“What did you call my food?”
“Just bring me some of your garbage.”
Artie jumped in right away. “He’s from Austria,” he explained. “He means the cabbage. He’s used to the cabbage from Austria.”
Gradually, though, I started making progress, thanks to my classes at Santa Monica College. Going there really fired me up to learn. On my very first day in English as a Second Language, all of us foreigners were sitting in the classroom, and the teacher, Mr. Dodge, said, “Would you guys like to be inside or outside?”
We all looked around trying to figure out what he meant.
He pointed out the window and explained, “See that tree over there? Well, if you want, we can all sit in the shade and have our class there.”
We went out and sat on the grass under the tree in front of the college building. I was so impressed. Compared to the way school worked in Europe, so formal and structured, this was unbelievable! I thought, “I’m going to take a college course sitting under the tree outside, as if I was on vacation! After this semester, I’m signing up for another class!” I called Artie and told him he should come by the next week and take a picture of us sitting outside.
In fact, the next semester I signed up for two classes. A lot of foreign students feel intimidated by the idea of jumping into college, but the community college dealt with me in such a low-key way and the teachers were so cool that it was a lot of fun.
Once Mr. Dodge got to know me a little bit and I told him about my goals, he introduced me to a counselor. The guy said, “Mr. Dodge suggested I should give you some other classes besides English. What do you like?”
“Business.”
“Well, I have a good beginning business course where the language is not that difficult—a lot of foreigners take that class—and you have a good teacher who understands foreign students.”
He put together a little program for me. “Here are eight classes you should take besides English. They’re all business courses. If I were you, I would also take some math. You need to hear the language of math so that when someone says ‘division,’ you know what that means. Or ‘decimal,’ or ‘fraction.’ These are the terms you hear, and you may not understand them.”
And I said, “You’re absolutely right, I don’t.” So I added a math class where we did some decimals and easy algebra, and I started relearning the language of math.
The counselor also showed me how to fit classes into my life. “We understand you are an athlete, and some semesters maybe it doesn’t work out. Since the fall is when you have your big competitions, then maybe you only take one class in the summer. You could go one night a week, from seven to ten, after your training. I’m sure you can handle that.” I thought the way he worked with me was terrific. It felt great to add getting an education to my goals. There was no pressure, since nobody was saying to me, “You better go to college. You better get a degree.”
I also had a math tutor at Gold’s Gym: Frank Zane, who had been an algebra teacher in Florida before coming to California to train. I don’t know why, but as a matter of fact, several of the bodybuilders had been teachers. Frank helped with my assignments and translations, explaining and taking the time when I didn’t understand. In California, he had gotten deeply into Eastern philosophy and meditation and relaxing the mind. But that didn’t rub off on me until later.
If I’d thought there would be a serious challenge to my dominance, I’d have stayed 100 percent focused on bodybuilding. But there was nobody on the radar. So I diverted some of my energy to other ambitions. I always wrote down my goals, like I’d learned to do in the weight-lifting club back in Graz. It wasn’t sufficient just to tell myself something like “My New Year’s resolution is to lose twenty pounds and learn better English and read a little bit more.” No. That was only a start. Now I had to make it very specific so that all those fine intentions were not just floating around. I would take out index cards and write that I was going to:
• get twelve more units in college;
• earn enough money to save $5,000;
• work out five hours a day;
• gain seven pounds of solid muscle weight; and
• find an apartment building to buy and move into.
It might seem like I was handcuffing myself by setting such specific goals, but it was actually just the opposite: I found it liberating. Knowing exactly where I wanted to end up freed me totally to improvise how to get there. Take that twelve more college credits I needed, for example. It didn’t matter which college they would come from; I would figure that out. I’d look at which courses were available and what the credits cost and whether they fit my schedule and the rules of my visa. I didn’t need to worry about the exact details now, because I already knew I was going to get those dozen credits.
Immigration status was one of the obstacles I had to work around putting myself through college. I had a work visa, not a student visa, so I could only go part-time. I could never take more than two classes at once in any one school, so I had to jump all over. In addition to Santa Monica College, I went to West Los Angeles College and took extension courses at the University of California at Los Angeles. I realized this would be a problem if I wanted to earn a degree, because I’d have to link all those credits to make them all count. But a degree wasn’t my objective; I only needed to study as much as I could in my available time and learn how Americans did business.
So at Santa Monica College, those English classes became English classes, math classes, history classes, and business administration. At UCLA, I took courses from the business school in accounting, marketing, economics, and management. I’d studied accounting in Austria, of course, but here it was a whole new thing. Computers were just happening: they were using big IBM machines with punch cards and magnetic tape drives. I liked learning about that, which I thought of as the American way of doing things. College appealed to my sense of discipline. I enjoyed studying. There was something really nice about having to read books in order to write reports and participate in class. I also liked working with the other students, inviting them over to my apartment to have some coffee and do our homework together. The teachers often encouraged that, so that if one person didn’t know something, the others could explain it to him. It made the classroom discussions much more effective.
One course required us to read the business news every day and be prepared to talk about the headlines and stories in class. That became the first thing I did every morning: open the newspaper to the business page. The instructor would say, “Here’s an interesting article about how the Japanese bought an American steel mill and dismantled it and set it up back in Japan. Now they’re producing steel more cheaply than we can and selling it to us at a profit. Let’s talk about that.” I never could predict what was going to make a big impression on me. A guest lecturer at UCLA told us that in sales, the larger the salesman, the more he tended to sell. I found this fascinating, since I’m a big guy. I thought, “Well, I’m two hundred fifty pounds, so when I go out to sell something, my business ought to be huge.”
I also found a steady girlfriend, which was a settling influence in my life. Not that meeting women was hard. Bodybuilding had its groupies just like rock ’n’ roll. They were always there, at the parties, at the exhibitions, sometimes even backstage at contests offering to help guys oil up. They’d come to the gym and the beach to watch us work out. You could tell right away who was available. You could go down to Venice Beach and collect ten phone numbers. Barbara Outland was different because she liked me as a human being—she didn’t even know what bodybuilding was. We met at Zucky’s Deli in 1969. She was a college kid a year younger than me, waitressing for her summer job. We started hanging out together and having long conversations. Pretty soon my buddies at the gym started teasing, “Arnold is in love.” When she went back to school, I thought about her, and we even wrote letters—a first for me.