Angelo Siciliano was born on October 30, 1892 in Acri, Italy. When he was 11, his family emigrated to the US and settled in Brooklyn, where, not to be too blunt about it, Angelo got beat up a lot. He was a scrawny little kid and easy for the bullies to pick on. In his teens he went to the beach (it was probably Coney Island), but found bullies there, too. One of them even kicked sand in his face.
Siciliano had had enough. He vowed to build up his muscles to the point where he wouldn’t be a target, and if he was, he could fight back. Punching a bully right in the nose was just what you did in the 20th century, particularly if you were an American kid who read comic books from cover to cover.
Siciliano tried lifting weights, but didn’t get the results he was looking for. He switched to calisthenics, but gave those up after a while too; they weren’t helping him become the muscleman he wanted to be. He was a leather worker, which didn’t pay well enough for him to join the local YMCA (where they had exercise classes) but he discovered that if you visited the side shows they had on Coney Island in those days, you could sometimes find a performer doing a strongman show. So he went to those and stayed after the audience left. If the strongman would talk to him — and most of them did — he’d ask them what exercises had worked, and also what foods they ate or avoided. He only weighed about 97 pounds, and he was determined to pack on some muscle.
Anybody could get a library card, so Siciliano was able to read “Physical Culture” magazine for information and advice. He finally found something that worked; a system of exercises eventually called “Dynamic Tension.” His system worked well enough that by the time he was 29, he was appearing in “Physical Culture” himself. The magazine named him “America’s Most Handsome Man.” The next year, 1922, he was named “America’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” in a contest at Madison Square Garden. At that point he changed his name to something more American-sounding. He also met Dr. Frederick Tilney, who had written several courses to help people learn better fitness practices. They collaborated on a new 12-lesson course based on Siciliano’s system of exercises, and Siciliano started a business to sell it.
The best audience for an exercise course was scrawny kids like Siciliano himself had been, so he published ads where they’d be sure to see them — in the back of comic books. The ads were often short comics of their own, telling the story of how he’d had sand kicked in his face at the beach, but eventually returned as a model of physical development and punched the bully (who he was able to find, somehow, despite the passage of time — but after all, it was a comic book). The thing that closed the deal was a picture of Siciliano himself and his new American name: Charles Atlas.
It all worked, especially when, after a few years went by, the boxing champions Max Baer, Rocky Marciano, and Joe Louis all revealed they’d bought the Charles Atlas course and used his exercise system. Later on, after Atlas himself passed on (in 1972), Darth Vader himself mentioned that he was an Atlas graduate — or, well, it was really David Prowse, the actor who played the original Vader. So was Allan Wells, who won the gold medal in the 100 meter dash at the 1980 Olympics.
The selling point of the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course was to escape fear. But the fear of having sand kicked in your face is one thing; the fear of being vaporized by a heat ray from a strange metal cylinder is something else. Particularly if that cylinder landed in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey on October 30, 1938. It quickly turned out that the cylinder was a space ship — out of which came an army of Martians. Radio reporters were on the scene with emergency reports from Grover’s Mill — until the signal went dead, most likely because of a heat ray attack. Then reports came in from New York City, which was being devastated by heat rays and poison gas. The Martians, it turned out, had landed all over the world, and with their superior technology, quickly conquered the whole planet. But eventually they were defeated. Sort of like us, in fact, because what did them in was…a virus.
