Earle Liederman

Liederman was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1888. He grew up in poverty, which affected his health. As a friend wrote, “his was a sickly, skinny childhood.” And, Pollack and Todd explain, men like him often used beginnings like these as selling points, with sales pitches that “capitalized on stories of…earlier weakness and debility as proof of the transformative power of their [fitness] systems.”