The extraordinary life and times of a vegetarian strongman
I always thought veggies were a rather pasty-looking lot. How wrong I was!!
A famed strongman who once lifted 3,200 pounds at Coney Island during its heyday and was still bending quarters with his fingers at age 104 died last week after he was hit by a minivan.
Joe Rollino was struck as he crossed a major street in Brooklyn, and suffered a broken pelvis, head trauma and broken ribs. He died a few hours later at an area hospital.
During his storied life, Rollino hobnobbed with Harry Houdini, watched Jack Dempsey knock out Jess Willard and was friendly with Mario Lanza. He even had a bit part in On the Waterfront.
Rollino would have been 105 on March 19, and was the model of health, according to friends.
A vegetarian for life, he didn't drink or smoke, his friends said, and he exercised every day. He was a lifetime boxer and was part of the Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen, an organization of men who can still rip book binders at the seam.
Retired New York Police Department detective Arthur Perry, who boxed in the New York City Golden Gloves in the mid-1960s, met Rollino at his birthday party in 2008 and didn't believe Rollino was the celebrant -- he looked too good for a centenarian.
"If you would've said to me he was 80, I'd have said he looked younger."
A decorated World War II veteran, Rollino got his start as a strongman in the 1920s during the high point of the Coney Island carnival, and he billed himself as the "Strongest Man in the World."
He later made a living as a traveling boxer under the name Kid Dundee and fought in armories in cities around the country where boxing was forbidden.
Rollino said in 2008 that he was just simply born strong.
"Fighters would hit me in the jaw and I'd just look at them. You couldn't knock me out," he told writer Robert Mladinich in an interview for the boxing Web site The Sweet Science.
Mladinich said Rollino had a slew of followers who worshipped him. "He was instrumental in their positive development," he said. "He was an athletic mentor and a father figure to them."
One is ten-time Golden Glove winner Peter Spanakos, whose twin brother, Nick, roomed with Cassius Clay during the 1960 Olympics in Rome. The two met in the 1950s on the beach.
"He's a hero's hero. We should celebrate him," Spanakos said. "A true patriot, an athlete's athlete."
At Rollino's birthday party last year, Spanakos gave him a quarter, and Rollino bent it between his fingers.
"And you know what, he apologized. He said he used to be able to do it with a dime."
Weird Science Factoid: Woodpecker scalps, porpoise teeth and giraffe tails have all been used as money. But how many teeth make a tail?
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
