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The Incredible Joe Weider - Part 2

By Rob Drucker

Joe Weider overcame weakness and became one of the best built and strongest men in Montreal by the time he was in his early twenties. But he developed something much stronger than a big set of muscles - he developed a strong mind. Despite poverty, little formal schooling, and a need to support his family during the Great Depression, Weider developed his intellectual powers to an extraordinary degree. Fearing that he would be ignorant and left behind after he was forced to quit the public school system, the future publishing giant embarked on a lifetime quest to educate himself.

Weider's quest to become supremely educated began with a systematic study of many of the greatest thinkers and philosophers the world has ever known. Among the many accomplished thinkers the boy from Montreal extensively studied included Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Sigmund Freud. His studies brought him across a wide variety of disciplines, including science, politics, religion, philosophy, humanity, and the arts.

Schopenhauer, who is regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 19th century, greatly influenced the young Joe Weider. Schopenhauer emphasized that true intelligence does not come about from attending classes in a university or other formal setting, but rather from absorbing, digesting, and integrating information on your own. The philosopher described the typical university student as having a head-full of other people's ideas, but few of their own. With relatively little classroom instruction behind him, Schopenhauer's observation gave Weider encouragement that he could be just as smart, even smarter, than the many college graduates who surrounded him.

After Joe was forced to leave school, ironically his education took a quantum leap forward. Not restricted by a classroom pace, or by empty lessons of facts and figures, Weider took it upon himself to observe and learn everything that he could about human actions and civilization. He didn't merely absorb facts into his head. Rather, Weider pondered upon the significance of every observation, and he questioned the basic assumptions that were taken as "truth" by the majority of his peers. Most importantly, the young man took newly learned knowledge and made it his own. Every idea, every thought, every principle, and every claim that entered Weider's head was questioned, examined and tested with his own reasoning.

Joe sought to find the PRACTICAL value of new knowledge. He was not a student of theory or dogma. Rather, he was interested in what worked, or what could work, in the real world. Using the same intellectual rigor that he used for his studies of humanity, Weider sought truth in the iron game. Joe recognized through sound logic and real-world testing that much of what he read in the muscle magazines was contradictory, invalid, and counterproductive to body-building success.

By the late 1930s, Weider began a quest to create a new magazine of physical culture, one based on his own ideals. In his mind, he envisioned a major publication that would provide the physical-culture world with sound and proven training advice from the "champions", attractive and colorful illustrations and photographs, and a means to purchase top-quality muscle-building courses and equipment.

The 1930s was a very tough decade to enter the publishing business, especially with regard to physical culture. The Great Depression had caused the Milo Barbell Company to declare bankruptcy in 1935, and Strength magazine ceased publication as a result. Bob Hoffman, a wealthy man who owned an oil burning company in York Pennsylvania, took advantage of of the Milo Barbell Company's demise. After the company was forced into bankruptcy, Hoffman bought out the defunct Milo and incorporated whatever assets that remained into his own company. Hoffman had started Strength and Health in 1932 and a cast-iron barbell business shortly afterwords.

Due largely to the success of his oil burner business, Bob Hoffman was able to survive the Great Depression and keep his strength businesses going. However, nearly everybody else in the strength business collapsed due to financial ruins. Even the mighty Earle Liederman, who at one time owned one of the largest physical-culture businesses in the world, folded during this period. Reportedly, Bob Hoffman bought Liederman's business, once valued at over one million dollars, for a mere $350.

By the late 1930s, Hoffman had established a monopoly in the North American physical-culture market. His barbell manufacturing company had become the largest in this region, and Strength and Health had become the dominant weight-training magazine as well. With Hoffman's established dominance, and a stronghold on the body-building market, it seemed that nobody could possibly challenge him, least alone a poor kid from Montreal.

Now consider these facts. When Joe Weider first contemplated publishing a new bodybuilding magazine, he had very little money, he had little formal education, he was working full-time in a restaurant to support his family, he had no publishing experience, he was living during the Great Depression, and he was about to enter a field dominated by Bob Hoffman, a very rich American and established business man. These hurdles would have crushed any ordinary soul, but the young Weider was anything but ordinary.

Rather than dwell on his tough circumstances and near-impossible odds, Weider got to work to bring his dream to reality. Realizing that Hoffman was concentrating primarily on the more densely populated United States, and that Strength and Health was relatively hard to find in Canada, Joe reasoned that the Canadian market was his to take.

With seven dollars in his pocket, Joe bought 600 postcards. He then had printed on each card a premier announcement that he was publishing a new magazine for physical-culture enthusiasts called Your Physique, and he offered a special subscription deal, six bi-monthly issues for 75 cents. The postcards were then mailed to 600 Canadian iron lifters, many who were from Montreal. Weider obtained the names and addresses of these folks from the Pen Pals section of back issues of Strength and Health.

Shortly after mailing the postcards to his 600 Canadian prospects, Weider rented a typewriter and a mimeograph machine. He then began work on the first issue of his magazine. Still living with his parents and siblings in a small house, Joe placed the rented typewriter on his mother's dining room table, about the only feasible place he could find to put it.

