Charles Atlas, Vic Tanny, and Muscle Beach

In the late 1940s you could see an ad strip in comic books and newspapers about a 97-pound weakling at the beach with his girlfriend who was humiliated by some muscly bully kicking sand in his face. But the weakling was no dummy. He sent for the Charles Atlas body building plan and soon went back to the beach a muscled guy himself and beat up the sand-kicking bully, who for some reason was still there in the same place. Then, because of his muscles, the former weakling could get his girlfriend back—and any other girl he wanted.

I'm not sure I ever believed the ads, but I loved the look of the muscled body, and I liked the justice of the whole thing.

Charles Atlas was a real person, and I remember those advertisement pictures of him holding the world on his shoulder. He was a body builder who didn’t use weights but his own system, Dynamic Tension. In 1921 and 1922 he won the title of the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man, which is what he called himself ever after. The contest that gave him the title wasn’t held after 1922 because its promoters knew there was no one else in America who could ever win the title away from Charles Atlas.

Charles Atlas had no gym. His was a mail-order business. But Vic Tanny had a gym on 4th Street just down from the Hitching Post theater in the town where I grew up, Santa Monica. In those days Santa Monica was small, and I don’t remember it being populated by the kind of ignorant stupid people Jay Leno finds there and then displays on his Jaywalking episodes. These folks know nothing and are proud of it. But that is another story.

I went to the Hitching Post theater—Saturday matinee for a dime—but I never went inside the Vic Tanny gym. (My brothers may have, I’m not sure.) What went on there remained a mystery to me. I think it was one of those upstairs places—step in from 4th Street and take the stairs to the second floor. My parents would never have allowed me to go. I may have asked. Besides, in the late 1940s women were pretty much excluded from body building gyms except as spectators, and few at that. And in the late 1940s I was no woman, only a small girl who clearly did not belong in a men’s gym.

But I have learned that it was Vic Tanny who changed the workout gym from a dark and smelly place to one of light, color, and even carpet, and he hoped his gyms would attract not men only but everyone. Eventually, they did, and he had 80 some Vic Tanny gyms throughout the country. Joe Gold was a frequenter of Vic Tanny’s Santa Monica, and we know what he learned there.

Muscle Beach? Yes, in those days it was in Santa Monica, not Venice, just south of the Santa Monica Pier. It was a place of interest for me, and when I could get someone to take me there I loved to watch the gymnastics and body building that went on. Those muscly, oiled bodies looked good, if a bit unreal. Nothing like any boy I ever knew. But Muscle Beach was not a place where I could hang out, even in my teen years.

Today a Gold’s Gym is within walking distance of my home in Boise, Idaho. It has lots of light and lots of women working out, as well as men. But I don’t go to Gold's. I drive on down the road to Curves to do my work outs. There’s not much atmosphere, not much excitement, nothing very fun going on at Curves. But I go, for the health of it.