Back in the days before computers or headphones sat under the tree, Jan Todd didn’t want to give her husband any old shirt. Instead, for years, Jan and her husband Terry gifted each other old sports posters for Christmas. 

“We often tried to buy each other gifts that could be saved and preserved,” Todd said.

These posters, once Christmas gifts, now live in an exhibit run by the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports featuring lithographs and posters of 20th century strongmen and strongwomen. The couple co-directed the center before Terry passed away in 2018. 

The exhibit, open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday, resides in the Center on the fifth floor of the Darrell K Royal Texas Memorial Stadium. The posters were created using a printmaking process called lithography, which according to the Stark Center, allows artists to make multiples of the same illustration. The posters announced athletes’ upcoming performances, Todd said. 

“One of the Stark Center’s missions has been to collect and preserve as many of these historic prints as possible,” curator Kyle Martin said in an email. “We decided to create a strength poster exhibition based on the several hundred posters we now hold here at the Stark Center related to both professional athletes and competitive weightlifting.”

Todd said posters in particular are hard to find because of their “ephemeral” nature. She said it is rare to find more than one or two posters a year for good athletes. Some posters arrive in poor condition due to the quality of paper and their age, but the Center pays to have preservation done, Todd said. 

The exhibit features two rare posters of strongwoman Katie Sandwina, which are believed to be the only copies in the world, Todd said. Sandwina herself passed the posters down to strongwoman Joan Rhodes before they ended up with Todd.

One is an original poster of her 1920s chariot act and the other is a poster-calendar from 1901 featuring six strongwomen from all over the world, Martin said.

“One of the things that I think many people are surprised by when they come to see the Center in general is how much participation there was by women, both in performing strength acts but also in the early days of weightlifting and Muscle Beach,” Todd said. “We’ve tried very hard to celebrate that.”