View From the Phlipside - Jack Lalanne

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.
You know it was easy to over look Jack Lalanne.  It seemed like it had always been there.  I remember as a kid back in the '60s seeing him on TV.  There he was in his almost skin tight coverall urging everyone to get up and do some exercises.  He was talking about eating right and working out decades before most of us started paying attention.  Most of us would say the getting healthy craze in the media began in the '80s with things like aerobics and Jane Fonda workouts.  And we would be so very, very wrong.

Jack Lalanne opened one of the first fitness gyms in the United States at age 21 which means it was 1936 when he did it.  The self proclaimed sugar junkie was dedicated to get the country in better shape.  And Jack led the way.

Let me make a confession here.  I never took Lalanne seriously.  He was some goofy old dude who wanted housewives to exercise in their living rooms.  His show looked cheesy to me even by the much less sophisticated standards of '60s middle America.  What I didn't know was that Jack swam from Alcatraz to the San Francisco shore several times, after he turned 40 and handcuffed each time, when he did it at AGE 60 he pulled a thousand pounds of dead weight.  At age 42 he set the world's record with 1,033 pushups in 23 minutes.  I'm not sure I've done that many in my lifetime.  And he kept on doing these kinds of physical feats into his 70s.  In fact Jack kept on working out and working to get us all into shape virtually until his death last week.  His workouts in his 90s were still 2 hours a day which included walking, swimming and lifting weights.  Quite simply Jack believed that getting the country into better shape was a vital ingredient in the success of the United States as a nation.  He invented new workout machines, produced TV shows and videos, urged the elderly and disabled to continue exercising and sold juice makers.

For Jack exercise was king and nutrition was queen.  With the two of them working properly you could live a long and healthy life.  As it turns out as the years have gone by we've discovered an awful lot of what Jack kept teaching back on those cheesy TV shows was right.  Maybe I ought to start paying a little more attention to those ideas.

Jack Lalanne was 96 when he died last week.


Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010