Jack LaLanne: An appreciation

            The Twittersphere has been rife with reaction to Jack LaLanne's death yesterday.

            "RIP--I really thought he'd live forever," wrote one twitterer, and it surely seemed that LaLanne, rightly called "the spiritual father of the health movement" in The Los Angeles Times' obituary, would live at least longer than the age of 96. Alluding to his amazing physical feats (among them, setting a world record of 1,033 push-ups in 23 minutes, and swimming from Alcatraz to Fisherman's Wharf while handcuffed and shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat), Sandra Bernhard tweeted: "I am going to swim handcuffed pulling 70 boats up the hudson this morning in honor of jack lalanne we already worked it out months ago."

            Another tweeter joked that LaLanne "will carry his own casket at his funeral." Still another reflected, "yes, my 1st thought was why didn't I buy that juicer?"--but this person was likely a relatively young LaLanne follower, aware of him from his color TV infomercials plugging his signature juicer.

            Baby boomers, of course, knew LaLanne from his black-and-white TV exercise show that began in 1952 and lasted 34 years. Indeed, the Times noted that since his early morning audience was mostly young children, he got a dog--Happy--to appeal to them (he also urged them to wake up their mothers so they could exercise along).

            One twitterer clearly went back to those early days, when LaLanne was likely watched as much as Lucille Ball.

            "Farewell, glamour stretcher," he wrote, in reference to LaLanne's Glamour Stretcher--certainly one of the first pieces of exercise equipment, a precursor to today's resistance tubing exercise products. And a good half-century before exercise DVDs, he accompanied the stretcher with Jack LaLanne's Glamour Stretcher Time--as he describecd it, "a long-play, high-fidelity unbreakable [instruction] record."

            He offered the record along with one Glamour Stretcher and instruction charts in a specially-priced set ("Special No. 12") for $5 ("a ten-dollar value!"), and it could easily have been just a pioneering get-rich-quick exercise scam promising fast results with minimal work--except that his religious commitment to helping people achieve good health through exercise and nutrition never wavered.

            "I care more than--you cannot believe how much I care! I want to help somebody!" LaLanne said in the Times, which spoke to him when he was almost 92. As he sang at the end of his shows (to the tune of the Italian standard "O sole mio"), "Here's my wish for you: May the good Lord bless, and keep you, too."

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