I Grew Up with the World's Strongest Boy

Growing up there were 5 of us. There was me and Billy and Rhonda, who are my actual brother and sister. Then there was Rusty and Sissy, who grew up in the house next door. We were inseparable and biology is the only thing that actually separated our families. When we moved in I was 10, Billy was 9, Rhonda was 8, Rusty was 7 and Sissy was 5. There was nothing we didn't do together.

Rusty at 7 was bigger than most 12 year old boys. At 10 years of age he was 6 feet tall and weighed 300 lbs. easily. One day we were all playing hide and seek, I was racing around the front of the house to hide when I took a flying leap down the stairs and broke my ankle. I knew it was broken immediately. Thankfully the pain was so severe that my ankle went numb, but I also couldn't breathe it hurt so bad. That means that I couldn't holler for help.

I was standing there leaning on the wall, holding my foot up, when Rusty came around the corner of the house (he was it). He was unable to believe his luck because there I was just standing there and he finds me first. (I was almost always the last one to be found) So he took off running to base which was at the back of the house. Rusty was the slowest of the slow because of his size and normally I would have run him down.

The only thing I could do when I saw that he left me was to stand there and scream! "Rusty! Rusteeeee! Rusteeeee!"

After what seemed like forever because of course he had to touch base before he came back to see what was wrong. He came back. He was still hollering, "one, two, three, on Pam, " because he had to make sure that I knew that I had been caught. I had tell him to go get Mommy and he did. But he didn't just go get her like he normally would, he stood there and rang the doorbell and waited on her to answer the door! In the meantime I am truely suffering.

Mommy came out and took one look at my ankle. It was huge and she said we have to go to the hospital. She was trying to figure out how to get me to the car when Rusty walked over and picked me up under my arms and carried me to the car with his arms fully extended like Frankenstein. I was 16 and he was 12. He gently placed me in the front seat of the car.

We were all amazed by his strength because I probably weighed 150 lbs. or so at the time. We always knew Rusty was the strongest because he always won our weight lifting competitions, but we didn't have enough weights to go anywhere near that high. So we didn't realize until that day just how strong he was.

Rusty was the hero that day. From then on he was the king of weightlifting. We didn't even make him compete. He was just 1st. and then there was everybody else competing for 2nd. place.