Rodale was born in Manhattan on August 16, 1898, the son of a grocer, and raised on the Lower East Side. His birth name was Cohen, but presuming it would be a handicap in business, he changed it to a non-Jewish-sounding one. He worked as an accountant for New York City 1917-1920, and worked for the Internal Revenue Service 1920-21. His brother Joseph and he co-founded Rodale Manufacturing, a maker of electrical equipment, in New York in 1923. He married Anna Andrews in 1927; she died in 2000 at 95. They had three children: Robert Rodale (1930–1990), Nina Rodale (who married Robert Hale Horstman and then married Arthur Houghton), and Ruth Rodale.