Red Lerille has owned and operated his Lafayette, LA, health club for 48 years. Photo by Theresa Cassagne.

"Do you want to hear the story?”

Ask Red Lerille what you think is a fairly straightforward question and that is how he will often reply.

Lerille has a lot of great stories—stories about how he became interested in bodybuilding in his youth, how he met his mentor, Joe Gold, why he legally changed his name from Lloyd to Red, and what inspired him to buy his first Lamborghini and a 70-year-old ice cream parlor. But the story of how he built Red Lerille’s Health and Racquet Club, the facility he has owned and operated for almost 50 years, is the one I drove to Lafayette, LA, to hear.

Although it is Louisiana’s fourth-largest city, Lafayette is still a small town by most standards. It is not a town where everybody knows everyone’s name, but one name is known to almost all of Lafayette’s 120,000 residents: Red’s. The club—which proclaims it is the largest in the South—has an estimated 16,000 to 20,000 members, which translates to somewhere between 13 percent and 16 percent of the local population.

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