I remember watching Jack LaLanne on my parents’ old black-and-white television when I was a little kid in New Jersey in the mid-1960s. He was quite the spectacle to my young eyes—an old guy with an unnerving abundance of enthusiasm for an adult, maniacally doing jumping jacks, push-ups and other calisthenics in a jumpsuit that looked not unlike what the aliens had worn in low-budget science fiction movies from the 1950s that already had made their way to rerun-happy non-network TV stations like WOR and WPIX.
Honestly, I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 8 years old when I first caught LaLanne’s low-tech “Let’s start a muscle!” pep rally, yet I had the sense even then that there’d always been a Jack LaLanne. That although I personally had only just discovered him, he might well pre-date TV, or perhaps recorded history. TV still was relatively new then, after all, and this guy looked like Methuselah to me. Cripes, when had he been born—1216? Yet, his physique and musculature were such that he might easily have ridden roughshod over the alleged infidels during the Crusades.
OK, at 6 or 8 I probably wasn’t actually conversant in the Crusades. Still, the point is, I instantly recognized Jack LaLanne as an institution of some sort—albeit an extremely odd one—some 45 years ago. And in fact he was kind of old already then. I now know that Jack LaLanne was born in 1914. That made him at least 50 by the time I first saw him. My parents, by contrast, were still in their 30s. And we all know how ancient our own parents seem to us when we’re kids. Jack LaLanne, to me, seemed more of my grandparents’ generation. Yet none of my three living grandparents were then jumping around on TV—lifting weights, doing deep-knee bends and clapping their hands together for emphasis while barking out exercise instructions. To the contrary, my grandparents were operating at 33 rpm, to this muscle-bound madman’s 78.
In one of my earlier blog posts, “The Immortal Mortals,” I wrote about people whose deaths have caught me off guard, even though I’m intellectually aware the Reaper claims all of us in the end. My catalyst in writing that piece had been journalist Daniel Schorr, who’d died last July at age 93. He’d been a newsman forever, and had long outlived his antagonist and contemporary Richard Nixon. I still was listening to his commentaries on National Public Radio in the weeks before he ascended to that big broadcast booth in the sky. It surprised me more that he’d finally succumbed to age than it would have had he lasted another decade or two.
By contrast, I hadn’t seen much of Jack LaLanne in more recent decades. Every once in a while I’d catch a nanosecond of a juicer infomercial he was hosting on some off channel at some off hour of the TV day. He looked more wrinkly than he had years ago, and of course he now appeared in living color. (His hair matched no color in nature, I found.) But LaLanne remained in great shape, and he still had that capacity for making viewers of any age feel like sluggards, lying at home on our sofas and stretched out on our easy chairs when, were we to be half the match of this peripatetic grandpop, we’d instead have been dropping to the floor and giving him 50.
The salient fact was, I always knew Jack LaLanne was alive and active, however old he must be by whenever he occupied my passing thought—whether the year was 1980, 1997, 2002 or 2010. And this seemed the natural order of things. The world was round, our two-party government was paralyzed by partisanship, the Israelis and Palestinians hated each other’s guts, and Jack LaLanne was still doing his thing. It was comforting, somehow. Much more so than governmental dysfunction or that Middle East powder keg situation.
So, yes, I was surprised and saddened when news came several days ago of Jack LaLanne’s death, even though he was 96 years old when his strength finally failed him. I found myself devouring every obituary I could find online, as if they might collectively tell me how death could claim a guy whose body had been such a temple. (He, rather than the semi-famous musician, might better have gone by Taj Mahal.) But I found no quotes in the obits by specialists in geriatric medicine expressing disbelief that LaLanne had corked off, just like everybody else. Still, I did learn things that made me appreciate the strange old muscle man all the more.
Like the fact that this all-American prototype had been born Francois Henri LaLanne, the son of poor French immigrants. And the fact that this professed one-time “sugar addict” decided to devote himself to fitness training and a largely vegetarian diet as a young man, after having been scolded by pioneering nutritionist Paul Bragg, “Jack, you’re a walking garbage can.” And the fact that to the end, he deemed exercise a necessary evil, even though he could make it seem fun. To him, exercising and eating well was the price one paid to have energy, to stave off illness and injury, and to live to be, well, 96, as it turned out.
One of my favorite LaLanne quotes, repeated often by news outlets this week, was, “I can’t die—it would ruin my image.” Not with me, it didn’t. Throughout his long life, Jack LaLanne remained, in my mind’s eye, the same sculpted geezer from another planet he was when I first saw him. That his death in the year 2011 caught me off guard in the slightest attests to the power and constancy of the image he so painstakingly—with every grunting rep—maintained, until reality at last trumped self-invention.
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