America Shapes Up
By J.D. Reed
COVER STORY
One, two, ugh, groan, splash: get lean, get taut, think gorgeous
That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing off of the old skin, towards a new youth.
--D.H. Lawrence
At 7:15 a.m. Audley White, 52, watches the Today show, an American morning ritual. But with a difference: the youthful-looking information systems manager views the program on a convenient monitor while he pounds out the miles on a motorized treadmill at the Xerox Corporate Fitness Center in Stamford, Conn. On his daily jog, White is surrounded by a $61,000 mechanical sculpture garden of chrome, leather and cable: stationary bicycles, cross-country skiing simulators, rowing machines, Nautilus weight stations and racks of dumbbells positioned around the spacious, brown-carpeted gym. Down a hallway hung with modern paintings are whirlpool baths and a sunning room studded with ultraviolet and infra-red lamps. Near by: offices for a physician and a full-time exercise physiologist.
Not long into his daily workout, White has soaked through his T shirt, emblazoned XHMP--Xerox Health Management Program. His face is mottled with exertion, his eyes narrowed to the 1,000-yard stare of a man at the limit of endurance. Beta endorphins, chemicals released by the body during sustained strenuous exercise, calm his nerves, suppress his appetite and relieve his pain. Increased blood circulation as a result of the exercise may improve White's heart muscle. Such are the small miracles of activity: insurance factors in a stressful and sedentary life.
Though the $700,000 Xerox program is not compulsory for executives, participation is a route to faster promotion through the ranks. At the invisible end of the treadmill a vice presidency may be waiting. In the last mile of his workout, as his $40 running shoes echo on the treadmill, White resembles a movie hero: the young man who wrestles with the hand of a huge clock. If it strikes 12, the heroine will be decapitated or the dynamite will explode. Audley White has extracted a similar victory over the inevitable: time.
As recently as 20 years ago for most people, the body was hardly more than an interesting mass somewhere down there below the head. It could be barricaded in gray flannel and wantonly pleased in steak houses and French restaurants. If the body belonged to Clint Eastwood or Sophia Loren, it was interesting. Otherwise, except in bed, it was ignored by the public in favor of more important pursuits like winning the space race or building the New Society. Of course, Muscle Man Charles Atlas beckoned to boys from ads in comic books (Don't let bullies kick sand in your face, weakling) and a few grownups even lifted weights at Vic Tanny's. By the early '70s, however, a sweeping change was literally afoot. At a cocktail party, the old-fashioned kind with fat-laced canapes and spirituous liquors, some gaunt, counterculture Ph.D. brandished his glass of club soda and announced: "The body is the temple of the soul!"
It did not matter that the notion was as old as ancient Greece, as recent as the 1910 Boy Scouts Official Handbook; Americans make a specialty of reinventing the wheel every decade or so. The philosophy seized folks overnight, and the sport of mass running had begun. Suburbanites jogged like herds of oestrous gazelles down side streets. Marriages were threatened when one spouse trained for a marathon and never arrived home for an evening meal. Dinner itself became a lean affair of crudites and boiled fish. Executives could be seen pumping iron like buttoned-down Schwarzeneggers. For a while it seemed to be a fad, one more instantaneous American fixation like the twist or the Hula-Hoop. The U.S., after all, had become the country of spectator sports, hadn't it? Walking was all but unAmerican. Long-distance running was for Europeans. "It'll never last," said the wise guys over the second martini at the bar.
Surprise, fellas. The fitness boom has grown for a decade, and improving the body has become an enduring, and perhaps historically significant, national obsession. These days, even the wise guys order a second Perrier. On any given day in the Republic this year, a record 70 million Americans--almost half the adult population--will practice some form of corporeal self-betterment. The figure is a startling one: in 1960 only 24% worked out. Paring it, preening it, pumping it up and pounding it down, the body national is being rejuvenated with a relentless impatience, slimmed with a fanatic dedication. On jogging tracks, in diet clinics and health restaurants and on the operating tables of plastic surgeons, a wholesale attempt to transform the body is avidly purchased with VISA and MasterCard.
The shopping spree is a wild one.