Joe's mother was not fond of his ambitions to become a publisher of a body-building magazine. Fearing that he was setting himself up for financial ruin, Weider's mother once scolded him with some pretty tough words. She said, "How can you expect to compete against him [Bob Hoffman]? You're just a young kid living in Montreal! He's a multimillionaire. He has his own foundry. He has his own company, York Barbell. Who do you think you are that you can compete with him? Look, you'd better work for your father tomorrow morning in the factory and learn a trade. Otherwise, you'll be a bum."

Although Weider was bothered by his mother's criticism and lack of support, he worked around her, and he never doubted that his publishing ideas would blossom into something really big. Each night, he waited until his mother fell asleep. Then, he would cover himself and his typewriter with a sheet, and with just the light of a small flashlight, he would type away. Joe's mother was hard of hearing due to an illness she had suffered from earlier in her life, so the typing noise didn't awake her.

At the onset of his magazine writing, Joe's work pace was hampered by his lack of typing skills. In fact, prior to starting work on his new magazine, he had never used a typewriter. Imagine the strain of typing new articles late at night, after a full day's work, under a sheet, with only a small flashlight to provide light, and with no typing experience. What a powerful drive Joe Weider must have possessed to endure such an ordeal night after night.

As Weider was putting together the first issue of his magazine, which he named Your Physique, orders began to pour in. His gut feeling that Canadians bodybuilders and lifters were hungry for sound training information turned out to be correct. Encouraged by a favorable response, Joe cranked out, all by himself, and with a slow one-finger typing technique, 22 pages of muscle-building information for his first publication. Weider couldn't afford the services of a professional printer, so he typed the pages onto mimeograph stencils so that multiple copies could be made. Article headings were hand lettered in big display type, and hand-drawn muscle-man illustrations were also added. The cover for the first issue of Your Physique was the only part of the magazine that was professionally made.

The process of making copies on a mimeograph machine was very labor intensive, and it required Weider to spend countless hours spreading papers out to dry. After the drying process was complete, many more hours were then required to manually assemble each magazine to be shipped. However, Joe's hard work and perseverance paid off. The August, 1940 issue of Your Physique, Weider's first publication, grossed over 200 dollars, the most amount of money Joe Weider had ever seen. More importantly, subscribers to Your Physique liked what they saw and read, and they recommended the magazine to their friends. Soon, orders picked up at a very fast pace, and Weider used nearly all of the profits from his sales to make his magazine even better.

The cover tag line for the debut issue of Your Physique showed that Joe Weider was thinking big right from the beginning. It read, "NATIONAL HEALTH AND PHYSICAL CULTURE MAGAZINE". Barton Horvath, a weight lifter and bodybuilder from New York City, and one of the best built men in the world at the time, graced the cover. He was featured doing a double-biceps shot. Inside the magazine, there were a number of feature articles. One article was entitled I Am Young at 64, and penmanship credit for this piece was given to Arthur Dandurand, an old-time French Canadian strong man and a personal friend of Weider. Another article focused on personalities in weightlifting, and Johnny Young, a local gym owner, was given credit for this story.

Truth be told, Weider wrote each of the articles in the inaugural issue of Your Physique all by himself. For years, he gave other people byline credit because he knew readers wanted to hear directly from the "champions". To his credit, Weider's ghost-written articles were based on information directly attained from knowledgeable and established bodybuilders and weightlifters. But, relatively few of them could write a decent sentence, least alone an entire article. This forced Weider, at least during his early publishing years, to put the champs spoken words into a readable format himself. Weider would later hire some of the best writers the physical-culture world has ever known, including George F. Jowett, Earle Liederman, Barton Horvath, and Charles A. Smith.

One of Weider's goals for his new magazine was to establish bodybuilding as a respected, organized, and independent discipline. Hoffman regarded bodybuilding as nothing more than a side show for his weightlifting contests, and he often spoke about bodybuilding with contempt. Nonetheless, Hoffman tolerated bodybuilders because they drew big crowds to his events. Hoffman's bodybuilding shows almost always were staged after the lifters finished their competition, and the physique shows usually did not take place until the late hours of the night. Hoffman used this timing strategy to ensure that the crowd would be present to see all of the weightlifters battle it out. Had the physique contests been presented first, it is doubtful that the attending crowd would have stuck around long enough to watch the weightlifting competitions in their entirety.

Although Weider was an avid fan of Olympic-style weightlifting, he knew that Hoffman dominated the weightlifting market. By catering to the bodybuilding crowd, the young publisher found a niche with a HUGE market potential. By 1943, Your Physique was well established throughout Canada, and profits soared. A few years later, Bob Hoffman took notice that Weider's popularity had spread to the States. Wanting to crush him before he gained control, Hoffman responded by repeatedly attacking Joe Weider and his publication in Strength and Health. Ironically, the attacks increased Joe Weider's popularity, and sales of Your Physique skyrocketed as a result. This would lead to one of the most famous rivalries in lifting history, and one which would last until Bob Hoffman's death in 1985.

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© 2012 Rob Drucker

contact email address: robdrucker@musclesofiron.com