The Ben Weider collection of Napoleonic memorabilia will be opened to the public at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on Thursday - but sadly, the man who donated the 60 pieces won't be present for the inauguration.
Weider, 85, died on Friday at the Jewish General Hospital.
The founder and president of the International Federation of Bodybuilders, Weider was a philanthropist, author and scholar whose passion was Napoleonic history.
The Ben Weider collection of Napoleonic memorabilia will be opened to the public at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on Thursday - but sadly, the man who donated the 60 pieces won't be present for the inauguration.
Weider, 85, died on Friday at the Jewish General Hospital.
The founder and president of the International Federation of Bodybuilders, Weider was a philanthropist, author and scholar whose passion was Napoleonic history.
His book, The Murder of Napoleon, which challenges the theory that the French emperor died of stomach cancer and instead suggests that a French general poisoned Napoleon Bonaparte, has sold more than a million copies in 35 languages.
This month, Weider delivered a keynote address on Napoleon to a meeting of the Royal Heraldry Society of Canada at the St. James Club.
As a promoter, he helped bring bodybuilding from an obscure and often ridiculed status to international prominence.
In 1968, on a trip to Austria, he met a young local who had just won a bodybuilding competition and wanted to try his luck in America. In 1969, Ben and his brother Joe arranged for that young man to travel to California, where Joe took over the lad's training schedule.
The young man was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who went on to parlay his bodybuilding success into a lucrative acting career, marriage to a Kennedy cousin and electoral success as the governor of California.
At a speech during a trade mission in Toronto last year, Schwarzenegger singled out his old friends sitting in the audience.
"They had faith in me," Schwarzenegger said. "Without them, I would not have had all this great success in bodybuilding or in showbusiness or I wouldn't be here today as the governor of the great state of California." In more than 60 years of involvement in bodybuilding, the Weider brothers led the worldwide fitness revolution and legitimized the sport of bodybuilding.
The IFBB, founded by the Weiders in 1946, has more than 170 member national federations worldwide and sanctions thousands of amateur and professional competitive events.
"I don't know of anyone who, starting with nothing, did as much as he did - he was downright heroic," said his biographer, Mike Steere, who wrote Brothers of Iron, the story of the Weiders.
"To do what he did, to accomplish what he did in the face of poverty and prejudice, is nothing short of heroic." Benjamin Weider was born in Montreal on Feb. 1, 1923, to Jewish Polish immigrants Louis and Annie Weider.
He and his brother dropped out of grade school to support the family and worked in garment sweatshops and restaurants before he enlisted in the army, serving during the Second World War in army intelligence.
He returned to Montreal upon his discharge in 1945. He wanted to be an architect, but because he was Jewish, he was denied entry-level positions in Montreal architecture firms.
Weider also has said he wanted to be a Mountie, but again was refused because he was Jewish.
In 1946, as a broke 22-year-old, he organized his first bodybuilding contest at the Monument National Theatre, scraping together the $50 deposit fee to rent the space.
He worked with brother Joe to put out a physique magazine and helped him operate his mail-order business in weightlifting equipment.
Ben became the promoter and producer of physique contests and travelled the world as an ambassador of bodybuilding, introducing the sport overseas and organizing new national federations of the IFBB.
Joe moved to New Jersey in 1947 and later set up the U.S. Weider enterprises in southern California, while Ben remained in Montreal.
Ben Weider was awarded the Order of Canada and the Order of Quebec, and was nominated for the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the promotion of peace through sport. In 2000, he received the Legion of Honour Medal from the French government.
In an interview with a Gazette reporter last month, Weider was asked how he wanted to be remembered - as a bodybuilding pioneer or as a Napoleonic scholar? Weider said he wanted to be remembered as a man who built bridges among people of all races and nationalities and political beliefs.
Weider noted the huge number of countries with memberships in the bodybuilding federation.
"During the early days, you had the struggles between the Communists and Catholics. You had the blacks and whites. You had the Jews and Arabs," he said.
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