DEDICATION:
This volume is earnestly dedicated to three Great American veterans who during their career were comrades of the characters that fill these pages. May this dedication help to keep their names green before the eyes of strength-loving America.
OSCAR MATTHES, PROFESSOR PAULINETTE, "TEDDY" MACK.
Three men whom I am happy to call my friends.
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PREFACE:
Dear Strength Lover:
When I took up my pen to write "The Key to Might and Muscle," I did so because I desired to tell you of many things that others had missed, or overlooked in their various explorations of "the magnificent man." I wanted to open before you the lessons that life taught me by placing "the key" in your hands. I feel that I have done it, yet while languishing from my labors, to my mind came another thought, as I visioned a space that checked my musings. I perceived that my duty to my circle of body lovers was not fulfilled. There was another task ahead and I meant to do something different to completely fill the aurora of the body lovers' landscape- I took up my pen and wrote this book of a song of secret aspirations, which through all the years of my life of toil has been the font that fibred my existence. For many, many years I have worshipped in silence at the alter of the god-like man, and pressed the nectar of inspiration that poured from them to my lips. I felt its warm glow of cleanliness course through the veins like wine through the blood. It felt like band music going by. A spontaneous sort of rapture that makes the eye quick, and the speech incoherent, but the muscles throb vibrantly.
I am at the age in life when we are told that labor and joy mixed with the tears of happiness mellows our judgment, brings us levity and makes our ideals earthy. Happily, the former is still true, but positively not the latter if you still have courage. For myself, I remain just the same, inasmuch as that I still see the gods that I enshrined upon their pedestals of a purity far richer than the gold dross of this world. Theirs is the vast splendor of manly beauty and physical purity, encased with indomitable strength. Each one a living, breathing ideal, though made of clay, fashioned of God.
Who dare say that my creed is wrong, while all around us we see the world enslaved in the dissipation to its creed of gold. Completely forgotten to them is the house that God built. Then what right has any to deny us the privilege to pay tribute to our idealism, which stands like Moses on the Mount - undefiled.
So, dear strength lover, because my creed is yours, I have drawn together the golden threads of a great man's life and spun the web of his story within these pages. The manner in which this book is written is entirely a new departure in strong-man journalism. I have bared my soul and purposely scorned the reins of conventional writing by giving full sway to my exaltations, and perhaps to a few lamentations, but not many, as there is so little reason for them, especially when we consider that all things happen for the best. If I have in places appeared to abandon and let the fire of my song run riot, forgive me; remember I am human and that my strength is my weakness, for I love the God-made man even as you do.
As you read through these pages, I hope you will feel the throbs of excitement that I have lived. The straining at the leash of a restless spirit as mine has been, the enveloping passion to shout and hurl sky-high your hat like a baseball fan, as you visualize our hero through the battle line to victory. I want you to see this man as I have seen him, sweaty, palpitating, sometimes bloody, but with a triumphant eye as he looked over his battlefields.
I only hope you will like this book and inspire others to possess it, so that this volume will be first of many to fire your soul and urge you to beautify your body even as my other book so instructs and guides.
Sincerely yours,
The Author, George F. Jowett
Iron Nation