The market for all kinds of sport shoes alone has reached $1 billion, although perhaps a third of those are worn for fashion rather than fitness, in itself a commentary on contemporary values. While a fraction of these expenditures is not fitness related, Americans also spent $5 billion on health foods and vitamins; roughly $50 million for diet and exercise books; $1 billion on cosmetic surgery; another $6 billion for diet drinks and $240 million for barbells and aerobic dance programs. Health clubs and corporate fitness centers add another $5 billion, sporting togs and gear $8 billion, gadgetry--from water filters and orthopedic shoe inserts ($150 a pair) to stop watches--$1 billion more. Bicycling has rolled to $1 billion in annual sales. Equipment for enthusiasts ranges from a Raleigh Rapide ($165) to a $2,000 Gios Torino, plus plastic helmets and even eyeglasses with rear-view mirrors. The latest boom: distance swimming, which already accounts for another $1 billion in swimming pools, goggles, fins, etc. Even walking has become a fitness fad. Major sport shoe companies such as Nike and Etonic will be pacing the market with new models ranging from $55 to $70. The almost new field of sports medicine is now a legitimate $2 billion specialty. The total bill by year's end: more than $30 billion. The surest indicator of the current dominance of fitness was the flood of applicants for the twelfth New York City Marathon last Sunday. New York Road Runner's Club President Fred Lebow spent $1,000 out of his own pocket a decade ago, when 233 marathoners entered the event. This year 25,000 runners applied for 16,000 places. Replete with controversy over mismanagement and under-the-table payments to top amateurs, the race garnered the ultimate American status symbol of sport: a national television contract on which ABC expects to spend $750,000. Says one of the original running gurus and fitness authors, Dr. George Sheehan: "Any time we have the money and the time to do things, we get back to the body."
Much more than mere leisure must be fueling this run for the money, however. Today a record 30 million confirmed runners are lapping about the U.S. Thirteen million biceps builders are working out in the 5,000 health clubs built in the U.S.; 20 million overweight Americans--and 20 million more who believe they are--will join in the battle of the bulge by dieting this year; and an alltime high of 440,000 patients will elect cosmetic surgery to freshen their features and tuck in their tummies. As if to give the surprisingly durable trend an official fillip, President and Mrs. Reagan have joined the race. A Universal-type weight-lifting machine has just been installed in a spare room of the White House family quarters for almost daily workouts.
Between the calorie counting and aerobic breathing, the yoga and the yogurt, the rolfing and the rope jumping, exercised Americans will admire their improved chassis in 300 million sq. ft. of new mirrors. The reflections of these new Adams and Eves glowing radiantly through the steam rising from the hot tubs are provocative indeed. They portend even more than they posture.
While Americans may seem younger, feel healthier and slimmer, the passion for muscularity reverberates in the country's collective unconscious. More than waistlines may be getting leaner. In fact, the glorification of the body, the absorption with physical beauty, the passion for youthfulness and health that are now part of everyday American life at home and on the job, are transforming the nation's character, like it or not.
A top executive of an investment brokerage firm spoke before a New York Society of Security Analysts group. The man was only 54 and intended to work for another decade. But during the question-and-answer period, he was challenged: When did he plan to step down? Shaken, he made an appointment with a plastic surgeon for a face-lifting the next day. Such tales are often heard these days; it is as if the latest role model for success has become Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. Fully 16% of patients tightening up their features with surgery are men, who once confined their transformations to hair transplants (still an $11 million business). The number of men seeking cosmetic surgery, as opposed to plastic surgery performed on burn and accident victims, is expected to triple within five years, and the number of women may double.
In a culture hipped on youth, face-lifting is becoming an economic survival tool. Says Robert Stevenson, 58, a New York corporate interior designer who does not want to be forced into retirement: "If you're a dynamo but have gray hair, you won't get the job." Uplift by scalpel is not to white-collar occupations, either. A surgeon says, "It is Mr. and Mrs. America who shop at K mart are getting face-liftings." New York cosmetic surgeons report a new class of patients -- policemen, sanitation workers and truckers.
That so many Americans should be transforming their features, and futures, to compete for jobs and mates is a dramatic development after postwar rich living and the automobile had all but taken the country's breath (and legs) away. But America always had a weakness for do-it-yourself salvation and made its playtime purposeful. On the prairie, leisure hours consisted of quilting bees and barn raisings. In New England, a relaxed weekend in the late 1800s was a practice muster of local fire companies. The country has always blended its fun with self-improvement and dreaming up gimmicks large and small to help. In young democracies like the U.S., Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "each generation is a new people." The cult of youthfulness and the idea of a fresh start have forged the national character.
