The earliest memory I have of watching TV was when I was around 3 and I watched “The Jack LaLanne Show” on a small black-and-white set and tried to do the exercises as Jack LaLanne demonstrated them. I don’t remember much beyond falling down, and thinking, “Hey, this is pretty hard.”
LaLanne, who passed away at 96 on Sunday, pioneered the fitness show genre. His show ran for 34 years, starting in 1959. Today he would have a few hot babes, in skintight “fitness suits,” dancing along behind him to a hip-hop soundtrack. Not then.
No, it was just Jack in a space roughly the size of a storage locker, with a chair as his only prop, doing jumping jacks and pushups and various other strenuous stuff. Always energetic, always wearing his trademark belted jumpsuit. Sort of like a super hero.
Quite simply, Jack LaLanne was Mr. Fitness. There were no others. Hard to believe in today’s fitness- and diet-crazed society that there could be just one. There was no Tae Bo, no Deal-A-Meal, no Chuck Norris infomercials. Just Jack LaLanne. He was all we needed.
LaLanne talked of the benefits of being a vegetarian and eating only raw foods in an era when macaroni and cheese was considered a vegetable. LaLanne was a lone voice in the wilderness during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the average American considered the four food groups to be sugar, fat, grease and alcohol. LaLanne was the voice of health when neonatal units at the hospital had a smoking section.
You could not help but like Jack LaLanne. He just had so much enthusiasm and energy. You wanted to be like him; a relentlessly positive, dynamo in a cool body suit, with the energy of a bull moose on crystal meth. And he had a foxy wife to boot.
LaLanne opened his first health club in Oakland in 1936. In the years that followed, he created a chain of 100 health clubs, his TV show and eventually he came to represent the Cadillac of juicers, the Jack LaLanne Juicer (as seen on TV).
For decades LaLanne topped himself with various public strongman stunts, including towing boats while swimming. Then he towed boats while swimming handcuffed, in his 70s!
LaLanne once joked that he could never die, because it would ruin his reputation. So he lived to the ridiculously old age of 96.
Other fitness leaders have disappointed with their life spans. Natural foods pioneer and author of the best selling “Stalking the Wild Asparagus,” Euell Gibbons, died at 64. Running book author Jim Fixx dropped from a heart attack at 52. No, Jack LaLanne knew that to be the real deal you had to live a long time. He had no choice.
Sometimes when celebrities die it makes us feel old. Like Dennis Hopper. We think “I remember when he was the young hippie guy in ‘Easy Rider,’ how can he be dying of old age?” That is not the case with Jack LaLanne. He had been old longer than most of us have been alive.
Some people should just never die. People like Bob Barker. People like Jack LaLanne.
Phil Perrier, a native of Atlanta, is a comedian and television writer in Los Angeles.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
