'Rocky' steps at Philadelphia museum inspire runners, book

By MARYCLAIRE DALE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PHILADELPHIA -- You won't find many celebrities in a new coffee-table book about people who run up the famed steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and that's just the way author Michael Vitez wants it.
Vitez, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has built a career finding the extraordinary story in everyday people.
The book tells the tale of the Rocky impersonator who leads conventioneers up the steps at 6:30 a.m., the recovering drug addict -- five months clean -- clinging to a day job sweeping snow from the steps, and the Turkish woman who defied long odds to get a college degree and attend the nearby Wharton School of Business for graduate school.
Vitez and photographer Tom Gralish, his colleague at The Philadelphia Inquirer, found each of them, and hundreds of others, in the year they spent at the museum steps working on "Rocky Stories."
Runners
The book, a collection of essays and portraits, captures its subjects as they run to mark achievements great and small by re-creating a scene in the Academy Award-winning film "Rocky."
"With all these people, I was trying to look for what brought them here," Vitez said. "What inspiring story, or hopeful story, or entertaining story do they have to tell?"
The book's release coincided with the 30th anniversary of the film, in which screenwriter/actor Sylvester Stallone permanently etched the steps -- and the image of the Philadelphia underdog -- into pop culture by hustling up the staircase at dawn in a sweat shirt. (The movie series' sixth installment, "Rocky Balboa," is in theaters now.)
Fresh perspective
The book's narratives tend toward themes of romance, medical challenges, visitors from around the world and people at a crossroads in their lives, all well-versed in the "Rocky" mythology.
Gralish, also a Pulitzer winner, caught the subjects as they raced, danced or wheezed their way to the top, and swiveled like Stallone for their own fist-pumping "Rocky" moment.
Having worked in Philadelphia for more than two decades, he has shot dozens of subjects at the steps, from sumo wrestlers to beauty queens. He said he tried to bring a fresh eye to a place that is so familiar that he generally avoids it for newspaper assignments.
"We didn't want a book with 50 pictures of everybody with their arms up the air. The challenge was to shoot it a little different to try to show their personalities," Gralish said. "That was the challenge ... to not make it look like a scrapbook."
Michelle Chevalier
Vitez sometimes followed up with e-mails or phone calls to elicit more of their stories.
Their persistence yielded poignant tales such as that of Michele Chevalier. A basketball player, Chevalier had to take a year off from the sport when she became pregnant while attending Long Beach State. A decade later, she's a high school basketball coach and den mother to a group of inner-city girls in Los Angeles.
Gralish's photos show Chevalier carrying senior point guard LaShay Fears on her back as they finish the 72-step climb, the Philadelphia skyline behind them. The image is fitting. Fears, one of 11 children who had moved a dozen times in high school, was heading to college on a scholarship thanks to Chevalier's steady support.
"Collectively, it is a book about hope and about faith and about how people overcome amazing things," Vitez said. "In a world filled with madness and chaos and venom, this story, I think, just offers joy and hope."
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