Nowhere have fresh starts and new attempts to achieve fitness been more evident than in the nation's supermarket basket and at the dinner table. Presbyterian Minister Sylvester Graham started the bulk wagon rolling in the 19th century with his famous cracker. Later Post and Kellogg began cleaning digestive systems with flakes of bran and corn in their Battlecreek, Mich., sanatoriums. With cheerful innocence, Americans have periodically embarked on reordering themselves, as well as the country and the world. The current obsession with the body can partly be seen as a diminished expression of the old or of unquenchable American optimism. "Here's for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world." So Ralph Waldo Emerson toasted the American spirit. But the "old" Adam, that rugged and predatory individualist, in his current incarnation is caught in a dilemma: how to survive an increasingly imperfect, not to say hostile, environment.
Says Charles Althafer, 49, of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta: "Most folks are turned off by the disease of the month, by frightening reports on PCB and Love Canal. It makes them want to go home and suck their thumbs." Disaster seems to threaten through disease or radiation or some vague Apocalypse Now that everyone fears but cannot give a face to. Some Americans still prepare for anarchy by retreating to the hills with automatic weapons, radiation detectors and the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans for Physical Fitness; a few have taken to storing freeze-dried survival foods in their garages for a well-fed Armageddon.
People have become deeply suspicious of the food they eat. Convenience foods and the microwave ovens in which to prepare them have turned the supermarket into an additive minefield: saturated fat, nitrites, saccharin, sodium and caffeine. Shoppers pause, read package labels, searching for poisons real or suspected. Amid the latest warnings about salt, sugar, too much protein and assorted baneful additives, one current bestseller, Jane Brody's Nutrition Book, sensibly advocates a return to a down-home simplicity: meat, fish and milk in moderation, plenty of green and yellow vegetables, grain and some kind of fruit. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, what's the most carcinogen-free of all?" Thousands of people have even abandoned markets, selecting organically grown guavas and "pure" rice in the nation's 8,000 health-food outlets.
One need not be a granola and beansprout faddist now to question processed foods. In the '60s, when Adelle Davis (Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit) preached against the dangers of good old American "enriched" white flour, she seemed no more than another village crank. To consumers obsessed with the astounding levels of sodium in processed foods, claims Author Brody, the knowledge that two slices of Pepperidge Farm white bread contain more sodium than a 1-oz. bag of Lay's potato chips is a mainstream American fact of life. Label reading is not the passion of a literary or political elite.
Natural foods are also popular because they reputedly make folks look better. In the fitness game, appearances are deceivingly important. Looking good, whether for love or money, is a national aim. "We're just madly brushing our teeth, shampooing, and holding our stomachs when we make love," complains California Psychologist Michael Evans. "We've made the ideal physical type one that is really difficult to achieve."
That may be so, but few Americans are willing to admit it, especially the huddled and teeming masses trying to reduce. "Thighs, thighs, go away! Give them all to Doris Day!" Puffing, giggling matrons in lumpy leotards attempt toe touches while being taped in a Hollywood studio. The electric-haired, slender cheerleader who puts the women through their paces (and chants) for an installment of his syndicated talk show is Richard Simmons, 33, the leading media star of fitness.
Simmons' weekday show is a chattery potpourri of exercise ("Tuck in those tushies, girls!"), diet tips ("Peanuts will make you full!") and cheery behavior-mod patter. His Never-Say-Diet Book is No. 1 on the New York Times's bestseller list, where it has been lodged for 38 weeks. At 5 ft. 7 in., 138 Ibs., Simmons seems a model of svelte fitness, but he knows whereof he sweats. As a boy in New Orleans, he sampled so many crepes suzette at the family's restaurant that by his 18th birthday he weighed 268 Ibs. Then he found a note under his windshield wiper: "Fat people die young. Please don't die." Simmons lost 112 Ibs. in 80 days. His fasting was so extreme that his hair fell out, and he was eventually hospitalized.
