Mr. 60s: A Baby-Boomer’s Story of Trials, Triumphs… and Redemption

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Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories. Up next, a story from a listener in West Virginia. Here’s Joe Quinn with his story.

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Speaker 2: On the morning of April 30th, 2019, I got back into acting after raising a family. And then, on April 30th, at 5:30 in the morning, when I was putting my boots on getting ready for work, I felt something funny. It wasn’t funny like ha-ha funny. It was funny like, well, that was weird. So I started to tying my boots and a little bit of a hard feeling in my right hand. It wasn’t working very well. I looked at myself in the mirror and I stuck my tongue out, and my right side of my face just sagged, and I went, “Oh, oh God, I’m having a stroke.” So I went upstairs with my right legs starting to dwindle, and I wanted to tell my wife I’m having a stroke, and I couldn’t talk. So that was the beginning of a real, tumultuous journey. I always knew I was adopted. Always, for my earliest, earliest recollection, my parents made sure I knew that I was adopted. So I guess it was important, but to me it didn’t matter. I had my mom and dad, and as I grew up, it was I was just a little tight. And I remember my dad had an infinity for alcohol. He drank. And I remember one time I was, uh, seven, I hit a home run in Little League baseball, and that’s all I ever had was at one home run because my dad, he, he sort of staggered out of the bleachers, and he was from Louisiana; he was a Southerner. And my mother was from Germany. She was a war bride. Well, my dad come staggered out of the bleachers, and he goes, “He didn’t know he had home run.” I’ll always remember that, you know. He said that I was stepping in the bucket and I was just swinging, trying to protect myself. That wasn’t the only time. I mean, I boxed the same thing. It was kind of a bizarre relationship with my dad. I think he treated me like his little brother, like I was a sibling, and, h, you know, still a rivalry over the affections of Mom. He said, “Let’s put the gloves on there.” “Let’s put the gloves on and get down in the basement, box a little bit.” So he… I was, again, I run seven or eight, and, man, he knocked me cold. He just—he just, bam! It broke my nose and chipped my front teeth. And I woke up and said, “No, no, no, don’t make a scene.” Mom wa loves box anymore. But that’s just the way. Then, I really didn’t have any sort of a model to look to look to. I kind of modeled myself after people in the movies. That’s all I had, especially BORA. A powerful movie for me when I was growing up at about that time was Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman, and that was a powerful movie for me. Another one was 2001 that came out. I thought, “Wow, that was really powerful.” I didn’t understand it, but it was powerful, and I thought it was great, and I thought, “That’s where I want to be.” I thought about being in the movies and being an actor and turned look for something. I was looking for something. Well, I got some weights and I started living in the weights in the basement, and all of a sudden I had something. There was something. So I wanted the Marine Corps out of high school. Again, the weightlifting. As you know, I was made a platoon leader in boot camp. Uh, and, you know, they used me to show people how to do push-ups, you know. And it just all the way through, it turned to a pretty good thing. And I got a service, started competing right away, and I got more and more. Now I was, you know, people were like asking me how to get ready for a show, and how do I do this? How do you do that? All of a sudden, I really developed into somebody that, when you mentioned my name, people went, “Oh, oh, the bodybuilder,” you know. I got a lot of attention. I felt people like me and people like having me around. My mom was from Germany. She was kind of a—well, she was from Germany, and they kind of says it all. I mean, she was very strict and very forthright with everything—with everything—the way you ate, the way you sat, the way you talked. She expected a certain thing and of people, and she’s expected people to act a certain way and have a certain decorum about themselves, too. I got a service, and I majored in theater, and then that was the end of it. That was really the straw. The books, the camel’s back. With my parents, they were like, “Oh, theater? What are you doing? Major in business or financeer law? Get into pre-law, you’d be a good lawyer, and then do some community theater on his side.” “What’s the matter with you?” Anyway, as I got older, I’d ask God, “What the heck do you let those two people adopt me for?” Just didn’t make any sense? Huh? You know? I mean, there was nothing there, nothing, no support. But I’ll tell you what, Weightlifting gave me an identity. He gave me something that I was good at. He gave me something I could be proud of. He gave me something that people liked me and respecting me and would ask me questions and asked me to help them. And I thought, “Well, fantastic!” I got something I really do. I felt like I was really in something good with good people with substantial things to do.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: Well.

00:07:06
Speaker 2: Anyway, after I got through college and my parents—first wanted to go with my mother. She had a cancer or the liver, and I was sitting at her bedside when she died. My dad, almost a year to the day later, he had gone back to Louisiana. He had lung cancer. I looked at him, and he was in the living room. There, there’s a housecoat on. He was down close to 70 pounds in his time. He was getting really close to the end, and I thought, for one second I was gonna go over there and say, “Let’s put the gloves on.” “Come on, let’s put him all!” And now I’m just gonna hit him as hard as I could. Was It’s just a straight right hand, bye, right down in the middle, and just say, “How do you like it?” That’s absurd. You don’t replay evil for evil. It’s really much more powerful. I just forgave them, both of them. But the problems really persisted because when my parents had passed away, I mistakenly thought, “Sure, now they’re gone,” my life would be fine. No. No. My first wife, that ended. My second wife, that also. And because of my shenanigans. Is because of my bad behavior. I just could not shed that feeling that was following me everywhere. And that was it. I’m worthless.

00:08:55
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Joe Quinn share his story, and what is story it is! It starts with abandonment, and he is ultimately adopted and was told he was adopted from the earliest time.

