ACRI, ITALY — Charles Atlas, whose original name was Angelo Siciliano, was born on October 30, 1893, in Acri, Calabria, He came to Brooklyn with his seamstress mother when he was 10 years old. He lived on Front Street, which at the time was not such a pleasant place. Being rather feeble and sickly, he was daily pickings for every neighborhood tough. He described himself as a 97 lb. weakling at age 15.
Picture this: Coney Island, circa 1908, Atlas is sunning himself at the beach and trying hard to make time with a pretty girl. Up walks this gorilla and literally kicks sand in Atlas’s face and walks off with the dame. After this humiliating experience, Atlas beheld the statue of Hercules at the Brooklyn Museum and vowed that he would never again have anyone kick sand in his face.
While watching the lions at the Prospect Park Zoo, he admired the musculature of the sleekly chiseled cats and it struck him: lions didn’t lift weights as he had started doing with little success. All the cats did was stretch. From this revelation he devised a practical theory of physical development that involved pitting one set of muscles against another, or, basically wrestling with oneself. In just a year he doubled his weight. By age 19, he was a professional Coney Island strongman, tearing phone books in half and pounding nails into blocks of wood with his hands.
He began to pose for sculptors. The George Washington of the Washington Square Arch sports the body of Charles Atlas. Other bodies modeled after his are Dawn of Glory in Prospect Park, and Alexander Hamilton at the U.S. Treasury in Washington. Hollywood was pleading with him to come and be their Tarzan. Atlas preferred to stay in Brooklyn.
He stood at 5 feet, 10 inches, weighted 180 and had a 47-inch chest, a 32-inch waist, a 17-inch neck, 14-inch forearms and 24-inch thighs. When Physical Culture magazine staged a bodybuilding fair at Madison Square Garden in 1921 they named him “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.” In 1922 he again won the title. By this time Charles Atlas realized he had something to sell. So he set up a small bodybuilding-by-mail enterprise.
At first there was little response to his ads, but things boomed after he brought in an ingenious advertising man named Charles Roman who assessed the theretofore untitled muscles-against-muscles program and christened it “Dynamic Tension.”
By the late 1930s there was hardly a magazine on the newsstands that didn’t have one of his ads inside. Every year 60,000 young males were tearing out coupons and ordering the $30 Dynamic Tension course. The ads ballyhooed the Charles Atlas way of Life: “Avoid all dissipations and injurious habits you know to be wrong. Think high and beautiful thoughts.” “A sound body and sound mind go together. They always will.”
Kids made pilgrimages to Atlas’s offices in Manhattan where he would oblige by bending a railroad spike and offer them sound counsel: “Live clean, think clean and don’t go to burlesque shows.”
One day the mail brought a coupon from India’s Mahatma Gandhi. Atlas custom-designed a lesson plan just for him and refused any payment. “Poor little chap,” he said. “He’s nothing but a bag of bones.”
At 60 Atlas could still bend an iron bar with his chin, and at 70 he still looked 50, ferociously walking and swimming and stretching. In 1968 he was grousing at the moms of America for the deplorable conditions of their young. “Kids today look bad because their mothers feed them pop and crackers.”
He further commented: “Our women are too selfish. Mothers going here and there, wearing pants like a man, showing their backsides to people. What is this? They should be home cooking real food and feeding their families instead of out showing their backsides.”
In 1972, Atlas semi-retired to Point Lookout on Long Island under the name Charles Roman. He continued to run the still very prosperous business. When he suffered a heart attack he just couldn’t believe such a thing could happen to Charles Atlas. He resumed his old exercise regimen at once. On Christmas Eve he had another attack that proved fatal. Mail-order sales of his Dynamic Tension course remained brisk for some years after that. The price was the same $30 it had always been.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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