July 18, 2012
Bodybuilder, model Fred Massaro dies at 89
Fred Massaro, Mr. New York City in 1949 -- a year in which he was also named the most symmetrical and most muscular man in the five boroughs -- died Saturday at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip. He was 89 and lived in Deer Park.
The cause was kidney failure, his family said.
Massaro was a strongman, bodybuilder, physical trainer, longshoreman, sanitation worker and nurse who appeared frequently as cover model and product endorser in magazines such as Modern Physique and Muscle Builder.
Often he wore leopard-print briefs, a signature element of style that some found shocking.
"You too, can have a powerful dynamic physique," he advised readers in an ad for Dan Lurie Health Equipment.
An article in the Brooklyn Graphic in 1960 praised the "power he packs in his highly developed muscles which makes him a dynamo in human form" and described him as "built as sturdily as the Rock of Gibraltar."
Massaro stood 5-foot-6, and another newspaper account, saved in a scrapbook he kept in the family's home, attributed his lifelong interest in strength training to the experience of being bullied as a child on Brooklyn's Tillary Street.
Maria Massaro, his wife, scoffed at this in an interview Wednesday. "Anybody who bullied him, he would have knocked out," she said. Besides, he trained for "his own health and happiness," she said, a practice he continued until the last days of his life, working out in a simple gym at home.
As a young man, she said, he built himself into "a bull." A 1949 article in the New York Journal-American confirms this assessment, describing a demonstration of strength that had Massaro lifting 225 pounds with his teeth, lifting 300 pounds above his head with his hands, then employing an assistant with a sledgehammer to smash a 200-pound stone on Massaro's stomach.
Later in life, when Massaro became an expert in martial arts, his family said, he added barehanded brick-smashing to his repertoire.
"I used to cringe," Maria Massaro said of these demonstrations. "I went a couple times and would not go anymore. I got too nervous."
The two met on the beach at Coney Island in the late 1940s, she said. Massaro worked out and trained others at a nearby health club, Raven Hall. She was walking on the sand with a friend when she saw him.
He was surrounded by a small entourage of both sexes, she recalled. She also recalled noticing his muscles.
"I gotta admit, it was nice," his wife of 61 years said.
Besides his wife, Massaro is survived by daughters Cathy Laudicina, of Lincolnton, N.C., and Donna Beer, of Mastic; son Pat Massaro, of Palm Bay, Fla.; 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild
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