After some 60 years, I have returned to pushing barbells into the air.

As a young boy, I wanted to be like Angelo Siciliano. Siciliano was a weightlifter, a carnival strongman. Taking the name of “Charles Atlas,” he designed a weightlifting course and advertised it in the comic books of the 1940s and 1950s.

I devoured those comic books with the action heroes, e.g., Superman and Batman, and the ones with the Western heroes, e.g., Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger.

In every comic book, it seemed, there loomed Atlas, a chiseled mountain of a man who told his “story.” There were several versions. With an assist from Wikipedia, the one that sticks in my mind is a six-panel comic strip featuring stick figures.

A “97-pound weakling” is at the beach with his girlfriend. A bully kicks sand into the weakling’s face and strides off with the girlfriend. The humiliated weakling buys Atlas’s course, does “Dynamic Tension” exercises pitting one muscle against another. Now bulging with muscles, he returns to the beach, beats up the bully, and strides into the sunset with the girlfriend clinging admiringly to his rippling bicep.

For all I know, Charles Atlas’s course made muscular men out of millions of puny boys in the 1940s and 1950s.

I know of one exception: Me.

I stayed puny all through high school. I remember getting the free Atlas book, which was mostly more advertisement. I remember using my paper route money to buy the “Dynamic Tension” course, whatever that was.

I do not remember doing the exercises. I probably did, to some extent, but I could still count my ribs through my skin as a high school junior. So either the course was a phony, or I was not dedicated. I would bet on the latter.

I exited high school weighing a whopping 127 pounds. As the years passed, I seemed to gain 10 pounds with each decade: 140 pounds at 30, 150 pounds at 40, 160 pounds at 50, 170 pounds at 60, 180 pounds at 70 … Whoa!

For the past 30 years, the only way I kept the same waist size in my jeans was to buckle my belt way down below my belly button. I needed to fasten the buckle in front of a mirror because I couldn’t see the strap and metal by looking down.

My doctor objected. My wife objected. Friends who are funeral directors began to look at me in the same speculative way as I studied the growth of my 401K retirement plan.

Well, maybe not, really. But I felt as though they were measuring me.

We got dogs. I walked with the dogs, a mile or more each day. That helped. The belt buckle moved up just a bit.

But that wasn’t enough.

So, feeling silly, I went back to the gym, first at the YMCA in DuBois with my son Greg, most recently at a fitness center in Brookville.

Charles Atlas’s promise, “Give me 15 minutes a day, and I’ll give you a new body!” was just a dim echo.

I am not interested in a new body. I just want to keep the one I have, and prevent it from dissolving into a blob of gelatin.

So I go to the gym. At my age, three times a week is enough. I do bench presses, pushups, dumbbell curls, back stretches, belly crunches, that sort of thing. I don’t do much in the gym that is targeted to my legs; the walking and, more recently, bicycle riding seem to keep them functional.

I even do chin-ups, plural.

That started out pathetically. I saw a young man snapping off a dozen rapid chin-ups. “I used to be able to do that!” I recalled.

So I went to the Smith Machine, which has brackets for placing a bar at various heights. I pushed the bar up, lifted my legs, and hung there.

I grunted. I flexed.

I still hung there.

“I used to do a dozen! I cannot even do one!” I moaned.

These days, about a year later, I can do four, maybe five on a good day.

Those workouts really are work, even though we try to make them be fun. But I feel better. I have no idea whether my weightlifting has kept me from dying. But the lifting, the walking, and my wife’s oh-so-persistent feeding me healthy foods have now made it possible for me to buckle my belt without the assistance of a mirror.

Besides, I have made new friends. Some are fellow geezers. Others are young guys and gals energetically seeking Charles Atlas’s “new body.”

We groan. We gripe. We lift, we crunch, we curl.

We keep the Grim Reaper at bay for another day.

New body? Nope. But the old one seems to be hanging on.

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.