From Physical Culture To Physical Fitness -- Seattle Has A Long History Of Getting Exercised

THE M WORD As the millennium approaches, Pacific Northwest is doing its best not to lose sight of the past. This is another in an occasional series of stories on interesting and unusual aspects of the area's history.

ADDING MUSCLE, EXPANDING breath, extending health, paring body, repairing damaged parts - fitness is all about change. That's fair enough, since motion itself is defined by change, a shift from one state or place to another.

Tracing the origins of that change, though, can be as elusive as fitness itself. We can go back nearly 5,000 years to China, or 30 years to the beginnings of aerobics. We can head to Greece in the second century A.D., Europe in the 1700s, or the White House in the 1950s.

We also can return, oddly enough, to the year 1851. Many things not very related to fitness are happening, of course: Millard Fillmore is president. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Moby Dick" are published, the Singer sewing machine is patented and the first wholesale ice-cream business, decidedly anti-fitness, starts in Baltimore.

But in one corner of the country, in Boston, the YMCA is opening its first U.S. office. And in another, the 22 members of the Denny party land on a beach they'll call Alki, becoming the first white settlers to this area. They didn't likely suspect it, but the city of Seattle and the fitness movement were about to grow up together.

"We provide one place of healthy resort, open 365 days in the year, for the spiritual and social upbuilding of young men, against seventy-five Devil's traps, open day and night, to ruin them." - YMCA Monthly Bulletin, September 1886

The U.S. was ripe for the impending boom in fitness or, as it was then called, "physical culture." In the mid-19th century, science-oriented physicians began investigating the exercising body. The industrial revolution was turning farmers into city workers, who gained a bit of leisure time yet began to feel the strain of urban living.

Seattle soon was equally ready for some alternative recreation for a boom town filled with young, energetic men, although "fitness" wasn't exactly foremost in their minds.

"Their concept of fitness then that we could probably grasp was manliness, the ability to take care of yourself in the woods, working in the lumber camps, being a good shot," says David Buerge, a Seattle teacher and authority in 19th-century cultural history.

Running, jumping, bow-and-arrow marksmanship and throwing enormous boulders, however, were part of social life among Northwest Indian tribes. Their vision quests involved what today might be considered a sort of personal training: To prepare for that rite of puberty, which sent youths alone into the wilderness in search of a personal guardian spirit, an elder would oversee rituals to help harden them, including cold baths each morning.

Pioneers came around slowly to such practices. "The idea of bathing," Buerge says, "was something the frontier crowd didn't relate to."

Access to bathing became a major early contribution of Seattle's Young Men's Christian Association, noteworthy enough that someone kept track: In 1889 YMCA members took 2,144 baths.

Founded in 1876, the Y occupied a series of spaces before building its current home at Fourth Avenue and Madison Street. Its headquarters from 1886 to 1889, on the northwest corner of First and Spring, included enough room for Seattle's first gym.

Not all members, including original board member Dexter Horton, agreed that the Y should be in the business of providing a gym. He'd come to Seattle in 1863 with a third-grade education and $50 in debt; when he died at a prayer meeting 41 years later he left $1.5 million and a little place to keep it called Sea-First Bank. When asked to contribute to a new building after the Great Fire of 1889 destroyed the Y, Horton balked.

"No sir, not one cent," he said. "The Association has departed from the purpose for which it was organized, the spiritual uplift of young men, and now you propose to make it a gymnasium and a swimming pool. If the boys need exercise, let them saw wood, and if they want to swim, let them go into the Bay."

The gym backers prevailed.

Much of the era's exercise evolved from German gymnastics, using the body's weight and equipment such as vault, parallel bars and Indian clubs. These clubs, swung around the body using wrists, elbows and shoulders, looked like elongated bowling pins and originated not with Native Americans but in India.

