While the world was focused on the tragedy at Martha’s Vineyard this summer, I was saddened by a death much closer to home: that of Charles P. Roman, age 92.
Who was he? He happened to write one of the all-time great pieces of Americana, an ad in which a 97-pound weakling gets sand kicked in his face at the beach by a bully.
Yes, from 1929 until his retirement just two years ago, Roman ran Charles Atlas Ltd., a mail order firm with only one product: a 13-part exercise course based on the principle of dynamic tension. He wrote the famous ad, “The Insult That Made a Man Out of `Mac,'” in 1940.
Though that copy has appeared in probably tens of thousands of ad insertions, and has been ripped off many times, Roman didn’t think much of it at the time. But it struck a chord in millions of 97-pound weaklings like me.
Told in comic book form, the tale starts when the protagonist (based loosely on Charles Atlas himself) is humiliated on the beach: “Listen here,” the bully says. “I’d smash your face…only you’re so skinny you might dry up and blow away.”
In the space of only a few comic panels, though, Mac sees a Charles Atlas ad, and decides to send for the course. One sweet day he runs into the bully, and gives him a dose of his own medicine.
“What! You here again? Here’s something I owe you!”
“Oh, Mac!” says his girlfriend. “You ARE a real man after all!”
Roman met Atlas (real name: Angelo Siciliano) in 1928, shortly after joining the Benjamin Landsman ad agency. He was given the Atlas account, the worst job in the shop.
Atlas, one of several musclemen who sold courses by mail (anyone remember Joe Bonomo?), wasn’t doing well. He offered Roman a deal: He would make him a partner if he would take over the marketing and business end.
It was the start of a long, profitable run – and a beautiful friendship. Though a small man, Roman did the exercises himself right into his 90s, and continued with habits like chewing milk (the saliva makes it easier to digest). And when Atlas died in 1972, he devoted himself to keeping the flame alive (as he told it, Atlas kept exercising even after having a heart attack because he didn’t believe this could happen to the great Charles Atlas). He wrote books, did interviews and continued spending big sums on space, though by the 1990s comic publishers were starting to prefer brand ads from Nissan.
I met Roman in 1982 when I was assigned to do a story on the company. We stayed in touch, and until he moved to Florida years later we occasionally met for lunch at the Player’s Club in New York. He told me many wonderful stories about Atlas (for example, the time he pulled a boat to shore with a rope in his teeth), and tried to teach me the basics of buying mail order space.
As I learned from perusing his scrapbooks, he adapted that famous ad many times to fit different sizes – fulls, halves, quarters and eighths. (Why did he do it in comic form? Because it was going to appear in comic books, the medium of choice of his readers.) And he wrote many other great ads, although none attained quite the same status:
– “The Hog of the Dance Floor”
– “How Joe’s Body Brought Him Fame Instead of Shame”
– “If you only had 10 days to live…what would you give for another 10 years of gloriously healthy life?”
Maybe this tells you something about the man: The last one was his favorite.
