Roman, a young advertising executive whose firm had serviced the Atlas account. The turnaround began in late 1928, when he hired Charles P. He opened and then closed a Manhattan gymnasium, and for two years served without compensation as the physical director of a summer camp. The amicable and obliging Atlas-a poor businessman, by most accounts-spread himself too thin. The Atlas course required no special equipment, stressed a holistic approach that included advice on diet, grooming, and personal behavior, and held out as an ideal a body that, like Atlas's own, was "perfect" in its symmetry and proportions (5 foot 10 inch 180 pounds neck, 17 inch chest, 47 inch biceps, 17 inch forearm, 14 inch waist, 32 inch thigh, 23 3/4 inch) rather than heavily muscled.įor several years the enterprise foundered, even while competitors thrived. Siciliano's career took another turn in 1921, when he won $1,000 as the victor in Macfadden's contest for the "World's Most Perfectly Developed Man." He won again the following year at Madison Square Garden-provoking Macfadden's lament, "What's the use of holding them? Atlas will win every time." Late in 1922, he used his prize money to open a mail-order bodybuilding business to market his exercise methods. Until 1921, Siciliano was one of the nation's most popular male models, his physique serving as the basis for some forty-five statues, including one of George Washington in New York City's Washington Square and another of Alexander Hamilton at the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C. In 1918 he married Margaret Cassano they had two children. Harry Payne Whitney, and James Earle Fraser. In 1916, while doing the Coney Island show, Siciliano was seen by an artist and introduced to New York City's community of sculptors, including Arthur Lee, Mrs. Liederman in The Orpheum Models, and in the Coney Island Circus Side Show. Beginning in 1914, Siciliano performed feats of strength in vaudeville with Young Sampson, His growing resemblance to a hotel (or bank) statue led his peers to start calling him Atlas-a name he took legally in 1922. By the age of nineteen, he was able to earn a living by demonstrating a chest developer in a storefront on Broadway. Using a system of isotonic exercise that he derived from this observation, Siciliano transformed his body and, with it, his life. Its physique, he reasoned, must have developed in a more natural way, perhaps from the animal pitting one muscle against another. At the age of seventeen, on his regular Sunday trip to the Prospect Park Zoo, he stopped to admire a muscular lion. Though disappointed by the results, Angelo nevertheless remained open to other solutions. Determined to develop muscles of his own, Angelo joined the YMCA, where he worked on stretching machines, fashioned a set of homemade barbells, and began reading Bernard Macfadden's Physical Culture magazine. That summer, while touring the Brooklyn Museum, Angelo learned that the muscles he had observed on statues of Greek and Roman gods were the result of exercise. The following year, still the "ninety-seven-pound weakling" of future advertisements, he was humiliated when a Coney Island bully kicked sand in his face and he was unable to respond. At age fifteen he was attacked and beaten on the streets. Frail and possibly anemic as a youth, Angelo was twice victimized in incidents that shaped his life and career.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |