Tribute ©1992 OUTCOME Magazine & David Hurles. All rights reserved. All images ©Bob Mizer: Athletic Model Guild. All rights reserved. Images may not be reproduced in any way, shape or form in any manner or media without the wrritten permission of The Athletic Model Guild.

On May 12, 1992 our nation lost yet another national treasure & I lost a friend. BOB MIZER, the co-founder & personification of The ATHLETIC MODEL GUILD died. Since it's founding in 1944 AMG has been the studio that immortalized the male physique & launched a billion fantasies. While there are a few of the great photographers of the golden age of Physique still around AMG was the last of the great studios to still be active. Bob was the last of the immortals & that most wonderful time of magic and fantasy, that time when anything was possible because your imagination had free reign. Thanks to Bob the Physique Age outlasted the Age of Hollywood and AMG outlasted MGM. At least Bob returned home for reassignment (a reminder to the L.A.P.D. that Bob WILL be back & kick the crap out of you yet again) knowing that he & AMG had attained immortality! I wanted to pay a proper & loving tribute to this wonderful man but couldn't come up with the words. Out of the blue another treasured friend, David Hurles, sent me a tribute he wrote to his great friend thus explaining why he's called Old Reliable. David has given me permission to reprint it here & I thank him endlessly! Just to tie up loose ends: Bob left AMG in the capable hands of his assistant , Wayne, who will maintain Bob's legacy. No new work of course will be created. The costumes & props are being preserved & hopefully will one day be put on display in an archive. Bob was 70 (3/27/22 - 5/12/92), he was laid to rest (the first he's had in decades) on May 18th beneath a tomb stone that says "AMG" & his final act of magic was to order that no pictures of him be published. Picture him in your imaginations however you wish, just do it with love! - OUTCOME Magazine

IT ALL HAPPENED SO FAST

People who know each other well or for a long time develop their own code, a communication shorthand, which enables them to communicate a great range of facts as well as feelings, doubts, suspicions, approval and more, with few words, and privately, even in the presence of others. It's based on the things you've experienced or shared together, with references to people and things you're both familiar with.

B ob and I had our own code. Over the years we dealt with hundreds of strangers passing through our lives, as well as an always expanding collection of people we knew in common, or each knew of. These people became the adjectives modifying our assessment of others. It was a language that could be spoken freely and openly, and without giving offense even to the person being spoken of, because since others lacked the code, they could not know just what and how much was being communicated.

Like most Gay men of my generation, I feel as if I met Bob about 1957, at a news rack in downtown Cincinnati. Of course, he wasn't there in person. But he was there.

I was excited when he built his swimming pool. Airplanes had propellers, Los Angeles was as far away as the moon, but suddenly, in those magazine pages, I came face to face with the awesome and wonderful knowledge of a place somewhere different from any place I yet knew. It was a place far richer with wonder and excitement than I could even have designed. I was certain!

I n 1970 I met Bob in person. I was 25 or 26. I had a lover then, but as life goes, he was not able to hang on, leaving me to solo. I'd been in California since 1965. I'd been doing one thing or another in this vocation for three years already. I met Bob because I wanted to meet him. Even then his work had become a reference point, something Gay men shared in common, and already many presumed him to be out of business or long dead. But just as the spark of Bob's work had helped us define our desires, he had himself become larger than life for me. For many in the vast and terrifying solitude of that cruel and repressive era, he offered life itself. For the most part he was by then much the same man as he would still be when the curtain fell 22 years later. At that time I never could have anticipated that that moment would all too soon seem so long ago and so far away.

I n 1980 I walked into the force field of Bob's aura, and began a friendship that was intense, intimate and nurturing. And which never stopped growing. Fortunately for me, I recognized our special relationship and was able to savor it while it was happening. Sadly, that makes the loss even more enormous. I cannot yet make sense of the fact that the phone will never again ring with him at the other end, even though I know it won't. As long as Bob was eternal, then I was immortal. I feel mortal, now, and I don't much like it. I'm not certain if the tide will come in even though I can look out and see the moon rise in the evening sky. And I wasn't done talking to him, yet.

T here are three people whose character most molded and formed my own. Bob was one of them.

I never had anything bad to say about Bob. I always made it clear that no one else should speak disparagingly of him in my presence. I never argued with Bob. And when all was said and done, he was almost always right, anyway.

B ob was a man of principle. He taught me that when you believe in something, you don't look around for loopholes and exceptions to it. The death penalty was a good example. If it is wrong to kill, then it is wrong. If you believe in something, then you have to stand by it. He had the nobility of a true believer. He was moral, honest and loyal. When someone behaved so badly that Bob did not want to know them any longer, then I did not want to know them any longer either.

H e was modest. He knew that his work stylized and distilled an erotic other world for a huge audience that was more often fickle than grateful. Bob was the keeper of the keys to that magnificent tough boy's club. His pictures, magazines and films turned us on. But more than that, they gave us hope. They fanned the flames which kept it burning. Bob revealed the evidence which made us certain that what we desired and needed did, in fact, exist. He supplied the proof we so badly needed. We could be certain in our hearts, then, that what we had once only barely dared to imagine in our most private moments was somewhere a reality. We just knew we would not be excluded from it. When I grew up, we still grew up believing that you could have anything if you worked hard for it, and focused your energy, and behaved. Like a diner in the dark night with its neon smile beckoning the hungry traveler, PHYSIQUE PICTORIAL called out to the hungry, to me, with the promise that I could be fed, if I did the right things. Bob eventually recognized what his work had meant to so many, but he was not seduced by the knowledge, nor was he blinded by excessive pride. . .although he was pretty pleased in the home stretch of his career, confident, finally, that others recognized his life's work, and his life, as significant.

B ob did what was right without a second thought. More often than not that's not the same as what's easy. He didn't look for a lot of thanks as he kept legions of displaced men from hunger, gave them shelter or found them work. He didn't get many thanks, either. But he lived what he believed, doing what was right was its own reward. Even as society fell prey to an almost bacterial cynicism, Bob put the best face on things with his virtual motto of "We'll hope for the best, but let's also stay prepared for the worst. . .that way, just in case things don't work out as planned, we'll be able to deal with them and we won't be quite so disappointed."

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