Simmons represents a new breed of health instructor. Though his delivery is breezy, he exudes the compelling energy of a passionate convert. He has also grasped a central fact about new-wave fitness. America likes to think of itself as a young nation, yet its average age is already 30. Anxiety over that point, Simmons notes, is not confined to leisured matrons. The folks on food stamps and blue-collar men and women live with an unspoken fear of Wrinkle City. Says he: "People are scared of getting old. They believe they won't have a sex life, they believe they won't work, they believe they won't get any respect, they believe they'll be hard of hearing, and their teeth will fall out, and nobody will want them." The aging are into fitness all right, but anyone who wants to feel really old has only to confront another statistic. The huge baby-boom generation, which statistically has already helped bulge out of shape various U.S. institutions, including schools and colleges, is now age 27 to 35. Most of the 76 million boomers are finished with the drug culture and alternative therapies. Instead, many of them have seized on fitness--ergo, older Americans jog in an attempt not to be pushed aside by an army of fresh, unlined faces running in their wake. For the '70s generation, leisure consisted of getting its head together. The reading list: Creative Divorce; Your Erroneous Zones; The Baby Trap; Looking Out for No. One; How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. That globulous body of quasi knowledge could only be critiqued by another title: The Culture of Narcissism. In his savage 1978 indictment of changing attitudes, Social Historian Christopher Lasch wrote: "Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, [they] seek neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence, but peace of mind." The boomers have acquired pinstripes and purchased their entry into the American mainstream. But their search for laid-back pleasure does help define the present lust for fitness.
Michael O'Shea, 34, owner of the Sports Training Institute in New York City, speaks for his generation: "Most of the people my age have been through the drug scene, Viet Nam, protesting and all that. Now instead of being a workaholic to the point where you have to have a house and car, we want something to equate how we feel about ourselves. If you spend more time on something like exercise, you may like yourself a little better."
The gigantic East Bank Club in Chicago is a two-block, five-story country club of glass and steel. It is nicknamed the Biggest Meat Market by its 5,000 youthful and mostly single, upper-middle-management members, who pay an initial $900 to join. The E.B.C. is more than a Dating Game in sweatsuits, however. It is a latterday, secular cathedral built to the glory of the body. The $20 million club contains ten tennis courts, a complete indoor golf facility, eight handball-racquetball courts, three squash courts, a basketball court, saunas, whirlpools, massage rooms, sleeping rooms, steam rooms, sunrooms, library, nursery, card room, an outdoor restaurant and a crowded, quarter-mile banked and cushioned indoor jogging track. As even the architecture asserts, life is nothing more--or less--than the body beautiful.
Preoccupation with the flesh and its beauty has been geometrically accelerated by television. The original moment of truth, for millions of viewers, came in the field of politics, when youthful, imperially slim Jack Kennedy apparently clinched the presidency with the first closeup in his televised debate with the blue-jowled Richard Nixon.
Later the networks brought the minicam to the locker room. Athletes with enviable physiques were suddenly "up close and personal." They proved neither as intimidating nor as unmatchable as they seemed from a distance. If petulant Jimmy Connors could do it, playing tennis had possibilities for Everyman. In 1972 television struck another blow for fitness when Frank Shorter, the first American to win the Olympic marathon in recent times, lunged across the finish line in Munich's Olympic Stadium and into 13,540,000 American households. The images wavering on the color tube informed viewers that there were better things to do with the body than leave it in an easy chair clutching a beer and a sandwich.
While television may be a simple medium, its messages are often contradictory. Each evening perfect bodies are projected into millions of living rooms. Prime-time grandmothers, whether in sitcoms or the countless ads hawking cosmetics, yogurt, diet soda and designer jeans, hardly look older than the actresses who play their daughters. The crow's-feet and wrinkles by which age and even character are judged have been pneumatically erased. A recent University of Pennsylvania study has even accused television of fostering complacency about health. Says the critique: the tube presents five times as many doctors and nurses as there are in real life. Since so much official health advice--from doctors (both real and televised), government agencies and TV experts, as well as from evident crackpots--also seems contradictory, there is no one to trust. Who will protect the vulnerable body then? The individual, that's who. Besides, medical-care costs far exceed the price of a preventive handful of Spirulina pills, Mexican cultivated algae that runners use to aid in fasting, or a couple of SOD (superoxide dismutase) tablets, touted as retardants of the aging process.
Lately the medical community has responded to this anxiety with something called risk analysis. Like many institutions and corporations round the country, the federal Centers for Disease Control is measuring the biological ages of employees against their chronological ages and evaluating their life expectancies. But risks are estimated in a new way, with an emphasis not only on heredity and medical history but on such things as stress factors, income, marriage and the wearing of seat belts (see quiz).
