On Monday, we wrote about Bob Hoffman and Charles Atlas, two early twentieth-century musclemen who were predecessors of Brian Shaw, the strongman profiled this week by Burkhard Bilger. One of Hoffman’s protégés was Paul Anderson, the Georgia native who held the title “World’s Strongest Man” for much of the nineteen-sixties. Anderson, who won a weightlifting gold medal in the heavyweight category at the Melbourne Olympics, was the subject of a 1969 U.S. Journal piece by Calvin Trillin. Though not nearly as tall as the six-feet-eight-inch Shaw, Anderson was equally recognizable:

[He] is five feet ten and weighs about three hundred and seventy-five pounds; he is never mistaken for anyone else…. At first glance, he looks like a huge fat man. He has an immense, soft-looking stomach, and he walks with a rolling gait somewhere between a swagger and a waddle—probably because of the fact that his thighs are thirty-six inches around, about the size of the average man’s waist. But at a second glance, when the thickness of his neck and the breadth of his back become apparent, it is obvious that he is not exactly a fat man.

Anderson, who died in 1994, was a devout Christian and a teetotaler. After his Olympic win, he turned professional in order to raise money for the residence for troubled and homeless youth he founded with his wife in Vidalia, Georgia. “Being the World’s Strongest Man, like being the Fastest Gun in the West, is not easily translatable into a trade,” Trillin notes. This was especially true before the creation of the strongman circuit in which Shaw competes. Anderson briefly had a Las Vegas act, and later tried wrestling, before settling on a career in which he earned about forty thousand dollars a year making as many as five hundred public appearances annually. (All of the money went to the home; Anderson lived on a stipend.)

At his appearances, Anderson typically performed such feats of strength as driving a nail through two wooden boards with his thumb and lifting a platform on which eight men were seated. He is renowned for a 1957 exhibition at which he backlifted 6,270 pounds, a feat that earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. His appearances provided an opportunity for Anderson to encourage members of the audience to become more involved in their communities and in Jesus Christ. Often he would close out a performance by reading patriotic and spiritual poems of his own composition. (Anderson drove to many of his events and had a special “car desk” installed in his automobile so that he could pull over when inspiration struck and write.)

Though Anderson said that his athletic career was “thrilling,“ he also shared with Trillin some some of the nuisances that came with being the World’s Strongest Man:

When [Anderson] used to demonstrate strength by hoisting a huge barbell above his head, someone would invariably come up at the end of the performance, lift one end of the barbell off the ground, and proclaim that it wasn’t terribly heavy after all. “I can’t understand that,” Anderson says. “When a violinist gets through with a concert, nobody comes up and starts playing his violin.” _The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.

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Photograph courtesy of the Anderson family.