Behind the Scenes, Weedy

Monthly Column by Harry B Paschall

I see in the current number of one of Weedy's Magazine for Morons that I have been singled out for the purge treatment. I don't know a nicer fellow it could happen to, and I am proud to be able to take my place in the Lemac Box with Robert Hoffman, John Grimek, Ray Van Cleef, Peary Rader, Dietzie Wortman, and other ironmen too numerous to mention.

A month or two back Weedy made another one of those lightning switches, worthy of a Milton Berle, in announcing that he had changed his mind about the A.A.U. and was now willing to let them stay in business, providing he could get into the act. This was a noble gesture, coming from a guy who had been responsible for having had Champion John Davis barred from the 1949 Senior Weightlifting Championships, with the result that John now finds himself in the unique position of a world's champion who is not even champion of his own country.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. A year ago Weedy was hollering that the A.A.U. was unfair to bodybuilders, who should be highly paid for their efforts in achieving biceps with a larger circumference than their heads. Now we find him a snuggled up to the A.A.U., using the well known Red tactics of infiltration. I would suggest to Mr. Wortmann that after a visit from the Weedy entourage he should carefully examine his hand and count his fingers to see if any are missing.

The plain facts are that the IFBB (Informal Brotherhood of Boobs) did not work out quite as well as Weedy expected, and now he is prospecting for gold on the other side of the street in the field of weightlifting. Any day now you hardworking lifters are apt to wake up and find out that Weedy has discovered a way to press with an inclined bench stuck up your back.

Frankly, I am glad that the Miracle Man has chosen me for a target, because of all the good folk I know in the weight training business, I am the one who has least to lose. I am not a professional bodybulger; I am completely independent. Neither Weedy nor Robert Hoffman tells me what to write. Strength & Health buys my stuff and pays me for it, just as do a number of other magazines in other fields. Any opinions I express are mine alone, and not the responsibility of the publishers, and I would like to go on record here as saying that in my long association with Strength and Strength & Health magazines (dating back to 1915), not one line of my copy has ever been changed. Like the "mean liddle kid" in Red Skelton's radio program, "I calls 'em the way I sees 'em."

I have, during the past few years, tried in a gentle way to discourage some of the very obvious errors being committed by a certain clique of muscle builders. I felt very strongly that the "muscle-spinning" tactics adopted by certain of these men would do the weight-training and weight-lifting game a lot of harm in the eyes of the general public. I think the greatest contribution Bob Hoffman has made to the iron sport has not been his development of weightlifting, but rather his educational program in going into Y.M.C.A.s and schools all over the country and convincing prejudiced physical training instructors that barbells offered the most sane and sensible method of physical culture.

Do you think for one moment that one of these over-inflated 19" arm, and 3 inch-deep pectoral boys could approach a sane and conservative physical instructor and sell him on the value of weight training as a conditioner? No, indeed - you would find yourself running into the same sort of opposition that I did some 35 years ago when I attempted to put weights into my local Y.M.C.A. There would be shouts of "musclebound"; and there would be some justification for such reaction. I don't want to see barbell training go back to the place it occupied in the old days, but if Weedy continues his present course, and you see youngsters sweating and puffing and "pumping up" their biceps for hours on end in the Y training rooms, you are going to see a lot of these training places close up.

Wonderful Weedy has collected about himself a coterie of muscle men (mostly on the West Coast - although now he has come down from Canada and is invading the Eastern Seaboard) who worship at the Altar of "Lumps". Most of these men run professional muscle emporiums and have nothing to lose and everything to gain by such publicity. Weedy uses them, and they use Weedy, a fair and square arrangement no business man would cavil at, except that these lumpy gentlemen have no means of knowing when the Old Master Switcher will lower the boom and cast them adrift. One never knows, just as with prize hogs, just when one will get fat enough to kill.

Lately, the Miracle Man has acquired a new sycophant named Horvath, whose duties, as far as we can ascertain from this distance, are to follow the Great Weedy around and mutter, at frequent intervals, "Chee, Boss, you're wonderful!" This new straight man who feeds lines to the comedian seems to be in charge of the "1000 Guinea Pigs" Program, which is certainly an appropriate name for any collection of hopefuls who wander into the spider's web. He has recently busied himself, in the intervals between nailing up boxes, with a so-called Evolution of Heavy Exercises, which is about as accurate as A History of America by Joe Stalin.

The worst of all this mess is the fact that hundreds of young fellows are coming up and when they read this sort of goo they are not to be too severely blamed if they believe some of it. I get letters from some of these boys, and they occasionally write as though I had poisoned their grandmother because I had mentioned something about useful muscles and sensible training. I have five grandsons who are now approaching the age when they should take up sane and progressive barbell training. I tremble when I think of one of these lads stopping in at the corner drug store and picking up a copy of Muscles for Morons. Boys have to have "heroes", and it seems to me it is the duty of honorable people who are connected with the weight training profession to provide these lads with real idols instead of men of clay.

You would think that anyone with a grain of commonsense could leaf through one of the Weedy picture books and smell a rat from the reek of self-admiration and egotism, but unfortunately, as all press agents well know, the American public can be sold anything with soap opera tactics and singing commercials. About the only thing missing in the Muscles for Morons sheet is the singing commercial, and since I write commercials, I think I will give one to Weedy free. This one is to be sung to the tune of "Beautiful K-K-Katie", and I suggest that Horvath oil up his pipes and make a recording: "Wonderful Weedy...Wonderful Weedy...You're the only, only one that I adore; When the mule train goes over the moutain, It will carry 'pec' and 'lats' galore! Wonderful Weedy...Wonderful Weedy...Let me sing your praises evermore; And when the moon shines over the cowshed, Don't let your 'lats' get caught behind the door!"

It is the privilege of a columnist and cartoonist to lampoon the foibles of humanity. Sometimes when we are presented in a rather ridiculous light we see the error of our ways and change for the better. Thank Heaven that I get letters from some of the more prominent models and bodybuilders who say that I am doing a good work in keeping them from considering themselves too seriously. They know that nobody has greater admiration for a muscular physique than I for this fact has been proven by my devotion over a period of 36 years to weight training. All that I am concerned with is keeping our game clean and sane, so that it may justly earn and keep the respect of the public. I feel that this writing has not been in vain, when I see ever so often, that Weedy has adopted another one of our ideas. Perhaps the time will come when he will straighten up and fly right, and we can offer him our hand in friendship. But as we told Wortmann, we are going to count our fingers afterward.