A less portentous signal for the future of fitness medicine, however, has begun in the Midwest. The Wellness Clinic of Salina, Kans. (pop. 40,000), has been quietly transforming the habits of this Midwestern town with surprising results. Family Physician John Schwartz, 37, took a fitness course at the local Y.M.C.A. Impressed with the benefits of the program, he began the Wellness Clinic in 1978 with former Y Instructor John Schlife, 35. The city of Salina contracts with the clinic to stress test its police department and some of its other employees. Most are given special diets and exercise routines. Says Schlife: "People arriving at the clinic don't like how they feel or look. They want an overhaul. We're four years into the program and have many of the people in Salina exercising every day and feeling healthier than ever. Our goal is to get people in good enough shape so that they won't have to go to their doctors so often."
Says Movie Director and ex-Actor John Derek, 55, better known as the husband of Bo Derek, the all but perfect "10": "If we were all nudists, we'd stay in better shape." Mrs. Derek, 24, who lifts weights to stay in shape, is certainly doing her bit for health. She is also one of the many people prospering through the body boom. Among those most happily jogging all the way to the bank are athletes turned instant entrepreneurs. With 1 million copies sold of his two running books, his endorsements for American Express cards and lecture circuit income, the running boom has turned the 1971 $25,000-a-year editor Jim Fixx, 49, into a happily perspiring millionaire. Marty Liquori, 32, an ex-middle distance runner, does a multimillion-dollar business at his 220 Athletic Attic shops in the U.S. Frank Shorter, 34, has 2,000 retail outlets for running gear, an enterprise he presides over from Boulder, Colo. Celebrated Marathoner Bill Rodgers, 33, was surviving on food stamps before he tried to sell running shoes out of a tiny half-basement shop in Boston's Cleveland Circle in 1977. Today sales of Rodgers' enterprises have reached more than $6 million a year, double from 1980. Rodgers now takes home $250,000 a year, partly from three shops in and around Boston.
Legions of non-sweaters have also grown richer. Nutri/System Inc. of Melrose Park, Pa., earned $44,000 in 1976. By this year earnings had jumped to $9 million on the 408 company-owned or franchised weight-loss centers in 45 states. Says Investment Banker Michael Taylor, who watches Nutri/System carefully: "It's a sybarite's delight, the Me generation personified."
When it comes to ways of fattening their bankrolls, the new fitness entrepreneurs have left few shoelaces untied. In a cinder-block building in Van Nuys, Calif., infants get put through exercise routines: 16-month-olds pretend to look like pretzels, swing from rings and run a kiddie obstacle course of bars and tunnels that looks like a miniature golf course, while older children learn what Junior Gym Founder Judy Braun calls "directionality" and have "rhythmic experiences." Eight lessons cost $55. The gym, begun in 1973, had revenues last year of $250,000 and profits before taxes of $100,000, a pulse-quickening return of 40%. Thirty-five million pairs of designer jeans, at prices ranging from $42.50 to $110, will be molded to newly trimmed bodies this year. Beyond labels, the rush to jeans reflects the American penchant for conforming to the image of the body demanded by such clothing. In the mirror, Calvin Klein and Fiorucci simply present what has become America's only authorized posterior.
The athletic outfitters were caught with their shorts down, however, by the phenomenon of women runners. Astonishingly, even five years ago there were no running shorts cut to fit the female form. Women had to run in men's shorts, which bound at the crotch and were too tight in the rear. Among the first to remedy the situation were New Yorkers Marni Weil and her husband Bernard Bouchardy. They came up with pairs of red, white and blue briefs cut especially for women, tested them on fellow runners and started marketing Panteras. Sales are projected at $1 million this year, and, burbles Weil, "some stores reorder every week."
Now appropriately attired women are dashing toward fitness as never before. As recently as 1967, though, an irate official tried to rip the cardboard number from the sweatshirt of a runner labeled K. SWITZER near the start of the Boston Marathon. He had discovered that the K stood for Kathrine. Kathy Switzer, then 20, managed to elude the man and went on to finish, the first woman with a number in the marathon's history to do so. Today there are 15 million women runners in America, and Switzer, 34, is the head of Avon Cosmetics' $5 million sports department. She believes women's entry into the fitness and health boom is the single most striking fact of her generation. Says she: "I have seen overweight, unhappy, insecure women develop a confidence through running that helps them take risks and experience joy in their lives. It is a testimony to what the human body can do."
Whatever sports and fitness have done for women in the U.S., women in sports have certainly helped increase the number of men pursuing fitness. A New Jersey housewife notes: "I started playing tennis while my husband still sat around with a beer can in his hand watching Monday Night Football. By I the time I was running, he was finally playing tennis. By the time he was jogging, I began Jazzercise. I finally found a way to compete physically with men that doesn't threaten them." She adds, "I feel that I am any man's equal now."
