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In Mr. Hoffman's Strength & Health "the world's most perfectly developed man" was once described in an article by one Alan Carse as having confessed to a gathering of mail order strongmen at Atlantic City that the only reason he sold his courses without equipment was that after having advertised he could think of no novel item to offer. When the customers began to complain to the postal authorities he simply had to give them something, so he gave them "dynamic tension." Vastly annoyed, Mr. Atlas complained to the Federal Trade Commission. Subsequently Mr. Hoffman cheerfully admitted that there was no one by the name of Alan Carse, that he wrote the article himself, that he had never seen Mr. Atlas, that the Atlantic City meeting never occurred at all. It was, Mr. Hoffman later told a Federal Trade Commission examiner, "a fiction story, which is very commonly done in writing." But writing under his own name Mr. Hoffman later accused Mr. Atlas of being "The World's Greatest Fakir." Mr. Atlas, roared Mr. Hoffman in his Strength & Health, "does not have a 17-in. bicep as he claims. He does not have a 14½in. forearm. He does not have a 47-in. chest. He cannot pull six autos with his teeth. He cannot lift 250 Ib. above his head five or six times without straining. . . .I defy him to carry 500 Ib. five or six blocks or one block with or without straining. He cannot run ten miles in an hour and he cannot tow a boatload of hysterical women a distance of one mile against wind, wave and tide as he claimed to do."
Mr. Hoffman, who on the side is president and half-owner of York Oil Burner Co., maintains that Mr. Atlas' "dynamic tension" is "dynamic hooey." Pressed for a definition of "hooey" at FTC hearings last spring, Mr. Hoffman with no hesitation explained that he had traced the word back to the Phoenicians "about 4,000 years before the Flood, not the recent Pennsylvania flood, but the Bible Flood." Then the word "hooey" meant "hoof." "In times of famine," continued Mr. Hoffman, ''it became necessary to eat all the parts of an animal. These parts were ground up into a food similar to our bologna of today. It didn't taste well or smell good but it was filling. So when the Phoenician soldiers received this food, which was supposed to be beef, they would say, 'that's hooey.' The word traveled up through the ages, possibly journeyed from the Baltic Sea to Russia, although I have not been able to trace it. ... But anyway in 1918 we find the same word in the French language, also 'hooey.' In those days, of course, beef was scarce. Horse meat was frequently substituted, and the soldiers learned to call it first 'hooey' and then say 'that's hooey.' "
Mr. Hoffman's education was cut short by the War, but, says he "I have been a voracious reader, luckily remembering what I read. I started to study health and exercise before I was 10 and have accumulated, through study, experience and observation such a fund of knowledge and information about the subject that approximately 500 articles I have written in the last five years have not begun to exhaust the information I have. ... If I do say so myself, my body is symmetrical."