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Joe and Ben Weider
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Soon he was winning weightlifting
competitions in Montreal. When so many people started asking
him for advice on his regimen he couldn't reply to all their
letters, he began to publish, at age 17, a mimeographed newsletter
called Your Physique, that sold for a princely 15 cents.
Within months it had a circulation of 50,000. He also
began to promote bodybuilding competitions in the Montreal
area.
These were the humble beginnings of what Joe, soon joined
by younger brother Ben, fashioned over the next 60 years into
a mighty bodybuilding, fitness and health empire. In
the late 1960s, Joe Weider, looking to popularize the sport
of bodybuilding, discovered a muscular young man in Austria
and brought him back to North America, setting him up in Los
Angeles, paying for his education and teaching him everything
he knew about business and real estate. Joe and the
young man with the unpronounceable last name of Schwarzenegger
became like father and son, and Arnold became the star who
helped legitimize the sport to a much wider public.
The Weider brothers started a bodybuilding craze in Montreal
that has spread to over 163 countries and has grown into the
fifth-biggest sports organization in the world. In doing
so, they validated what had been considered by most as a crazy
cult of freaks into a sport that is currently being considered
for inclusion as an Olympic event.
Foreseeing social trends, the brothers also expanded to achieve
a dominant position in the publishing and nutrition and food
supplement industries. Their more than a dozen health
and fitness magazines have millions of subscribers.
Their publicly held nutrition company, from its Salt Lake
City plant, churns out over 2,000 vitamin and food supplements
and controls over a quarter of that market worldwide.
Today, the Weider name is famous worldwide and is synonymous
with health and fitness. Now multi-millionaires but
still very much hands-on, Joe, 76, from his base in Los Angeles,
and Ben, 75, still based in Montreal, control a health and
fitness business empire second to none.
But as The Weider Brothers: Men of Iron reveals,
there's more to the brothers than their remarkable business
success. Joe makes a point of attending important art
auctions and has assembled a museum-quality art collection
at this Los Angeles home. Ben has had, for many years,
an obsessive fascination with Napoleon. He is President
of the International Napoleonic Society, and owns the largest
collection of Napoleonic artifacts, including Napoleon's hat
and a lock of his hair, in private hands.
Original Air Date - February 22, 1999
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