Initially females were involved only as members of the Ladies' Auxiliary, which helped furnish and decorate rooms. Women of the Victorian era, who got a daily workout wearing clothing that could weigh up to 14 pounds, received their own place for gathering and exercising when the YWCA opened in 1894.

Around town, Seattle Public Schools took up physical culture in earnest in the early 1890s under the direction of Miss Annie Lee Goodrell, who used German and Swedish-style traditions to devise a system emphasizing both energizing (strengthening) and relaxing (stretching). Students who at first tired after five minutes, she reported in the 1892 annual report, were by year's end "able and willing to stand for a twenty-minute lesson."

Already for many Seattleites "physical culture" meant sports. Native Americans played shinny - a blend of hockey and lacrosse - in Renton. Immigrant miners from Wales introduced rugby in the 1880s and Italians brought soccer, says Buerge. Japanese-Americans formed a local baseball team in 1904 and a league started in 1928 by the Japanese-American Courier newspaper unified first- and second-generation immigrants.

"Should you have a weak back, hollow chest, or spindle shank. If your calves have gone to grass or biceps gone to seed. Your appetite gone with your calves or dyspepsia make you mean. If you lean to corporation or your corporation is too lean, a systematic course of exercise in the gymnasium will cure you. It is better than `Hop Bitters.' " - YMCA Bugle Call, February 1891

The Y wasn't the only gym in town. In 1886 German immigrants built Turner Hall to continue their homeland's tradition of turnvereins, a sort of social and athletic club. Near Skid Road in Pioneer Square was a gym operated around the turn of the century by Doc Shaughnessy, who promised in an ad to "Remove Fat Fast from Fighters and Men under Forty." For those over 40, he added, "I'll Just Try."

But the YMCA endures, and its archives - along with those of the Washington Athletic Club, which opened in 1930 - help chronicle the city's past through fitness eyes.

In 1896 the Y estimated the average worker put in what today might be called Microsoft hours: 60 hours a week with just 20 hours for leisure. By 1926 the average work week was 46 hours, freeing up 34 hours. Capturing at least some of those hours for exercise inspired a sales job that continues today.

The Y's A.G. Douthitt argued in 1909 that if a businessman would give an hour three times a week to systematic exercise "he will be better able to transact his business affairs and get more of it done in the same length of time. He will eat better, sleep better, work better and be sweeter tempered."

Douthitt had no patience for an age-old defense for avoiding the gym. "The most common excuse offered by men for not taking exercise is the lack of time." The man who doesn't exercise, he countered, is nine times more likely to get sick than one who does.

"Don't rush into the room of an evening and pull frantically at the heaviest weights for a half-hour till thoroughly exhausted nor attempt to prove your Herculean powers by putting up the twenty pound dumbbells. . . . " - YMCA Bugle Call, March 12, 1890

The endurance of many fitness trends is especially clear in training approaches. Despite today's impression that strength training for the masses is something new, the WAC in 1933 advocated barbell classes to improve posture and develop muscles. Its first leg-press machine, which used a barbell, arrived in 1954. Weight-lifting attracted even more members with the 1966 arrival of a Universal Gym, "one of the newest pieces of gym equipment in the world," which took up just 10-by-12 feet of floor space yet offered 10 pounds to 440 pounds and "simultaneous use by four men."

German gymnastics evolved into the calisthenics of the '40s and '50s and is today back in "boot camp" exercise classes and videos. Specialized programs emerged as early as 1910, when the Y offered especially gentle classes for the inactive.

In 1888 the Y organized an athletic club "to promote the physical developments of its members by the means of out-door sports." A walking club in 1910 would ferry to West Seattle, climb the hill and walk through Schmitz Park, emerge at Alki and take a waiting car back to the city or walk to Fauntleroy to return on the ferry.

Women began joining club programs in the mid-1930s, and dancing was popular. The WAC staff included not only women's athletic director Mrs. Evelyn Ryer but also music accompanist Miss Catherine Pinney. Just back from a vacation in California in 1936, Mrs. Ryer introduced a new class, Hawaiian dancing.

