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July 29, 2010, 04:41:42 pm |
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V I S I T I R O N A G E . U S
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Topic: MEMORIAL - those we have lost. (Read 24146 times)
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Andrew Martin
Olympia Level
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Posts: 220
Natural Born Ironager
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Unfortunately, we at this time must add Reg Park to this list.
He was one of the great one's.
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Bill Gibbons
America Level
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Posts: 16
Natural Born Ironager
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The Charles Atlas obituary is inaccurate. I had the pleasure of knowing Atlas' son.
Charles Jr for several years, and he was able to put me straight on a few details. Here is a Charles Atlas timeline:
Born: Angelo Siciliano in 1892 Acri, Calabria, Italy
Emigrated: To the USA Brooklyn, NY, in 1903
Started: Exercising at age 16 with a home made barbell and a pulley rigged up in his bedroom. He visited the Brooklyn YMCA, read Physical Culture Magazine, sent away for the Swoboda physocal culture course. Adopted the nickname "Charlie."
Became: A successful sculptors model in 1916 and was also used by Bernarr MacFadden to illustrate exercises in Physical Culture Magazine.
Married: Met his wife when she saw him during his own strongman act at Coney Island. he used the name "Atlas." He married Margaret Cassano in 1918 then made a living with Adolph Nordquest (Young Sandow) as a Vaudville acrobatic act.
1918: Son Charles Vincent Siciliano born
1919: Daughter Diane born. Toured Vaudville again for a year with Earle Liederman as the "Orphium Models." Liederman later quit the act to start his own mail order bodybuilding course.
1920: Made a living by demonstrating cable exercisers in a vacant store window for strongman Abe Boshes. Boshes won Macfaddens "perfectly Developed" contest in 1903 and was also health advisor to President Woodrow Wilson. Charlie later demostrated cable exercisers and sold them directly to earn money.
1921: Entered and won "America's Most Handsome Man Contest," which was a picture contest held by Bernarr McFadden via his Physical Culture magazine. First prize was $1,000.00.
1922: Entered and won "America's Most Perfectly Developed Man contests, held at Madison Square Garden. he beat oput over 900 other contestants, including Joe Bonomo. First prize was $1,000.00 or a trip to Hollywood to audition for a role in the new "Tarzan" movie. Atlas was set for Hollywood, but his wife and mother were against him going due to Tinsle Town's racy reputation at the time. So Atlas stayed put in Brooklyn and took the money.
Note; In his wonderful autobiography, "The Strongman," Joe stated that he and Charlie were running neck-and-neck, and they even had a ten dollar bet on who would win. Then Joe went to work one day (he was a movie stuntman) and broke his leg. As the judges were not willing to change the title to "America's Most Perfectly Developed Man with a Broken Leg," Joe claims that Charlie won by default! He also got Joe's ten dollars!
1922: Charlie officially changed his name to the now legendary Charles Atlas, as it sounded much more American. He met Fred Tilney, a British homeopathic physician and course writer who was employed as MacFadden's "ideas man." He met Atlas through MacFadden, who was using Atlas a model for a short movie entitled, "The Road to Health." McFadden later shelved the project as he felt that it would give Atlas too much publicity. However, Tilney siggested that he and Atlas go into business together and sell a mail order bodybuildingy course with Atlas as the figurehead. Atlas agreed, and the two started in 1922.
Note: Tilney wrote the course, managed the finances and took care of the files and folders. They ran the business out of Tilney's home for the first six months, then rented an office and hired two girls. Every lunchtime, Tilney and Atlas would strip down and workout for an hour. Tilney notice that Atlas need more work on his chest and calves, and gave him additional exercises to work on these. The famous chair dips that form the foundation of the Atlas course were introduced by Tilney. BTW, the first mail order course did not have any photographs, and was entitled, "Health & Strength" by Charles Atlas.
1924: Atlas and Tilney toured the Bahamas, where Atlas performed various feats of strength. The climate appealed to Tilney, who suggested that the business move to Florida. Atlas' wife refused to leave her family, who all lived in Brooklyn, so the business stayed put. Earle Liederman predicted that Atlas and Tilney would be out of business in a year.
