"The highlight of Joe Shuster's visits to New
York, the moment he really knew he'd arrived, was
Superman Day at the second summer of the World's
Fair, in 1940. Duke Ducovny had arranged for
Macy's to sponsor a big show featuring a parade
and celebrity appearances—including one by
Charles Atlas
himself.
"When Joe was a little
boy, those bodybuilders in tights and trunks in
the MacFadden magazines, Atlas chief among them,
had given him his first glimpse of the
superheroic. In his teens Atlas's ads had
first shown him a strongman as an enemy of
bullies, and the very first published
Superman story had included his visual joke
on those ads. Superman was a fantasy of
Charles Atlas in more ways than one, and here was
the World's Most Perfectly Developed Man himself,
offering Joe his hand to shake."
An excerpt from Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones
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