Women's classes often couldn't be simply about exercise, though. In the WAC's 1955 Charm-Swim series, students learned such essential skills as going up and down stairs in a fitted skirt and putting on gloves. If a member already had taken the class, ads enticed them with "advanced training."

An obsession with body shapes and measurements has been a constant for both women and men, partly the result of archaeological findings in the 18th and 19th centuries that spurred a revivalism of everything Greek, including statues' measurements. The biceps, neck and calves of many beloved figures had the same circumference, and thus a 1889 Seattle YMCA booklet proclaimed that a fully developed 5-foot-10 adult male's biceps, neck and calves should be 16 inches, chest 42 to 43 inches, waist 34, forearm 12 5/8, thighs 26 at the bottom, and weight 164 to 174 pounds. (One more forgiving prize was Venus de Milo, a curvaceous 6-foot-10 statue whose discovery in 1820 marked the beginning of the end for the corset.)

The WAC's Physical Development Club, started in 1933, required measurements every two months as part of its exercise program. A 1945 children's physical fitness test for boys and girls included calisthenics, running, jumping, swimming and sports. Boys who met minimum standards received a silver pin; girls received prizes for accumulating points based on attendance, sportsmanship, proficiency and service rendered.

"Swimming is the greatest body developer known." - WAC News, Aug. 1, 1933

Water, not surprisingly, seeped into fitness around here. Jensen's Bathing Beach was Seattle's first, between Union and Pike streets. The YMCA had the first pool and longtime instructor Mr. Huedepotil was said to have "taught most of the fish in Elliott Bay to swim." The WAC became a swimming hub after coach Ray Daughters spotted 15-year-old Helene Madison leaving "all comers in her wake at West Green Lake Beach" in 1928 and brought her to the WAC to train; she won three gold medals at the 1932 Olympics. Swim-to-music classes began at the WAC in 1951, water aerobics in 1975.

Water from above also played a familiar role. The Y's Cycle Club, organized in 1892, "had a few pleasant runs but the almost constant rainfall made it impossible to go regularly." And women were reminded in the WAC News in 1946: "It's bound to stop raining some time . . . and then you'll want a trim neat figure that will look smart in one of the new mid-riff swim suits."

"The way I figure it, it was started by Napoleon." - David Chapman, Seattle author on physical culture

The modern fitness movement isn't one of things commonly credited to Napoleon. But perhaps it should be, says Chapman, a Kent teacher.

As Chapman describes it, the French emperor's European invasions set off a series of nationalistic fitness movements. Stunned Germans reasoned they'd lost because their troops weren't physically fit, and soon soldiers and citizens alike were frequenting turnvereins. After the British beat Napoleon at Waterloo, the French started their own calisthenics movement. The British took victory as an endorsement of their games-oriented fitness, which they contended brought people together while gymnastics created fit people unable to play - or fight - as a team.

In this country the Civil War accented the poor condition of men in both the North and South. In World War I, more than one-third of American men drafted failed the physical, demonstrating for the first time (but not the last) that far more people claimed to exercise than actually did.

This national emergency prompted a demand for "physical fitness" - one of the earliest uses of that term. Physical education in schools, mandatory in only 11 states before World War I, was required in 33 by 1930.

A sense of unreadiness returned before World War II, heightened by reports from Germany that soldiers were being given steroids to increase their muscle mass.

During World War II the WAC started one-hour "toughening up" classes, with calisthenics, rope skipping, bag punching and shadow boxing. Children could enroll in Junior and Girl Commando classes.

This time fitness effects persisted after the war. Boston physiotherapists Thomas DeLorme and A.L. Watkins helped rehabilitate wounded soldiers with "progressive resistive exercise" that is the source of a weight-training system still prevalent today: two to three sets of 10 to 15 repetitions.

