow blown Central Ohio winter morning in November. Neighbors were already displaying a motley offering of holiday decor, only weakly distracting from the biting cold and dreary gray days. With 12 pounds of the Columbus Dispatch banging the side of my 84-pound body, the trudge through snowdrifts along a seven-block morning paper route had already proved a tiring daily ritual.
Focused on preparing the next paper for its proper delivery behind Mr. Cole’s storm door, I stepped out onto the ice-strewn sidewalk without a second thought. A shadow blocked the sunlight reflected from the scattered ice patches I was trying to avoid. The source of the shadow was the biggest human being I’d ever seen.
Towering over six feet in height, his plain grey jogging suit seemed to be stuffed with over-inflated balloons, over feet the size of surfboards. Unruly brown hair spilled out around the sweat soaked hood of his sweatshirt, obscuring a youthful face carved in granite.
The giant slid wildly on the ice in mid-stride trying to avoid a collision that would have crushed me like a penny on a train track. He came to a sliding stop with a mixed expression of anger and confusion. His eyes flared as he scanned me slowly from head to toe, making my knees shake worse than my quivering bladder.
I nervously mumbled, “Good morning, I’m Eric, the paperboy,” as if the bright orange Columbus Dispatch logo on the newspaper bag didn’t make it obvious enough. His expression made it clear he did not like people getting in his way!
With a voice like a collapsing coalmine, he grunted “Arrgh, gdmng, ogh,” with an odd accent alien to my ears. He was obviously a stranger from some foreign land. Could he possibly be a Cold War communist infiltrator? A Sicilian hit man … or worse, an excommunicated priest? None of these bode well for a safe return to my empty bed just a few houses down the street.
The Dispatch bag was quickly jettisoned to reduce weight for my emergency flight back home. I breathlessly reached the safety of my front porch a block away as the mystery barbarian resumed his ice-crunching run.
As children, our parents warned us about strangers, but no one gave us a heads-up about giants who could snap us in half with a mere sneeze. My encounter with the over-sized interloper was immediately shared with my brother, Steve … a major mistake, considering the unwritten commandment of older siblings – “Though shalt terrorize little brothers at every opportunity.”
My breathless recounting of encountering a foreign giant kicked Steve’s imagination into a whole new gear. “I’ve heard about this guy, he’s been hiding from the FBI after robbing a bank a few weeks ago. He killed the manager and all the tellers with his bare hands. Sounds like you really pissed him off and you can identify him,” he said. “Now he knows your name and can track your footprints in the snow back here, so none of us are safe, thanks to you,” he gleefully added.
Holy shit. I had not only pissed off Conan the Barbarian, but left a calling card to make retribution an easy task. Worse yet, I had endangered our whole family, one of whom aspired to be a bank teller. Catholic guilt, my brother’s warnings and our sisters’ banking aspirations weighed heavily upon my shoulders.
While I wanted to protect my family, the prospect of confessing my unintentional provocation of the giant stranger to my father was out of the question. I decided to continue the paper route with the only self-defense tactics available, a bag full of rocks, a Boy Scout pocketknife and a wary eye.
As I delivered the Dispatch the following day, the giant once again appeared. To make matters worse, he had a partner who looked almost as big. To my surprise, Conan’s companion was our mayor, Jim Lorimer. Before I could squeak out a warning about his nefarious bank-robbing companion, he smiled and yelled “Merry Christmas Eric.”
Was our Mayor in cahoots with the stranger? Was he being held hostage? None of the possibilities racing through my mind made sense. I decided to keep quiet. Much to my relief, I never saw Conan prowling my quiet neighborhood again.
And my family survived.
The Real Story
In 1970, the mayor of Worthington Ohio, Jim Lorimer, was organizing the World Weightlifting championships in Columbus. A former FBI agent and vice president at Nationwide Insurance, Lorimer also managed sports promotions and had served as chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee for Women’s Athletics in the 1960s.
Lorimer wanted to hold a bodybuilding competition in conjunction with the weightlifting championships. He invited several of the world’s top bodybuilders, but had his eye on a then unknown Austrian bodybuilder with a long and unusual last name … SCHWARZENEGGER.
A private jet was sent to whisk Arnold Schwarzenegger to Ohio, where he stayed at Lorimer’s Worthington home for several days. He then proceeded to take first place over some of the top names in the sport at Lorimer’s body building competition.
A grateful Schwarzenegger always considered his win in Columbus to be the beginning of his rise to the top. He was also quite impressed with Lorimer’s professionalism and courtesy. Before he left town, he told Lorimer, “When I retire from bodybuilding, “I’ll be back”, and you and I will put together a major bodybuilding competition right here, every year.”
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