It was one of Kathryn Hall’s first play dates, and everything was going great — until the little girl was introduced to her friend’s dad. How could this be a dad? He was just an average-looking guy. Not like her own dad.
“I remember thinking, ‘No, your dad? Introduce me to your dad because this just doesn’t make sense,’ ” Hall says. “In my mind, dads were these enormous, mythical creatures. And then, as I got older, I realized: Oh, no. My dad’s special.”
Her dad was Bill Seno, an acclaimed bodybuilder whose list of titles included Mr. Chicago, Mr. Illinois, Mr. America “Most Muscular” and Mr. America “Best Chest,” that last one twice.
He also was an English teacher, spending most of his career at Eisenhower High School in Blue Island.
“On family vacations, when there weren’t any weights around, I remember I would make my body very rigid, and he’d bench-press me a million times,” said Laura Hamer, Mr. Seno’s other daughter.
Mr. Seno died May 11 from natural causes, his family said. He was 86.
Among his bodybuilding accomplishments, he defeated Sergio Oliva, a legend in the sport, for the “Most Muscular” title in the 1964 Mr. America contest, an amateur event that was held at Lane Tech High School.
“That was before Arnold Schwarzenegger, and bodybuilding was just a strange cult,” said Terry Strand, who became fascinated with the sport as a Lane Tech sophomore in the audience that day. “And so everybody sort of knew everybody.”
The next year, as a volunteer, Strand loaded the weight plates for the record-breaking bench press at an event at a Near West Side YMCA at 1515 W. Monroe St. in which Mr. Seno, competing in the 198-pound class, put up 454 pounds.
“He was one of the greatest of all time,” said Strand, a former bodybuilder himself who runs the Facebook page Chicago Iron, dedicated to the sport’s history in Chicago. “He won national titles in all three facets of our iron sport: bodybuilding, power-lifting and Olympic lifting — which is a category of weightlifting that mimics the Olympics in that it features the snatch and the clean-and-jerk.
“And you know how much money he made? Zero point zero dollars. It was all part of the Amateur Athletic Union. In any other sport, he would have been smoking a cigar in Tahiti with a multimillion-dollar contract, Bill did it for the pure love of it.”
He said Mr. Seno didn’t see the point in competing for what little money a contest like Mr. Olympia offered when it first was held in 1965.
“To him, it was an amateur sport, an avocation,” Strand said. “He grew up poor in the projects, and his goal in life was a career, a steady job with a pension and caring for his family.”
William Joseph Seno was born May 6, 1939, at Cook County Hospital. His mother, Della Seno, worked as a secretary at a steel mill and raised her two sons as a single parent. His father, Fred Seno, was a career criminal who was in and out of prison most of Mr. Seno’s life for armed robbery and other crimes and once was on the FBI’s most-wanted list.
Growing up, Mr. Seno and his family moved a few times around the North Side. He spent part of his childhood living in the Chicago Housing Authority’s Lathrop Homes near Diversey Parkway and Damen Avenue. It was a tough upbringing but one he looked back on fondly, his family said.
“When he was young, his thing was, if he was being bullied, he wouldn’t get into an argument, he would punch first,” Laura Hamer said. “He made the person back up and never fool with him again.”
One of his aunts was a nun at St. Bonaventure Church. That meant he and his brother got to attend the parish school for free, according to his daughters. They said he went on to graduate from Marshall High School and Western Illinois University before getting a master’s degree from Northeastern Illinois University. He also served in the Army Reserve.
Mr. Seno got into weightlifting to help him as a football player in high school and college. It became a passion when a friend introduced him to it as a sport unto itself.
In 1965, Mr. Seno married Barbara Racine, a college classmate. Their two daughters were born over the next few years.
For a long time, Mr. Seno trained in a Chicago Park District weight room in the fieldhouse at Sayre Park.
When he moved to Western Springs, his weightlifting buddies would train Saturday mornings on weights he kept in his garage.
“They’d close the garage door, and there would be the clanks of the weights and these guttural screams and yells coming from that garage,” Kathryn Hall said. “The whole neighborhood must have heard.
“And I remember trying to pick myself up and peek into the window to see what was happening. And then they would open the door eventually,and all take off their joint wraps and their huge weight belts and go back to their lives.”
To stay big, Mr. Seno’s caloric intake was astonishing. When his family went to McDonald’s, he’d have four Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers — and then he’d eat whatever leftovers there were from his wife and kids.
When his daughters were in elementary school, they wanted to be strong like their dad. They would regularly vanquish the boys in their class at arm-wrestling.
Mr. Seno’s size — 5-8 and 242 pounds — made him stand out wherever they went. People regularly approached him, his daughters said, saying things like: “You must be someone. A pro football player?”
Mr. Seno’s wife usually stepped in to field the question.
When boys would come to pick up Mr. Seno’s teenage daughters for dates, they’d knock, peek through the window and sometimes take several steps back when they saw the girls’ heavily muscled father approach.
But, as threatening as he might have looked, his daughters said he was kindhearted, loving and gentle.
Strand agreed.
“He was weightlifting’s Mr. Nice Guy, a humanitarian, very altruistic,” he said.
In addition to his two daughters and his wife, Mr. Seno is survived by four grandchildren. Services have been held.