ANDERSON, Paul Edward

(b. 17 October 1932 in Toccoa, Georgia; d. 15 August 1994 in Vidalia, Georgia), amateur weightlifter and professional strongman who, as an Olympic and world champion and a Christian evangelist, captured public attention and was widely regarded in the 1950s and 1960s as the world's strongest man.

Anderson was the younger child of Robert Anderson and Ethel Bennett. His father was a construction foreman who worked on dams and power plants in the southern Appalachians. His mother was a homemaker. Since the family moved frequently, Anderson attended many public schools, and he graduated in 1950. That year he enrolled at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, on a football scholarship, but resigned during the first year. At Furman, however, Anderson first realized his extraordinary strength by performing a 400-pound deep knee bend in the gym.

Upon returning home to Elizabethton, Tennessee, he was discovered by the legendary deadlifter Bob Peoples, who witnessed Anderson performing a remarkable 550-pound squat for two repetitions. Although concentrating on hip lifting (with a heavy safe) and lower-body development, he also began practicing overhead movements in order to enter competitions. In the 1952 Tennessee State meet, he broke all heavyweight records with a 275-pound press, a 225-pound snatch, and a 300-pound clean and jerk. Then he executed an astounding 660-pound squat. Hampered by injuries, Anderson did not perform in national or international competitions until 1955, when he set a world record of 436 pounds in the clean and jerk at the national championships in Cleveland. That same year in Moscow, Russia, Anderson won international acclaim by being the first man in history to press over 400 pounds. "U.S. Weightlifter Amazes Russians" was the front-page headline in the New York Times for 16 June 1955. The Russians called him chudo pirody, a wonder of nature. Anderson set a new standard of performance and became a cold-war symbol of U.S. strength and superiority.

At five feet, nine inches tall and 350 pounds, the Georgia strongman known as "The Dixie Derrick" became the 1955 world heavyweight champion at Munich, Germany, breaking two world records in the process. He was thought to be "surer of winning an Olympic title [in 1956] than any man, from any country, in any sport," predicted America's weightlifting coach Bob Hoffman. But in the days prior to the Melbourne, Australia, games, Anderson suffered from a high fever and severe loss of weight. Trailing after the press and snatch, and missing his first two clean and jerks, it was only through a superhuman effort that he made his final attempt of 413 pounds, setting an Olympic record and thereby winning on lesser bodyweight. He returned to his hill-country home as a conquering hero and quickly became an enduring strength phenomenon.

Anderson's fellow Georgians held him in high esteem. At an appearance at the 1957 North-South football classic in Atlanta, he walked around the stadium and each section stood as he passed; by the time he got all the way around, the whole stadium was standing and applauding. "It was like a slow motion wave," recalled a fourteen-year-old at the event. "He was just a Georgia country boy out of nowhere who made good, and these were his people. I had goose bumps." Another contemporary recalled Anderson as quiet and laid-back. "A cracker boy with no airs about him." Yet he never doubted his own strength. "Just load the bar and I'll pick it up," was his line. In his training methods Anderson provided strong support for exponents of the squat as the most effective builder of overall strength. He also advocated a protein-rich diet, consuming large quantities of milk and even experimenting with raw beef blood.

By no means the least remarkable aspect of his athletic prowess was his speed. Despite his great size, he was alleged to have sprinted 100 yards in 11.6 seconds and leaped over nine feet in the standing broad jump. A lesser-known fragment of lifting lore is that Anderson was rejected for service in the Korean War because no shirt could be found large enough to accommodate his twenty-two-and-one-half-inch neck. He was the first true super-heavyweight of the modern era, representing a quantum leap in size and strength, but unlike most successors, he made his reputation without the use of steroids.

Having won the highest accolades possible in amateur weightlifting, Anderson entered show business as a professional strongman in 1957, performing feats of strength where he hoisted humans and safes filled with silver dollars at a Reno, Nevada, casino and on the Ed Sullivan Show. Whether he unofficially performed a 1,200-pound squat in Nevada and a 6,270-pound backlift in his parents' backyard in Toccoa has been much debated. Although there is no irrefutable evidence for either feat, most iron-game buffs believe he either did them or could have done them. One credible witness saw him perform eight easy squats with 700 pounds. Anderson claimed to have done eight with 800 pounds. For several years he also pursued a successful professional wrestling career and then a brief, less successful fling at boxing, where his strength was less of an advantage.

On 1 September 1959 Anderson married Glenda Garland; their only child, a daughter, was born in 1966. After committing their lives to Christ in 1961, the Andersons established the Paul Anderson Youth Home in Vidalia to raise boys in a wholesome and disciplined environment. Over the next two decades, Anderson traveled an estimated 3 million miles throughout the country, conducting lifting exhibitions and giving Christian witness to raise money for his youth home, sometimes putting on as many as 500 shows a year. His record was fourteen shows in one day during a visit in 1967 to Charlottesville, Virginia.

In 1974 he was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame. At the 1992 USA Power and Strength Symposium in Orlando, Florida, Anderson was named the strongest man of the century. After a prolonged kidney illness, he died at age sixty-one and is buried on the grounds of his home for boys.

Anderson was, in many ways, an iron game innovator and icon who blazed his way through American sport and society for a quarter century. He is entitled, perhaps more than any other weightlifter for his respective era, to be called the world's strongest man.

Any study of Anderson's life and lifting career should begin with his autobiography, with Jerry B. Jenkins and James R. Adair, A Greater Strength (1990). The largest single source of information on Anderson's lifting career is Randall J. Strossen, Paul Anderson: The Mightiest Minister (1990). Also see Ed Linn, "Paul Anderson: The Georgia Strong Boy," Sport (June 1956); Bob Hise and Steve Neece, "Paul Anderson," MuscleMag International (July 1995); and Osmo Kiiha, "Paul Anderson," The Iron Master (Jan. 1992).

John D. Fair