Paul Edward Anderson

Paul Edward Anderson (October 17, 1932 - August 15, 1994) was a weightlifter, strongman, and powerlifter.

Biography

Anderson was born in Toccoa, Georgia, United States of America.

As a teenager, Anderson began his early weight training on his own within his family's backyard at Toccoa, Georgia in order to increase his size and strength so that he would be able to play on the Toccoa High School football team, where Anderson earned a position as first-team blocking back.

Anderson later attended Furman University for one year on a football scholarship, before moving to Elizabethton, Tennessee with his parents and it was there in Elizabethton where Anderson first met weightlifter Bob Peoples, who would greatly influence Anderson in squat training and introduce Anderson around weightlifting circles.

In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, Anderson, as winner of the USA National Amateur Athletic Union Weightlifting Championship, traveled to the Soviet Union, where weightlifting was a popular sport, for an international weightlifting competition. In a newsreel of the event shown in the United States the narrator, Bud Palmer, commented as follows: "Then, up to the bar stepped a great ball of a man, Paul Anderson." And paraphrasing Palmer "The Russians snickered as Anderson gripped the...
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