The Jazzercise instructor in rural Hopewell, N.J., cheers: "Pretend your boyfriend is watching! Strut your stuff!" Up to 50 women in leotards perform a fast dance routine to the tape-recorded rock. Their movements variously suggest college cheerleaders or amateur night with a Junior League chorus line.
But the physical workout is brisk and tiring. Vivacious Jacki Sorensen, 38, the guru of the trend, who now oversees the 42-state chain of Aerobic Dancing Inc. studios, began the movement in 1971 from a church basement in South Orange, N.J. Says she: "It's a fad gone stir crazy." Indeed, Sorensen's and a host of other programs attract an amazing 6 million participants a month. Says a student at Jon Devlin's Dancercise in New York: "My main reason for coming is my head. If I miss three days, I have to come in for my fix." Says Devlin: "There is something about dancing and music that's magic--it lifts people up." Whether the reason is the music, or the camaraderie, or the behavior-mod technique of encouraging women to smile and shout during the workouts, Dancercise has reversed the trend of the lonely long-distance runner.
At the turn of the century, fashionable women were so eager to resemble Singer-Actress Lillian Russell that many gained weight in strategic spots to imitate the actress's superhourglass figure. It is a long dietary path from Russell's bulk to the mod-media anoretic, the British model Twiggy, who helped popularize miniskirts in the late 1960s. The fashionable trend toward slender frames on females continues. Currently, three of the ten nonfiction bestsellers deal with diet (see box), and they have dominated the list for months. "No woman is ever too sum or too rich," Mrs. William ("Babe") Paley once quipped. This is the first American generation that has little hope of bettering its parents' earning power, but with what may be a compensatory vengeance, younger citizens have taken up slenderizing, or fashions that make one look slim.
The country runs and runs, from fear of death and pollution and old age as well as from longing for health, beauty and wellbeing. But what Americans will do with their revitalized corpora remains to be seen. Author Studs Terkel (Working) views the goings-on like a blue-collar Jeremiah. Says he: "Working on your body is narcissistic. It's basically a solo act. Narcissism comes when you're not connected to the rest of the world." By contrast, Dr. Dennis Colacino, director of the PepsiCo Fitness Programs, proclaims: "It gives people a better self-image. It helps one's selfesteem, it sharpens one's competitive edge." Somewhere between these poles is a path of balance down which a confused American can safely jog.
Chicago Psychiatrist Ner Littner has faith in American balance. Says he: "We have a need to go to extremes, to be impulsive and obsessive. But given a little time, we always become reasonable and exercise what matters--common sense."
Meanwhile, the health and fitness boom must be a major factor in some very bracing statistics. Heart disease, the nation's No. 1 health problem, is down 20% since 1967. According to the American Heart Association, strokes have dropped by one-third. Life expectancy has risen to a record 73 years. The cholesterol controversy has Americans eating 6 Ibs. less beef than a decade ago. They also drink 4% less alcohol. Though smoking figures among the young, especially females, are rising slightly, 1.8 million older smokers have given up cigarettes. It is possible that no future leader will have to echo the worry of Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1858: "I am convinced that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, pasty-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from the loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage." Or of President Kennedy in 1960: "Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security." In a country so lately thought to be dedicated to pleasure and self-expression, that will be no small achievement.
In the meantime, consider the story of Ponce de Leon, who was in his 50s when he first heard of the Fountain of Youth. He had subdued the natives of Puerto Rico to become a secure but bored governor. Supposedly an old Indian slave told him of the magic water, one sip of which would reverse the terrible effects of age. In 1512 the old rascal put out with three ships bound for Bimini, the supposed location of the fountain. Ponce found only the Sargasso Sea, the islands called the Dry Tortugas and flying fish. Eight years later, convinced that the fountain was located in Florida, he set off again. This time he was killed by an Indian arrow.
Ponce de Leon's story used to be good for a smile. A fountain of youth? Bartender, let's have another martini. On second thought, make that a double "designer" water--Perrier, Saratoga, Poland Springs--and make it snappy; everyone must get home early. There are morning miles to run and dance classes to attend and weights to lift. These days old Ponce would have swum to Bimini and jogged through Florida. And felt better for it, whether he found that pesky fountain or not.
--By J.D. Reed.
Reported by Sue Raffety/New York and Christopher Redman/Detroit, with other U.S. bureaus
With reporting by Sue Raffety, Christopher Redman, U.S. bureaus
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