00:09:08
Speaker 2: He had a.

00:09:09
Speaker 1: Bizarre relationship with his own father, who drank too much. Moreover, it was almost a sibling rivalry between he and his father over his mother. You heard that boxing story. Just how bizarre. He modeled himself after people in the movies, people like Paul Newman from the epic classic Cool Hand Luke, and in the end he found meaning and identity lifting weights and also in the pursuit of the arts in acting. But anger, resentment, and shame, and a feeling of worthlessness prevailed in his life. When we come back, more of Joe Quinn’s story and check out his documentary called Diary of a Bodybuilder: a Diary off a bodybuilder dot com. More of Joe Quinn’s story here on Our American Stories, and we’re back with Our American Stories and with Joe Quinn’s story. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

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Speaker 2: This first therapist I saw, he goes, “Well, first of all, you do know you’re an abused child.” And I just burst into tears. I mean, it was like a flood, and I mean, it was really a powerful experience, cathartic, in fact. Then I got to my third wife, and, oh, well, that almost made it. But he eventually, the torment of where I came from and, fueled by alcohol, still told me to do terrible things. Eventually, 2005, February 6th, I went to my first meeting—the program, AA. I thank God for AA, and I’m in it today. I sponsored people, and I close in and here on 17 years of sobriety, so I dealt with it. At this point in my life, I feel as though I’ve—I’ve got a handle on things, but from a very different respective following that stroke I had in April of 2019. So that, that’s the biggest challenge I’ve had in my life. My parents are not my challenge anymore. And the weightlifting, as it came through the gamut, it was solid, it was stable, it was something I could counter, and I didn’t need anybody else like if I was—if I was a boxer, I need a trainer; I need a sparring partner, you know what I mean. But you love to weights just going on in the basement and set your dumbbells and your barbell down and turn some music out and get to work, you know. And you can do that anywhere. It’s always there whenever you need it, except when you have a stroke. I don’t mean that to sound proceduous, but it’s really hard for me. I miss it. I miss it terribly, terribly. It’s like the death—a death of a family member—that I can’t work out. My bodybuilding has been cut short. I was. I remember competing at the Nationals in Pittsburgh in 2016. I remember being on a stage and looking out over a dark auditorium with people, and I would say close to 70%, maybe more, were on their cell phones. They weren’t even watching—watching my posing routine. And I love posing. I loved. I won Best Poser and to get some contests, and I was. I didn’t feel offended or angry. I felt sad. This is the end. They took some pictures of us, and a friend of mine sent me the pictures after they were developed, and I had to tell you, I did not look good in those stupid pictures. It looked ridiculous in those shorts. Those Speedos reminds me of when I used to ride my bicycle out to the end of pier over there in the summers, and the old men would be out there just standing or talking. And weren’t these Speedos looking, look stid ridiculous? When I saw myself, I felt like, wow, I looked just like those old dudes that were hanging out at the end of the pier over there of North Avenue Beach, and I mean they look bad. So I thought, “Was being looking like that?” I mean, aesthetics are gone. They’re out the window. I’m not going to be part of that anymore. No. In my life, I became a Christian when I was 18 years old in the Marine Corps. And in spite of my struggles, I’ve always seen that the peace and, uh, the power and the real victory, and everything was here. In my drunken—and often drunken—and angry tirades against God, was a verse that He always came to mind: that “neither this man, uh, sin, nor his parents sinned.” Is he was born blind so that God could be glorified. So I was put into that situation, into that, uh, challenge, and that hell—into that cesspool—for an opportunity for God to be glorified. I think that His glory is evident even in spite of those people. I love the Lord. I have going to understand. It’s just how powerful He is, especially through this stroke and through this lightest challenge. In life. That is probably the biggest thing I’ve ever undertake, aside from my death. And I’m not afraid to die anymore because I was in the midst of terror after that stroke. Terror, and that word doesn’t even do with justice. I hope to God no one has to go through what I did with a stroke. It’s just what an awful experience. But on the flip side of all that is that God’s going to be glorified in that stroke. God’s going to be glorified in my life, and that’s all that matters, because I feel that I was created to bring Him glory in spite of who I am. But now in my life, I have God. I’ve beautiful home and beautiful wife. I have an absolutely beautiful life I do, in spite of having a stroke. I feel positive. I feel empowered. I feel that because of forgiveness. Solely because of forgiveness, I’ve been able to release all the past issues and anomalies and things that were just evil in certain instances that brought me up—but it forged me into the exact person I think God had in mind. And it’s not for me. My life’s not mine, my life’s His. It’s to give Him glory, and that’s why I hope I do, and that’s what I strive for in spite of all the flaws that I have.

00:18:16
Speaker 1: And a great job on the production as always by Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Joe Quinn for sharing his story. To learn more about Quinn, check out his documentary called Diary of a Bodybuilder at diaryofabodybuilder dot com. And the dam burst when his therapist told him later in life, “You know, you were an abused child.” In 2006, we learned he went to his first AA meeting. “Thank God for AA,” he said. And he’s closing in on 17 years of sobriety. But the biggest challenge of his life wasn’t his parents anymore. It was his stroke. He’d lost weightlifting, he’d lost his identity, but he was searching for real peace and power, and he found it through his head faith walk. “I’m not afraid to die anymore. I was created to bring God glory despite who I am. I have a beautiful home, wife, and life and feel positive and empowered. And I couldn’t have done it without forgiveness.” The story of Joe Quinn, of his fall and his redemption, here on Our American Story.