Joseph L. Greenstein

From The Martial Arts Encyclopedia

Background/History

Joseph L. Greenstein (1893-1977) , who used the stage-name "The Mighty Atom", was a professional strongman, scholar, natural health advocate and American martial arts pioneer.

Greenstein was born in Suvalk, Poland. At the age of 14, a team of doctors predicted that he would die from tuberculosis. At about the same time he met a Russian circus wrestler and strongman called "Champion Volanko" who offered to help the young Greenstein recover his health and improve his strength. Greenstein traveled with Volanko and the Issakoff Brothers' Circus for a period of about one and a half years, practicing calisthenic, breathing and weight-lifting exercises. During this period the circus visited India and Greenstein also learned the basics of yoga and Kushti, an Indian wrestling style.

After his training, he returned to Poland and got married. He attempted to support himself and his wife through work as a professional wrestler, but met with mixed success. In April of the year 1910 he was reported to have killed a Russian soldier who was engaged in a pogrom (anti-Semitic riot) in Suvalk.

In June of 1911 Greenstein arrived in Galveston, Texas and began work as a peddler, also earning some money as a professional wrestler under the name "Kid" Greenstein. Gaining a job as a deckhand on a tramp steamer in 1912, Greenstein traveled to Yokohama, Japan, where he received some training in jujitsu from a sensei named Yamashita.

Returning to the USA, where he was joined by his wife, Greenstein continued to pick up odd jobs and to work as a professional wrestler. Despite being only 5'4" and weighing 140 pounds, Greenstein challenged some of the leading wrestlers of the day, including George Bothner, the American lightweight champion.

By 1915 Greenstein, his wife and young family had relocated to New York City and Greenstein had started occasional work as a strongman, exhibiting various feats of strength at carnivals and circus sideshows while continuing regular work in a service station. After ten years he hit the big-time, receiving engagements to appear as a strongman on the Broadway circuit and then in vaudeville shows throughout the USA.

Greenstein's strength performance was unusual because he specialized in feats such as tearing horseshoes in half, driving nails through wooden planks with his bare hands and biting through steel spikes, rather than the more orthodox weight-lifting exhibitions. He was featured in "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" several times, for stunts such as holding back a bi-plane attached to his hair.

However, by the early 1930s, Vaudeville was fading due to the Great Depression and competition from the movie industry. Greenstein's performance engagements tapered off and he began work as a "pitchman", selling various natural remedies (many of which he made himself) and exercise devices. He and his family began to travel again, basing out of New York's Coney Island but also following the rural fair circuit throughout the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest.

With the rise in anti-Semitic sentiment and the onslaught of the Second World War, the outspoken and proudly Jewish Greenstein increasingly found himself targetted by groups such as the American Nazi Party, and was reported to have had a number of street-fights and brawls with "Brownshirts" (Nazis). Some of these fights were widely reported in newspapers of the day.

During WW2 Greenstein joined the drive to help recruit men for New York City's police force, which was depleted by the War. He performed numerous martial arts and self defense exhibitions throughout the city and was commended by the mayor and other officials.

Greenstein continued to travel and work as as a pitchman throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, occasionally performing strongman feats at events such as martial arts tournaments, once, notably, bending a nine-foot iron bar across his forehead and snapping a chain wound three times around his chest at an event held in Madison Square Garden. This was particularly notable because he was 79 years old at the time. On his 80th birthday, Greenstein was awarded an honorary sixth-dan black belt in Kempo Karate, recognizing his status as the oldest living American practitioner of Japanese martial arts.

Joseph L. Greenstein, The Mighty Atom, died on October 8, 1977.