Joe Gold Passes Away

Fitness legend and Gold's Gym founder Joe Gold has passed away at 82...

(Reuters) - Legendary Gym Founder Joe Gold Dies in Los Angeles

Joe Gold, who founded the legendary California gym that brought body building to the mainstream and became the launch pad for the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, died on Sunday in a Los Angeles suburb, associates said on Monday. He was 82.

Gold, a Los Angeles native and lifelong bodybuilding enthusiast, opened the first Gold's Gym in Venice Beach, California, in 1965, calling it "the first gym made specifically for bodybuilders."

The unassuming storefront in a low-rent district attracted an international following and shot to fame as the setting for the 1977 documentary "Pumping Iron," featuring Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno.

Gold sold his namesake gym in the 1970s and went on to found Marina Del Rey, California-based World Gym, where he continued to work until near the end of his life. Both operations have grown into sprawling international chains.

Gold's Gym International was sold to privately held TRT Holdings, Inc., which owns Omni Hotels, last month in a deal the Los Angeles Times said was valued at $160 million.

Gold, who had carried dumbbells with him on merchant marine voyages for decades, hand-welded and designed much of the equipment in his original gym, including cable-based gear that bodybuilders came to rely on to push their muscles to exhaustion.

He also set the tone for the gym -- a tough-minded place where "the only music was sweating and grunting," said Michael Uretz, Gold's longtime friend and business partner at World Gym.

"He put his gym in a place where he wanted to be," Uretz said. "In the sun, on the beach and with cheap rent. Because in those days bodybuilders had no money."

In the years since, weight lifting went from the fringe to the mainstream, Venice became one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, and Schwarzenegger, once an unknown Austrian immigrant, went on to become first a major Hollywood action star and then governor of California.

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