To the world he was known as Samson the Strongman from Greece. In his prime, Leon Samson could pull buses with his teeth and carry out other amazing feats of strength, and chewed his way through metal and glass before gobsmacked audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. In the world before television really took hold, he was a superstar of the showground and variety show circuit.
Today, Samson is in his 80’s. He lives alone in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast. His unit is full of images of his life in show business. Now he lives a more quiet life that revolves around his vegetable garden and fishing on the river. He sees his daughter, and Soula Tsimpikas, a social worker of the Greek Community of St George in Brisbane, also keeps in contact with him.
Samson found fame in Australia as a variety show performer and a producer in his own right. He rubbed shoulders with the likes of Slim Dusty, Chief Little Wolf and touring review impresarios like Frank Foster. He continued to follow his star when he returned to Greece in 1971 and his act would take him to the carnivals of Europe, including the greatest of them all, the Oktoberfest in Munich, where he performed many times.
Born Leonithas Postoglithis near Veroia, west of Thessaloniki in 1932, he took the name of Leon Samson when he became an Australian citizen in 1969. Samson was the name conferred on him by the Navajo strongman and wrestler Chief Little Wolf who had carved a place in Australian hearts after the young Leon came to ask him for work in 1956. Up to that point he had been getting by as Mr Atlas, the Strong Man from Greece.
“Chief Little Wolf asked me what job did I want and I said ‘strongman’, so he said ‘from now on you are Young Samson from Greece’. At that time, the movie Samson and Delilah, with Victor Mature, was very popular and that is how the name stuck,” said Samson. The Chief put him in his shows and his fame grew.
As a boy Samson had always been quick and athletic and had made a name for himself by winning all the races held in his district.
“It all started for me when I was 13 years old. Every Easter there were sports like running and wrestling and I took on everyone. I was known for being lively,” he said.
“I met a distant relation from Thrama who was a strongman. He could bend metals and springs and I did that too. I bent iron with my teeth and broke nails too. As you go, you learn the work and your body develops and you get stronger.”
Samson said his family was not poor, they had fields in the village. He decided to leave for Australia in 1953 out of a sense of adventure, not economic necessity.
On landing in Melbourne he went to work in Bonegilla and Shepparton before moving to Melbourne where he worked in the General Motors factory.
“I worked on the railway line at Bacchus Marsh. During the lunch break, I would put on little shows where I would lie down flat on the ground and people would break rocks on my chest and stomach,” he said.
In 1955 he went to Brisbane. He joined the YMCA where they taught wrestling and weightlifting. He was also drawn to judo, and became so good at it that he considered trying for the Olympics that were to be held the following year in Melbourne. But by that time he had started performing at local shows as Mr Atlas, and was considered a professional who thus could not take part in the Olympics.
It was soon after that he moved to Melbourne and met Chief Little Wolf, and he took to the life of the showman.
“He had the means to put me into a few show numbers, and we would put on something different each time so that the audiences did not always see the same thing.”
Television was just starting at the time, and while it was to eventually replace the sideshow as the chief source of entertainment for Australians, it also helped to promote rising stars like the young Samson.
“Chief Little Wolf and I once did a ten-minute interview for a children’s show on Channel 7. The only payment was a large ice cream cake, but what interested me was getting the name known to Australia,” said Leon.
Soon he was working with other producers and artists. One of these was showman/producer Frank Foster, with whom he was to work as a partner before he branched out on his own. In the course of his career he covered most of Australia, following the showground calendar.
It was while working with Foster that he became more than a strongman who could pull vehicles with his teeth; he set about eating them before the audience.
“Every day I would think about how I could improve my act so that people did not get bored. It was in 1958, in Shepparton, when Frankie Foster told me that the star of the show, Slim Dusty, had laryngitis and could not sing. I told him not to worry and that I had a new act in which I would eat razors.”
“He thought I was crazy, but I said it would be fine. The next day, I started eating razors before the audience. This got through to the Melbourne papers and they went crazy with the story. I ate them, I swallowed them and I have the X-rays to prove it,” said Leon.
He soon moved beyond razors to eating metal sheets and glass, and to worldwide fame. At the height of his fame his body could process up to half a kilogram of metal a day.
“I did this act for 30 years without a problem, the teeth job. They broke the bits into small pieces and then you swallowed them with a glass of water. The tongue rolled the stuff around and you had to be careful not to cut your tongue.
“I learnt this skill myself. I took a decision, figured out how to do it and at what distance I should be from the audience to get the maximum effect. I thought it through and if it seemed okay, I went ahead with it. In and out, that’s it. You have to believe in yourself, otherwise you can do nothing,” he said.
Frank Foster was to say of Samson in a 1998 interview: “He was valuable because he was genuine. He wasn’t like a freak and he wasn’t an illusion. He had the best set of teeth you could imagine.”
Foster described how Samson was challenged by journalists in New Zealand to eat the fittings in a motel: “Everyone was gathered around and Samson was eating up things. But then the bloke (motel owner) comes in and says stop or I’ll have nothing left. They took Samson in and they X-rayed him and all of it was in his stomach. In the publicity game, that was really great for us.”
Businessman John Katapopthis even bet him $30,000 that he could not eat up a car over four years. Samson said Katapothis eventually backed out of the bet, but it still was wonderful publicity for him.
Samson was not just happy to be the star attraction, but became a show producer in his own right.
“I started to work alone on a one man show as Samson from Greece. It had to be a 15-minute act but people did not want to see just the one thing. When I went out alone, I built up a name on the theatre circuit. I had others with me, like acrobats, singers and other performers. I had to make up a one-and-a-half-hour show program and the audiences were growing because I built up a good name for my shows.”
When he got tired of life on the road, he would start up a business. He found that his fame helped the business to prosper. Over time he dabbled in owning and running eateries.
In 1971, Leon left Australia for Greece to be help his father on the family farm. But his fame had followed him to Greece and he successfully re-launched his show career at Thessaloniki Expo as Samson the Strong Man from Australia. He remained in Europe until he retired from show business in 1994 when he was 62. In Germany he was a hit in the biggest show in the world, the Oktoberfest, which draws over six million people.
As he had done in Australia, Samson also started parallel businesses as a dealer in second hand furniture and cars to Eastern Europe, as well as running fast food and sweet shops.
He retired to his village in Greece where he grew peaches and tried commercial fish hatching and growing mushrooms.
“I tried different things and I learnt a lot from them, I always like to learn and do,” said Samson.
He returned to Australia in 2010, trying Sydney first before moving on to Brisbane and then with help from his daughter Samson has made a home in Maroochydore.
“If there are mistakes, you pay for them. If there are not mistakes, you still pay for them,” says Samson. “I did this interview to make the name of Samson last a little longer and that it is not completely forgotten. Many have seen me four or five times and have taken their children to see me. All the older Greeks on the Sunshine Coast still remember me,” says the indomitable Samson.