1928: The business began to flounder, probably due to Tilney writing the newspaper ads, which weren't that great, so by September that year Atlas began to look around for some additional help. He eventually approached the Benjamin Lansdowne Agency, and his account was given to a young copywriter called Charles P. Roman. It was Roman who dreamed up the now famous ads where the runt gets sand kicked in his face by a beach bully. Other notable comic strip ads that went: "You too can have a body like mine!" and "How I made a man out of Mac!"Â "In Seven Days I'll Make You A Man" and so on, were invented by Roman.Â
Note: Roman also invented the story about Atlas receiving inspiration at the zoo by watching the big cats stretching and tensing their muscles. In truth, Atlas learned everything he knew about health and fitness from A.P. Swoboda, and increased his knowledge on exercises during his association with Bernarr MacFadden. Almost all the "Dynamic Tension" exercises in his course were featured in a book entitled "Secrets of Health & beauty" published by Bernarr MacFadden in 1903! The calf exercises and some of the chest exercises were introduced by Tilney, so Atlas had very little to do with "inventing" the exercise regime.Â
1929: In October of that year, Roman bought out Tilney's partnership for $500 and Tilney moved to Florida, where he and his wife ran a highly successful health food business. Roman edited the Atlas course, coined the term "Dynamic Tension"Â to describe the exercises within, and began to promote Atlas as the "World's Most perfectly Developed Man,"Â a title that Atlas never actually won, but he kept it all his life just the same. Liederman, who once predicted that Atlas would be out of business by 1925, had himself lost everything in the great crash. Even his wife, a former Miss Alaska left him. The man that had once employed 120 secretaries in his swank New York offices to mail out his course, had tens of thousands of devoted pupils, and lived a millionaire lifestyle was suddenly flat broke.
1936: Owner of the York Barbell Comany, Bob Hoffman, began to deride Atlas in public, calling him the "World's greatest Fakir,' and referring to his methods as "Dynamic Hooey," even accusing Atlas of false advertising. This caught the attention of the FTC who investigated Atlas' business dealings. Hoffman kept up his abusive diatribes against Atlas -even in court, and demostrated the superiority of weightlifting again Atlas' non-apparatus methods by doing pushups on his thumbs. Atlas retaliated by taking off his shirt, gave a muscle control demostration, followed by tearing a New York telephone directory in half far quicker than Hoffman could manage. Eventually, the FTC cleared Atlas of all charges and ordered Hoffman to cease and desist all verbal attacks on Mr. Atlas. One of the witnesses in the trial was the great John Grimek, who admired Atlas and "held him up in awe." later that year, Atlas pulled a 72 ton railroad car along a level track for 112 feet, broke iron bars in front of cheering prisoners at Sing Sing prison, and ran 10 miles in less than one hour to prove that he was a fit as he was strong.
1938: Atlas' Italian background was noticed by the Mafia, who sent along a goon to the New York headquarters to visit the great man. Atlas was offered a Mafia credit card, but he refused resolutely to accept it. When the goon got overbearing and tried to put it in Atlas' pocket, the strongman decked the oaf and physically threw him out of his office! The Mafia left him alone after that.Â
1941: Atlas was recruited by the US government to put together an exercise regime to get the thousands of young, but out-of-shape military recruits into fighting condition. Charles P. Roman and Charles Atlas Jr both enrolled in the US Navy.
1955; A young man called Joe Weider approached Atlas and asked him for help in establishing a New York office. Atlas told Weider that he was a "fool' for selling weights and didn't help him out.
1965: For decades, life was literally all roses for Atlas. He remained the world's most famous and successful bodybuilder and his course still sold tens of thousands of copies per year, world-wide. In April that year, his beloved wife Margaret was diagnosed with an enormous tumor. Doctors operated immediately, but could not save her. On April 17, 1965, Margaret Atlas died after 47 years of marriage. Atlas was devastated and for two years literally disappeared off the radar. He later recovered from a deep depression, went back to exercising, bought a luxury condo in Florida and lived there and in Long Island in semi-retirement. At one point he even considered joining a monastery, but his parish priest talked him out of it as this was probably not his true calling in life.
1969: Roman was under pressure from the media concerning the whereabouts of Charles Atlas. So to help out, Atlas decided to pose for a new set of publicity photographs at the age of 77 - much to Roman's chagrin, who preferred that the decades old Atlas photos taken in the 1930's and 1940's were fine. "To whiten his hair would not be meaningful" Roman once stated. He needn't have worried, as Atlas looked, fit, tanned and in superb shape for his age.
1970: Roman bought out Atlas' share of the company and became the sole owner of Charles Atlas Ltd. Charlie stayed on as a consultant, welcomed visitors to his Florida home and continued to pose for publicity shots. Atlas claimed that by 1970, over 7 million people had purchased his course. At $30.00 each, he became a millionarie many time over.
1971: Atlas developed a mild form of diabetes (inherited from his mother's side) and was put on a high protein diet. He continued to exercise and live a healthy lifestyle.
1972: Atlas began to experience chest pains after his workouts. As he aged, Atlas changed some of his daily regime by utilising a stationary bicycle machine, light jogging, wall pushups, self-resistance movements and deep breathing. He was diagnosed with clogged arteries and was ordered to take it easy. The chest pains became so severe that he was hospitalised on Long Island in late December 1972.
The End: Charles Atlas passed away from congested heart failure in his hospital bed on the evening December 24, 1972. Charles Roman turned 65 on December 25th.
