I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere but I have it from a usually-reliable source that Mayo Kaan passed away in mid-July at the age of 88. Now, who (you may be asking yourself) was Mayo Kaan? That's what Jerry Siegel — co-creator of Superman — was asking when Mr. Kaan began publicizing himself as the model for the Man of Steel. Around 1970, the Boston-based bodybuilder began selling photos like the one at left which he claimed were taken in 1936. Siegel and his artist-partner Joe Shuster supposedly hired the gymnasium owner to model for the new comic character they'd just invented and they even worked with him to fashion a costume. There were a few holes in Kaan's story, not the least of which was that neither Siegel nor Shuster had ever heard of him, nor had either traveled to Massachusetts anywhere near the time the alleged modeling was done. (Another problem, noted by a Boston newspaper at the time, was that in one of the photos, Kaan was posing in front of a building which wasn't built until 1940, two years after Superman debuted.)
Kaan's claim upset Siegel and Shuster, and some of us did some phoning-of press services and reporters and pretty well debunked the whole story. A few years later, the muscleman surfaced again with ads and p.r. materials about how he'd been the model for Superman, how you could now purchase a signed photo of him, etc. Again, the forces of Truth, Justice and the American Way descended on the guy and he retreated…which is, of course, something the real Superman would never do.