Muscle Makers

Peeling off their shirts and undershirts in a hearing room in Washington one day last week, a prime collection of mighty-muscled weightlifters offered their prowess and appearance as evidence in Federal Trade Commission proceedings against Robert Collins Hoffman, a strapping York, Pa. body-lover who sells male muscle in the form of lessons, bar bells and a magazine called Strength & Health. Mr. Hoffman had been cited by the Com-mission for unfair competition with his rivals in the muscle-making industry. But the case boiled down to a quarrel between Mr. Hoffman and Charles Atlas, who does business at No. 115 East 23rd St., Manhattan, as THE WORLD'S MOST PERFECTLY DEVELOPED MAN.

A swart Italian who was born Angelo Siciliano 44 years ago and brought to Brooklyn by his parents at 11, Mr. Atlas by his own advertised account was originally a puny "no-account runt," a "sickly, skinny, run-down weakling weighing only 97 pounds." His inspiration came on a visit to the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences, where he was so impressed by the plaster-cast Greek heroes that he thenceforth devoted his life to his body. His present title dates from the early 19203 when Publisher Bernarr Macfadden was running beautiful body contests. Charles Atlas won so regularly that Mr. Macfadden finally abandoned the contest entirely. The inspiration for his name came not from the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences, but from a wooden statue of Atlas in front of a Far Rockaway, N. Y. hotel.

For a time Mr. Atlas was a popular sculptor's model, his clients including James Earle Fraser and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney. But his real commercial success dates from 1922 when he started to offer mail-order courses in physiculture. Today he has an office in London as well as Manhattan, claims he has started a total of 500,000 puny people on the road to potent health. Mr. Atlas' formula is "Dynamic Tension" which means pitting one set of muscles against another for exercise instead of using weights, bars, bells, springs.

To competitors like Mr. Hoffman who have athletic paraphernalia as well as courses to sell, Mr. Atlas' dynamic tension is a continual thorn, particularly when used, as it always is, with the phrase "the world's most perfectly developed man." Mr. Atlas talks about the beauty of his body with the impersonal pride of a steelmaster describing the finest rolling mill in existence. What his competitors question is how much of Mr. Atlas' physical assets was acquired by dynamic tension.

In Mr. Hoffman's Strength & Health "the world's most perfectly developed man" was once described in an article by one Alan Carse as having confessed to a gathering of mail order strongmen at Atlantic City that the only reason he sold his courses without equipment was that after having advertised he could think of no novel item to offer. When the customers began to complain to the postal authorities he simply had to give them something, so he gave them "dynamic tension." Vastly annoyed, Mr. Atlas complained to the Federal Trade Commission. Subsequently Mr. Hoffman cheerfully admitted that there was no one by the name of Alan Carse, that he wrote the article himself, that he had never seen Mr. Atlas, that the Atlantic City meeting never occurred at all. It was, Mr. Hoffman later told a Federal Trade Commission examiner, "a fiction story, which is very commonly done in writing." But writing under his own name Mr. Hoffman later accused Mr. Atlas of being "The World's Greatest Fakir." Mr. Atlas, roared Mr. Hoffman in his Strength & Health, "does not have a 17-in. bicep as he claims. He does not have a 14 1/2in. forearm. He does not have a 47-in. chest. He cannot pull six autos with his teeth. He cannot lift 250 Ib. above his head five or six times without straining. . . .I defy him to carry 500 Ib. five or six blocks or one block with or without straining. He cannot run ten miles in an hour and he cannot tow a boatload of hysterical women a distance of one mile against wind, wave and tide as he claimed to do."

Mr. Hoffman, who on the side is president and half-owner of York Oil Burner Co., maintains that Mr. Atlas' "dynamic tension" is "dynamic hooey." Pressed for a definition of "hooey" at FTC hearings last spring, Mr. Hoffman with no hesitation explained that he had traced the word back to the Phoenicians "about 4,000 years before the Flood, not the recent Pennsylvania flood, but the Bible Flood." Then the word "hooey" meant "hoof." "In times of famine," continued Mr. Hoffman, ''it became necessary to eat all the parts of an animal. These parts were ground up into a food similar to our bologna of today. It didn't taste well or smell good but it was filling. So when the Phoenician soldiers received this food, which was supposed to be beef, they would say, 'that's hooey.' The word traveled up through the ages, possibly journeyed from the Baltic Sea to Russia, although I have not been able to trace it. ... But anyway in 1918 we find the same word in the French language, also 'hooey.' In those days, of course, beef was scarce. Horse meat was frequently substituted, and the soldiers learned to call it first 'hooey' and then say 'that's hooey.' "

Mr. Hoffman's education was cut short by the War, but, says he "I have been a voracious reader, luckily remembering what I read. I started to study health and exercise before I was 10 and have accumulated, through study, experience and observation such a fund of knowledge and information about the subject that approximately 500 articles I have written in the last five years have not begun to exhaust the information I have. ... If I do say so myself, my body is symmetrical."

Now 38, and self-styled world's largest maker of bar bells, Mr. Hoffman stands 6 ft. 3 in., weighs 247 lb., measures 49 3/4 in. around the chest, 35 in. around the waist, 30 in. around the thighs, 17 1/2 in. around the biceps. Even so, the FTC questioned some of Mr. Hoffman's before-&-after advertising. Furthermore, it questioned the propriety of using the bodies of professional strongmen to illustrate an advertising tale told by a satisfied customer. It did not, however, question the practice of retouching photographs to bring out the muscle or show manly hair where none grew naturally.

To justify his claims, Mr. Hoffman last week took his stable of champion strongmen to Washington for the final hearings in the FTC's Docket No. 2542. One strongman was Robert L. Jones who runs a Philadelphia subsidiary of Mr. Hoffman's York Bar-Bell Co. and can perform the unduplicated feat of hand balancing on ten Indian clubs. Once up on the clubs, he drops them two by two until his weight rests on four clubs through his thumbs and two fingers. Another performer before startled Commission Examiner Robert Samuel Hall was Anthony Terlazzo, Olympic world champion featherweight weight-lifter who broke his own record in Paterson, N. J. fortnight ago with a total of 765 lb. in three Olympic lifts.

Bob Mitchell, whose specialty is letting a Ford truck run over his stomach, did not have facilities for that exhibition last week, but he showed Examiner Hall how to get into the crab position from flat on his back with a man on his stomach. At one point Terlazzo and Mitchell leaped on the table, kicked aside the briefs, put on a muscle dance. Mr. Hoffman, not to be outdone, stood on his thumbs.

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