A Brief Introduction to the Todd-McLean Physical Culture Collection
Terry Todd began collecting books and magazines in the field of physical culture as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1960s. He was encouraged in this effort by his weightlifting coach, Professor Roy J. McLean, who shared Todd's love for the history of strength training. Later, as Todd worked on his doctoral dissertation on the history of resistance exercise, he met Ottley Coulter, who had accumulated what many experts believe was the largest collection of materials in this field in the United States. Coulter, who began collecting in the first decade of the 20th century, graciously allowed Todd to use this collection for his dissertation and they became friends. In fact, in 1966 Coulter visited Todd in Austin and Todd showed him the Rare Books Room. Diring that visit they discussed the value of a collection such as Coulter's being housed at a major university. In 1975, after Coulter's death, Terry and his wife, Jan Todd, purchased the Ottley Coulter Collection.
Although Terry Todd began by collecting weight training materials, the scope of the Todd-Mclean Collection has significantly broadened over the past twenty-five years. The Collection also contains materials on a variety of sports—especially golf, boxing, football, baseball—and the outdoor sports of hunting and fishing. The Collection includes a rich and diverse collection of materials related to UT sports, and also contains items related to sports at other Southwestern universities. Visitors with an interest in UT’s sporting tradition might enjoy looking at Longhorn Legacy: A History of UT Football Programs, a web project derived, primarily, from holdings in the Todd-McLean Collection.
In addition to rich repositories of materials related to weight training, bodybuilding, physical fitness, and school physical education, the Todd-Mclean Collection also contains materials related to hygiene and the alternative health movement, nutrition, the Olympic movement, the use of ergogenic aids and anabolic steroids in sports, the circus and vaudeville, and the early twentieth century science of physical anthropometry. The Todd-McLean Collection, which is made up of a number of smaller collections acquired from private individuals, consists of more than 300,000 items including books, magazines, photographs, scrapbooks, clipping files, art, film, artifacts, pamphlets, training courses, posters, and sporting event programs.
The Todds have made a concerted effort to collect the private papers and memorabilia of the major figures in the field of physical culture and weight training. We are honored to be the home of the Pudgy Stockton Papers, the George Hackenschmidt Papers, the Peary and Mabel Rader Papers, the David P. Willoughby Papers, the George F. Jowett Papers, and, of course, the Ottley Coulter Papers.
View brief descriptions of the major Collections that comprise the Todd-McLean Collection.