The family: Charles Jr enjoyed a career as an aeronautical engineer, with much of his work on the Lockheed Constellation. He finished his working life a professor of mathematics at Santa Monica College. He now lives in a Santa Monica nursing home and will be 90 years of age on December 12.
The daughter, Diane Spinelli, is a housewife and a great grandmother in Brooklyn, NY.
Charles Jr children: Gia Atlas is an orchid expert and works in the entertainment media. His son, Thomas Atlas MD is one of the top radiologists in the USA and the last I heard lives in Orange County, CA.
Charles P. Roman: Died in 1999 at the age of 92. I knew him for the last seven years of his life. I offered to buy the company from him in 1997 (by that time it was barely functioning and was being run out of his Manhatten apartment with the help of one secretary). The comic book ads still appeared in various magazines but reduced to business card size, and the course was mailed out of a shipping warehouse in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He stuck with much of the fictional BS surrounding the public face of Charles Atlas, and was not interested in selling what was left of the company to me for $80,000. I went off and arranged for a much bigger loan, and was encouraged by Charles Jr (who never entered the bodybuilding business) to keep trying. But as fate would have it, J.C. Hogue, an intellectual property rights owner from Arkansas, took the aged Roman to lunch, made him an offer, and purchased the company. I must admitt to being VERY upset at the time, but it happens. Given the fact that the Dynamic Tension course has been barely updated since 1927, I wonder how many courses they are selling today?Â
Bill Gibbons
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IA Mod
Guest
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Thanks Bill!
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Bob Sweeney
Gym Rat
Offline
Posts: 2
Natural Born Ironager
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Ref Sandow He's certainly with us in spirit. English heritage a government sponsored body recently placed a plaque outside his residence in London. 
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Bob Sweeney
Gym Rat
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Posts: 2
Natural Born Ironager
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Ref the Sandow plaque. Hi I will try and locate a photo but it may take a little time as in about 6 hours I go into hospital for a new knee replacement and will be in for 5 days or so. Regards Bob Sweeney.
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aameduri
Global Moderator
Olympia Level
Offline
Posts: 1942
Natural Born Ironager
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Bill,
I just read the Atlas bio. AMAZING.
Dr. A
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Dave Hartnett
Guest
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Adding Zabo.. RIP
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Michael Phillips
Olympia Level
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Gender: 
Posts: 464
Natural Born Ironager
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This is quite a thread - I really enjoy reading the respectful comments on here. As a follow-up to my post (No. 92) I thought some of you may wish to know that the NPA here in England re-named what was the UK Classic to The Mike Williams Classic after Mike's untimely passing. This was done with the blessing of his wife Janet, and here's the poster from last year's competition. There were 48 entries, and the contest is a very important one for all who knew Mike. On Mike's headstone, it says 'Gone training'...he really loved the sport.
 [img][/img]
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Clifford Tendler
America Level
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Posts: 25
Natural Born Ironager
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This thread has got me thinking about all the great bodybuilders who have thrown their lives or careers away whether it be through drugs or alcohol abuse, or by participating in criminal activites. I simply can not believe that Ron Teufel drank a bottle of vodka a day for years. There are just so many of these type of stories out there. I know we are all just human beings afterall, each with our own share of ups and downs, and being an athlete does not mean we are less fallible than any one else. Perhaps we should start a thread about bodybuilders behind bars, and kick it off with Bertil Fox and Craig Titus.
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Joe
Olympia Level
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Posts: 1242
Slow and steady
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Jim:
Did Al Oerter live on LI?
Joe
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Fritz139
Universe Level
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Gender:
Posts: 80
Natural Born Ironager
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Jim
Al Oerter was born in Astoria. Moved to Franklin Square as a young teenager.
He attended Sewanhaka HS where he threw the Discus under Coach Fraley. AO was a few years older than me but I knew him followed his career through the years. A very strong guy only exceeded by his pleasant disposition. I saw him in Florida at the airport where he had gone in his later years.
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Dave Hartnett
Guest
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[ caeser Juliani. Gun shot. Unsure - 1981 (?) .....he was 22 years old. In regards to Caeser Juliani, he was killed by gun shot in a supposed mob hit on shore parkway in brooklyn. the shot came from behind him from the back seat of his car so it was supposedly someone he knew ala "goodfellas". caeser according to those who knew him had a few problems with the local mobs. he supposedly was selling drugs(type inknown) and encroaching on others territory. he also was dating a mobsters young daughter and was told to keep away. he later beat up the two goons sent to "warn" him again. as he was very physically imposing it's imagined that this was the only way to stop him. i heard these stories from some lifters who knew him and from some of the police officers in that area that i worked with. i don't believe the killer has been caught yet so the exact why's and by whom are still just conjecture. it's a shame that he couldn't get his mind out of the gutter as his physique potentail was off the charts. what a waste. _______________________________________________________1981 Frank Wainwright (left). Gun shot. Unsure - 1981
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Good luck with the knee and get back on your feet soon!
