Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (86 page)

An impressed Jack stayed after the lecture to speak to Bragg. He later recalled, “Dr. Bragg asked me, ‘What do you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?’ and I told him, ‘Cakes, pies, and ice cream.’ He said, ‘Jack, you are a walking garbage can.’” Bragg explained to him that diet and exercise could cure his headaches and make him strong, athletic…and even attractive. Jack decided to give it a try.

After that day—LaLanne later claimed—he never ate another sweet. He also became a vegetarian (though years later, he added meat back into his diet) and took handfuls of vitamins. He began lifting weights at the local YMCA, and even studied
Gray’s Anatomy
to help develop and tone each muscle.

The skinny kid with bad skin, special shoes, and a back brace soon disappeared, along with the headaches and violent episodes, and Jack soon developed the broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped physique that would become his trademark. In high school he excelled in wrestling, football, baseball, swimming, and track. His mother wanted him to become a doctor and missionary, but he wanted to become a missionary of a different sort: Like Paul Bragg, he wanted to promote nutrition and exercise.

At the age of 18, LaLanne started a bakery business, selling whole-grain breads, and converted the family backyard into a gym where he coached local policemen and firemen in exercise and weightlifting. In his spare time, he earned a chiropractic degree.

In 1936 LaLanne decided to move the gym into a building of its own: the Jack LaLanne Physical Culture Studio in Oakland, California. At a time when private gyms catered mostly to boxers, LaLanne’s club opened its doors to everyone, including—and especially—women, kids, and the elderly.

Members of the LaLanne Studio routinely worked out with weights—an idea almost unheard of outside of the boxing community at the time—and got LaLanne’s personal assistance and nutritional advice. A blacksmith helped LaLanne invent exercise
equipment, including the world’s first leg-extension machines, weight-selector machines, and machines to aid squats. He is credited with designing the first exercise equipment that used pulleys and cables, features standard on weightlifting machines today.

But for all his inventiveness, LaLanne could barely pay the rent during the Studio’s early days. And his main obstacle came from an unexpected source—doctors, who called LaLanne a crackpot and told patients that his program was a menace. They claimed that men would become too muscle-bound to raise their arms, women would begin to look like men, and the elderly would get heart attacks. They even warned that LaLanne’s methods could lead to hemorrhoids.

In 1936 LaLanne made an unusual offer to attract clients: He invited parents to send their children to his gym, and if he couldn’t make them fit and healthy, he’d refund their membership dues. The strategy worked and brought in new customers, including adults. The Studio made a profit throughout the 1930s and ’40s, staying open even during World War II while LaLanne served in the Navy. And it was still going strong in the 1950s when he got his big break.

In 1951 a local television station approached LaLanne about hosting an exercise program, the first of its kind in the country. During the audition, LaLanne led a well-dressed TV executive through a series of exercises (all without making the man leave his padded swivel chair). He got the job, and became host of
The Jack LaLanne Show
, an early-morning program that aired on KGO-TV in San Francisco.

On the show LaLanne always wore a jumpsuit that showed off his muscles as he leapt around in ballet slippers. At first he shared a nearly empty studio with nothing but a wooden chair, but eventually he added a white German shepherd named Happy to the cast. Happy did tricks for the kids while Jack led their parents—mostly mothers at that early hour—through calisthenics using chairs and the floor as the primary exercise “equipment.”

The show soon became known as much for LaLanne’s folksy advice as for the exercising. On diet, he once said, “If man makes it, don’t eat it! If it tastes good, spit it out.” On exercise: “If your
back porch is draggin’ and your shoulders are saggin’ and you have no pep in your step, it’s time for a change!” And on his philosophy of health: “Exercise is king and diet is queen; put them together, and you’ve got an empire.”

At first, TV critics had an even lower opinion of LaLanne than doctors did; they predicted he’d be off the air in weeks. But the show held on and soon began airing in Los Angeles as well.

The success of LaLanne’s show didn’t quiet his detractors; doctors and sports coaches still called him a fake. “Everyone said I was just a muscle-bound charlatan,” he later said. “I had to show them I was an athlete.” So in 1954, on his 40th birthday, he set a world record by swimming the length of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge underwater…while pulling 140 pounds of equipment behind him.

The stunt gave him some much-needed publicity, so he decided to raise the stakes. In 1955 a handcuffed LaLanne battled strong currents to swim from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco—debunking the myth that it was impossible to swim across San Francisco Bay from Alcatraz to the city. Two years later, LaLanne not only swam 6.5 miles through the Golden Gate Channel, he towed a 2,500-pound cabin cruiser behind him. In 1959, at age 45, he did 1,000 pushups and 1,000 chinups in an hour and 22 minutes.

Now a media celebrity, LaLanne willingly shared his workout feats with television audiences, including repeated lifts of 140-pound dumbbells or climbs of a 25-foot rope with 140 pounds of extra weight strapped to his belt. His “health drinks” included hundreds of ground-up supplements as well as liver tablets, kelp, carrot and celery juice, and egg whites. At one point, LaLanne even tried drinking raw cow’s blood because he’d learned that the Masai people of East Africa drank it to stay healthy. (A blood clot in his cocktail ended the experiment.)

In 1959
The Jack LaLanne Show
was nationally syndicated on ABC, and it would continue to run through 1985. Faithful viewers admired LaLanne’s stunts as well as the fact that he practiced what he preached: He kept to a strict diet, and his own workouts were so rigorous that he offered a $10,000 prize to any athlete who could match him. Nobody ever collected.

