Charles Atlas was famously named “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man”
On my visit to St. John Roman Catholic Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, New York City, I visited the Cloister mausoleum and found the crypt of the “World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man,” Angelo Siciliano, better known as Charles Atlas.
Angelo was born in Acri, Calabria, Italy, and emigrated to the United States with his mother in 1904, growing up in Brooklyn as a sickly child. Legend has it that as a teen he had sand kicked in his face by a lifeguard at Coney Island and resolved to improve his health and physique.
He developed a system of isometric exercises later called “Dynamic Tension,” and won the “World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” contest at Madison Square Garden in 1922. Friends said he resembled a statue of Atlas, the name stuck, and he legally changed his name to Charles Atlas.
The newly named Charles Atlas began building a local reputation at Coney Island, working as a strongman who tore phone books in half and punched nails through wood with his bare hands. He also posed as a model for sculptors, and his physique is said to appear in several New York statues.
However, his fame grew internationally through mail order. Teaming up with a young advertising man named Charles Roman in the late 1920s, he sold his Dynamic Tension course through the famous comic-book ads about the “97-pound weakling” who gets sand kicked in his face, gets fit and wins back the girl.
By 1942, more than 400,000 copies of the Atlas program had been sold, at $30 a course. The company opened branches in London, England, in 1936 and in Rio de Janeiro in 1939, and the course was eventually translated into seven languages. The rich and famous also found his strength training intriguing. King George VI reportedly signed up, Mahatma Gandhi wrote to ask about the course, and baseball’s Joe DiMaggio and prizefighter Rocky Marciano are also said to have followed Atlas.
Atlas with heavyweight champion the “Brown Bomber”, Joe Louis.
Even with his financial success, Atlas lived a private and simple life. He sold his half to Roman and retired in 1970, and Charles Atlas Ltd. is still operating today, now out of a small office in Harrington Park, New Jersey.
A 2001 New York Times piece reported that letters addressed to Charles Atlas were still arriving every week, 28 years after his death, and still being answered by the company. One came from a teenager in Sydney, Australia, describing himself as a small, weak kid everyone laughed at, exactly the “97-pound weakling” from the old ads.
Charles Atlas died of heart failure in Long Beach, New York, on December 24, 1972, at 80, and his crypt sits directly above his wife Margaret’s.
1892-1972
