Warren Lincoln Travis began his strongman career as the “Brooklyn Strong Boy,” but quickly graduated to circuses and vaudeville and also worked long stints at Coney Island. Travis was America’s most famous strongman in the early years of the twentieth century. Most other touring professionals of the era were Europeans or Canadians – Sandow, the Saxon Trio, Apollon, Louis Cyr, and Horace Barre. To distinguish himself from these other contemporaries, Travis’ performances were marked by the lifting of monstrous amounts of weight in back lifts, in hip and harness lifts, and in the crowd-pleasing one-finger lift (a note from Stark...

Sigmund Klein was one of the most fascinating, and indeed, successful physical culturists of the 1920s and 1930s. Operating a gym in New York, the same gym run by his father in law, Professor Atilla, Klein’s unique position in the fitness industry made him the envy of many. Not only was he incredibly strong and athletic, but he was part of physical culture royalty. Given the fact that he ran a gymnasium and was a weight trainer in his own right, many of the images we have of Sig tend to be him in workout clothes. This is what makes...

In June 1911, shortly after Joe Greenstein arrived in Houston, Texas, he resumed a wrestling career that had been interrupted in his native Poland when rising anti-Semitism drove him to join relatives in America. In 1914, however, a friend shot him between the eyes and set him on a different path. As the story goes, the bullet flattened against his forehead, sparing his life and sparking a lifelong interest in the connection between mental power and strength.  As The Mighty Atom, he performed standard strongman feats of strength, but his signature stunts usually involved his hair, with which he pulled...