muscle

The Internet provides a few tantalizing hints to who Billy Wood may have been. He may have been the British wrestler William Wood, who won the silver medal in the lightweight (up to 66kgs) division of the freestyle wrestling competition at the 1908 Summer Olympics. Link: Wikipedia article on 1908 Olympic wrestling. Or maybe he was the Billy Wood who was Britain's middleweight wrestling champion in 1909 (middleweight being at least 76kgs, he'd have had to pack on quite a bit of weight in a year if William and Billy were the same guy.) Link: Google html cache of a big .pdf, with suitable highlighting. Or (and?) was he perhaps W. (Billy) Wood, styled "Welterweight Champion of the World" in a book about wrestling published by W. Foulsham & Co. of London sometime around the 1930s? The book, with text by E.J. Harrison, features posed photos of W. Wood and C. Law, illustrating wrestling holds. This book shows up for sale on the Internet in various editions. Link probably soon to die: A recent ebay UK offering of the book.

John Lemm was mentioned as wrestling champion of Germany and Switzerland in a New York Times article of December 11, 1910 (in the second of two articles in a .pdf avaiable here) The article mentions that Lemm had recently won a tournament held in London. Though it might or might not date from the time of that tournament, this photo bears the stamp of a London photographer of the era: P.W. Luton, 34 New Cross Rd., S.E..

Thanks for the information. We found a reference to Percy William Luton in Pritchard's A Directory of London Photographers, 1841-1908, p. 83, so will add his name to the source data and reload the description.

Great vintage .

That would be "Poughkeepsie," as in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Thanks, CerebusII. Will submit this to have Poughkeepsie spelled out in the catalog record.

In fact, this and the whole series looks like they're from the Intercollegiate Rowing Association's Poughkeepsie Regatta. It appears that the Cornell Varsity team won that year. :) Marist U. has an archive: library.marist.edu/archives/regatta/index.html

Would those be Cayuga's waters?

@Julie Lyn: No, Poughkeepsie is on the Hudson River.