By the 1960s, millions of Americans were stretching, jumping, and bending with Jack LaLanne. They also listened to his opinions. When he said, “Read every food label, and if you can’t pronounce the ingredients, don’t buy it,” or, “The best part of a doughnut is the hole,” they changed their shopping habits. His health club business also expanded, and in the 1980s there were 200 clubs bearing his name. Almost singlehandedly, LaLanne had launched the American health and fitness craze.

In the 1980s, the landscape changed. Fitness guru Richard Simmons had a hit daily TV show and Jane Fonda’s workout tapes sold millions. After LaLanne’s show went off the air in 1985, he became a pitchman for products like home exercise equipment and vitamin supplements.

In 1991 he helped start the home juicing fad with the Jack LaLanne Juice Tiger, a $150 electric juice-making machine. In two years, the company sold more than 600,000, but many were recalled after 14 people suffered eye injuries and facial lacerations when the juicer’s grinding mechanism came loose. In 1993 the machine was revamped and re-released as the Jack LaLanne Power Juicer. The 15-year-old infomercial for the Power Juicer still airs regularly on television.

He also keeps performing the feats of strength that helped make him famous. On his 70th birthday in 1984, he swam a mile and a half across Long Beach Harbor in California—with his hands and feet shackled and towing 70 people in 70 rowboats. For his 90th birthday in 2004, he planned to swim 26 miles underwater (with the assistance of oxygen tanks) from Catalina Island to Long Beach Harbor. But he didn’t. Reason: His wife, Elaine, pleaded with him not to. “I told him I’d leave him if he tried it,” she said.

In 2008 LaLanne turned 94, and he still works out every day for two hours. He’s been awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2008 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a long-time fitness advocate himself, inducted LaLanne into the California Hall of Fame. LaLanne plans to keep pushing himself as long as he can, because, as he puts it, “I can’t die. It would ruin my image.”

Mark this page and check it now and then. You might get to see several spectacular shows a year…and they’re all free
.

I
T’S A PERSEID! IT’S A LEONID…
Do you know what a
meteoroid
is? It’s a small, solid particle traveling through space. How about a
meteor
? It’s the streak of light you see in the sky when a meteoroid hits the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up. Most meteoroids are smaller than a grain of sand and burn up relatively quickly; some are larger—up to boulder size—and can cause “fireballs” to flare across the sky. Some even make it to the ground, at which point they’re referred to as
meteorites
. They’re common, but several times a year they become much
more
common, in events known as “meteor showers,” or “meteor storms.” What’s responsible for them? Comets.

Comets are relatively small solid objects in our solar system that, like the planets, orbit our Sun. Unlike the planets, whose orbits are fairly round, comets have
elliptical
orbits (long and narrow), traveling from way out in the solar system to its center at the Sun, which it circles very closely. Comets are made up of ice, dust, and rock, and as they get close to the Sun, some of that ice turns to gas, and some of its dust and rock is ejected. That’s what gives comets their big, glowing coronas, and their tails. After many millions of years, the entire orbital path of a comet becomes filled with debris…and then along comes us.

As the Earth makes
its
orbit around the Sun, it passes through several of those debris-filled comet trails. Some of that debris enters our atmosphere—and we see many more meteors than usual. That’s how we get those fantastic shows.

Meteor showers are named after constellations, and that causes a lot of confusion, since the meteors have absolutely nothing to do with those constellations. Here’s the explanation:

• When you look up into the sky during a meteor shower, you can
see many seemingly unrelated meteors in a wide swath of the sky, all of them moving in many different directions…but look more closely. If you could draw a line back from all the meteors you see, you’d find that they all go back to one point in the sky.

• All the debris fragments in a comet’s path are naturally traveling the same direction, in parallel lines. As we view them as meteors from here on Earth,
perspective
makes those parallel paths appear to recede to a single point in the distance. This point of origin is known as a meteor shower’s
radiant
.

• Because it occurs in the sky, the stars become a backdrop, and the radiants of different meteor showers fall “in front” of different constellations. In the case of the
Perseid
meteor shower, for example, which happens every August, its radiant falls within the constellation
Perseus
—hence the name. The radiant of November’s
Leonid
meteor shower is located in the constellation
Leo
.

• The confusion comes in because people long ago believed (and many still do) that meteor showers were somehow related to those constellations. They’re not: Constellations are made up of stars billions and trillions of miles away; meteor showers actually occur in the Earth’s atmosphere—just 50 to 75 miles above your head.

There are dozens of noticeable meteor showers during the year. Here’s a list of some of the most intense. Put a copy of this page on the refrigerator so you won’t miss any of the shows. Check an astronomy book or an online source to find out where the radiant constellations are going to be, dress appropriately—and enjoy.

January:
Start off the new year with the
Quadrantids
, seen from about January 1–5. They’re named after the constellation
Quadrans Muralis
, which isn’t recognized anymore—modern star charts show the Quadrantids emanating from around the constellation
Hercules
. They regularly show as many as 130 meteors an hour (if weather conditions are good).

April:
The
Lyrids
are named for the constellation
Lyra
, they peak on April 21 or 22, and can show up to about 30 meteors an hour.

May:
The
Eta Aquarids
peak on the night of May 5 and appear to emanate from inside the constellation
Aquarius
. They’re relatively
mild: In the Northern Hemisphere you can see about 10 meteors an hour, in the Southern Hemisphere about 30—but once in a while those numbers climb. And the comet that left this trail: Halley’s Comet, which orbits the Sun every 75.3 years.