Dave Draper

Dave is a former Mr. America, Mr. Universe, Mr. World of the 1960s and ’70s, a time of great influence on how we look at exercise today. He began his training adventure at the age of eight; sixty years of bodybuilding experience form the nucleus of his life, his writing and his life here in central California. Dave writes an email column that goes out weekly to nearly 50,000 people and is a regular contributor to several muscle magazines. Our 4,000+ page IronOnline website, online since since its humble beginnings as a five-page biography site, is visited by over 5,000 people each day.

When we first put the davedraper.com website online with it’s few pages, we were astounded by the email response, both in quantity, which was remarkable to us, but even more in terms of quality. Scores of readers, mostly men, but even then a few women, wrote to tell their stories of how they began their decades-long training careers in their garages or basements, or out in the yard, inspired by a photo of Dave on the cover of Muscle Builder, or in a Weider ad in the back of a detective magazine, or even perhaps a comic book. Sure, Dave knew he’d had a following back in the late ’60s (I wasn’t around at the time, blissfully unaware of gyms entirely until 1980), but he never could have guessed any of the bodybuilding fans of the Golden Era would remember him today. It was quite something, and inspired us to pour our energies into developing the website to share that camaraderie.

Over the course of marketing our gyms during the ’90s, we discovered Dave could write. I’m sure that’s surprising to many of his readers to see it written like that, but that’s exactly how it happened. He isn’t a reader, and hadn’t written more than a letter since high school, but as it turns out, his pondering and internal musing really shines on paper. For a year straight — I think it was 1996 but I can’t remember for certain — Dave wrote an exercise column in a local entertainment weekly that we paid $286 a week for (haha, yes, we’re kind of idiots that way) to market the gym. It didn’t work particularly well as a gym advertising tool, but boy did people like that column. Even today we bump into people in town who comment about reading Dave’s columns in the Good Times.

Eventually Dave decided to write a book, and after doing research into getting it published, we decided rather than scramble around for a mainstream publisher, a process that often takes years and ends in failure, I’d school myself in typesetting and figure this thing out on my own. That book became the very popular Brother Iron, Sister Steel, and the typesetting evolved into editing and then to cover design and finally became On Target.

Click here for Dave’s bio sheet, and here for a few more links of Dave’s history.

What others are saying about Dave

Dave on NPR, 27-minute radio interview, mp3 file