Jack Walsh, who died June 11 at 77, claimed the title of “World’s Strongest Man” for three decades, starting in 1950. Considering his eye-popping list of exploits – holding back a DC-3, lifting 732 pounds with his middle finger, and supporting a 12-ton fire truck on his chest – he may have been right.

Although the fire truck broke several of his ribs, Walsh was frequently victorious as he attempted, willy-nilly, to overcome human limitations pertaining to weight and – as when he was breaking two by fours over his own head – impact.

Asked to describe himself by an Associated Press reporter in 1981 when his career was winding down, Walsh said, “I’m 50 years old, 5 foot 9, weigh 190 pounds, my biceps are 17 inches, and my head is stupid.” He then lay down in a gutter on 47th Street and allowed a four-ton pickup truck to park on his belly.

Walsh was a staple of television variety shows in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and also toured for many years with the Hunt Brothers Circus, where he lifted, inter alia, a baby elephant.

He was attracted to both breaking records and to stunts, some of which were outrageous. At monster movies, he would perform a live act called “The Twelve Feats of Hercules,” which included allowing dozens of children to jump off the stage and stomp on his chest, and then serving as the center point to a tug-of-war, with each side having their rope wrapped around his massive neck.

He bent coins and railroad spikes, lifted a platform of Hollywood beauties that he claimed weighed 5,013 pounds, and carried a full-grown horse up a ladder. But he lost a tug of war with a tugboat in Jersey City in 1966. “That damn tug is too strong,” he told the Associated Press. “It’s 50 times more powerful than the airliner.”

He had even poorer results in a match against a bull, hyped as “Barehanded to the Death” in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1961. “Never before anywhere … any time … has a man attempted to kill a savage fighting bull bare-handed to the death!” ran the overheated advertising copy. The bull was unharmed after Walsh had a look at it and skipped town. “Unless that animal was awful sick, it was going to kill me,” Walsh told Steve Kramer, who as a youth was a fan of Walsh in his native Trenton, N.J., and who has assembled an oral history of Walsh’s exploits.

From his early adolescence in Trenton, when he gloried in tales of a turn-of-the-century strongman and bodybuilder, Eugen Sandow, Walsh was drawn to heroic feats of strength. It ran in the family, where lore had it that his grandfather was known to pick up horses and once went three rounds with light heavyweight Robert “Ruby” Fitzsimmons. Walsh’s father equipped him with weights and his own gym. By age 13,Walsh claimed to have achieved a 1,000-pound back lift. He toughened his neck by doing half-hour-long headstands, and took to bashing holes in the walls of his local YMCA with his skull.

At 18, he took up professional wrestling, and met another Trentonian who worked as a ring announcer, Ernie Kovacs. Walsh often appeared on the Philadelphia radio show, “Coffee With Kovacs,” where the host would banter with Walsh about having “the longest arms in town” after his latest body stretching feat. As part of the burgeoning Philadelphia entertainment world of the late 1940s, Walsh also worked with Dick Clark and Ed McMahon.

In the early 1950s, Walsh said he received an honorable discharge from the Army after sustaining a subdural hematoma – a blood clot above his brain caused by breaking too many things over his head in a bar. He began touring widely, both with the circus, and also with sideshows at state fairs and in bars. He said he once shared the bill with Billie Holiday. Another time, he had a 10-week booking at the Black Cat, a Philadelphia burlesque club, opposite the stripper Blaze Starr, as Samson and Delilah. In his one appearance on Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town,” his elephant spoiled everything by relieving itself on stage.

Walsh was the kind of showman with 1 million tales, some of them true. Thus it was impossible to check the veracity of his claim to have arm-wrestled Hemingway in Cuba, but it seems reasonably certain that he was, in fact, in Havana headlining his own show when the revolution came. He lost everything, according to Mr. Kramer’s oral history, and was forced to sell his elephant.

Back in America, Walsh continued to have success with stunts like pulling trains uphill, and performed whenever he could. He became a regular on “The Joe Franklin Show,” where he made “more than 220 appearances,” Mr. Franklin said, typically lifting two pretty girls above his head as they sat in a chair. “He married everybody he met,” Mr. Franklin said, and this was not far from the truth. He claimed seven marriages and eight children in a 2004 interview with the Trenton Times.

As his career wound down somewhat after the mid-1970s, he began hanging out at Trenton gyms, where he inspired a new generation of strongmen, including John Wooten, who broke some of Walsh’s records.

In recent years, Walsh lived in the New Orleans area and continued to perform occasionally, his body surprisingly intact for all the abuse he subjected it to. He could still lift far more than most ordinary mortals. His patter remained charming, and he never swore. Oddly, for a man who briefly replaced actor George Reeves as Superman, he hated to fly.

His health broke after he was robbed and assaulted in 2004, and he spent his last years in a nursing home in Metairie, La.

Jack Walsh
Born in 1929 in Trenton, N.J.; died June 11 of internal bleeding in Metairie, La.; survivors could not be determined.