History
Bob Hoffman was born on a farm in Tifton, Georgia on Nov 9th 1898. His family stock was good. His father was a large strong man who liked to demonstrate the hardness of his tensed muscles. Given this it is easy to see how Bob was influenced in his formative years.
When Bob was 5 years old the family moved to Wilkinsburg near Pittsburgh where his athletic career started from a very young age. He was an exceptional athlete especially in aquatic sports - his favorite being canoeing. The First World War saw Bob as a hero. He gained 3 Croix de Guerres with two palms and a Silver Star from France. From Belgium he was awarded The Belgian Order of Leopold and from Italy the Italian War Cross and the Purple Heart.
His business started in the 1920s, at first selling oil burners, before developing into the York Barbell Company. Bob Hoffman, never a great coach or great weightlifter, was a man who influenced and guided weightlifting and bodybuilding for half a century. He died on July 18th 1985 suffering heart disease and dementia.
John Grimek was the editor from 1964 until its sale in 1986 to Twinlab. In 2001 Twinlab sold Muscular Development to Steve Blechman who then resigned from Twinlab. Muscular Development is also currently published in Romania.
Muscular Development focuses on bodybuilding and nutrition science. Among its current or past contributors are Michael Colgan, John Romano, Dan Duchaine, and Mike Mentzer. It was notable for including an ongoing comic strip, Max Rep: Mr. Astrotitan 2206 by illustrator Lyman Dally in the 90's. Max Rep was featured on the January, 1991 cover with Sandy Riddell while both he and Quadra Blu appeared together on the fully illustrated November, 1993 cover with Quadra appearing on that issue's poster. After the sale of the magazine to Blechman it changed to a more "hard-core" bodybuilding magazine and focused less on fitness.
Read more about this topic: Muscular Development
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“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)