The Cold War may well have triggered the fitness boom of the 1970s and '80s.

"We seem to have to be in a crisis before anything is going to happen," says Jack Berryman, a professor of medical history and ethics in the University of Washington School of Medicine.

A 1950s Communist newsreel showing citizens tossing around watermelons proclaimed "Eastern Europeans are shaping up!" And in the U.S. there seemed reason to worry.

A report in 1953 said 57 percent of more than 7,000 American boys and girls failed a test of minimal muscular ability, compared with 8 percent of Europeans. Tests of more than 12,000 high-school students in Washington state found the average boy, for example, who could do a dozen chin-ups in 1948 could manage just five a decade later.

"The car has replaced his feet," explained Darwin Seeley, state superintendent of health, physical education and recreation. "There are no more chores. Everything is mechanized. Even in rural communities they are using automatic furnaces. There is no more wood to be cut or coal to be shoveled." Somewhere, perhaps, Dexter Horton was nodding in agreement.

A concerned President Dwight Eisenhower, who became a fitness role model himself by resuming exercise after suffering a heart attack in 1955, started the President's Council on Youth Fitness the following year. "The President must be worried about the Russians' showing in gymnastics" in the 1956 Olympics, joked a teenager in a Seattle Times article.

Of more concern was the Soviet Union's first Sputnik satellite in 1957. It launched the American space program, which in turn required a fitness program for astronauts.

Dr. Kenneth Cooper, an Air Force flight surgeon, developed a program to help astronauts get in good enough shape to offset the fitness they'd lose while in space. In the mid-1960s it was adopted by the entire Air Force and in 1968 was turned into a best-selling book. It was called "Aerobics."

"Some people get the idea that physical training is the contracting and relaxing of the muscles, or taking a few extra long breaths per day. . . . This has led a number of enthusiastic individuals to invent so-called systems of exercise in order to relieve the American people of their own dollars, and incidentally fill their own pockets. The tendency of the American people to always be after something new, and to get what they do get quick, has furnished a large field for these money grabbers . . . " - A.G. Douthitt, in "Seattle's Young Men," Oct. 26, 1906

Carrying on the 19th-century tradition of traveling medical shows and snake-oil salesmen, entrepreneurs in the late 1800s took advantage of a long-held myth that heavy lifting makes one "muscle bound." They discouraged conventional strength training and instead promoted hand grips and manuals on isometrics - which, after all, were much cheaper to make and ship than iron weights.

"Passive exercise" is another lasting enticement. In 1940 the WAC introduced the Contour Wave reducing machine: "Most gratifying results have been obtained without muscular soreness or fatigue. Pads are placed on motor points adjacent to or surrounding areas of excess weight and then muscular action of these parts is induced by electrical impulse."

Some rules of health clubs haven't budged: Limit your time on the equipment and return dumbbells to the appropriate places (1890), take a soap bath before going in pool (1911), lock your lockers (1927), try tanning machines (1931), don't wear black-soled shoes in handball and squash courts (1941).

Even Jack LaLanne has re-emerged, 30 years after his TV exercise show went off the air, this time doing commercials for the state lottery.

Lest we get carried away with the next fitness trend, we might keep in mind the ideas of Galen, who lived from 129 to around 210 A.D. Considered by some the greatest Greek physician after Hippocrates, he challenged the more military and athletic approaches to exercise.

Galen described three aspects of the body, says the UW's Berryman. The "naturals" were the basic elements of physiology. The "contra-naturals" were illness and disease. The six "non-naturals" were: air, food and drink, sleep and wakefulness, motion and rest, retentions and excretions, and the passions of the mind. If we balance these things, Galen said, we will stay healthy.

"I would argue that we don't have anything new to add to that today," says Berryman. "We just call it `wellness.' "

Molly Martin is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine. Special thanks to Jack Berryman, Brad Crisman and David Chapman. Harley Soltes is Pacific Northwest's staff photographer.