Remembering Jack LaLanne (1914-2011)

Almost all the tributes I have read to this great fitness guru, who died yesterday at 96, mention that he the one who almost single-handedly invented the modern fitness movement, that he was ahead of his time in suggesting that women, as well as men, can profitably use weights for physical training, and that nutrition is as important for health and feeling good as is physical training. Whether or not the popular myth of his rigorous daily workouts, until his dying days, was true, he became a symbol for the idea that the life well lived is the fit life, the disciplined life of working out.

Jack LaLanne was, until yesterday, one of my few remaining living heroes. I will specify my reasons below, but first I would like to tell a story.

Almost Meeing Jack

I was driving up from Los Angeles to the SF Bay Area early in March 2010. Instead of tearing up I-5, I decided to take the coastal route for several miles so that I could stop by Morro Bay, CA, which Jack called home for decades. Actually, I was little worried about his health. I knew he had bypass surgery in LA in December 2009, but the news about him was scanty thereafter. I wondered if he was well. So, I showed up in Morro Bay on a beautiful weekend and decided to "find" Jack. I didn't know where to look, so I stopped in at a convenience store, bought some gas, and casually asked the attendant, a middle-aged woman, if she had seen "Jack" lately. She furrowed her brow, looked toward the ceiling, and said that in fact she hadn't. Normally he would come driving into town in his bright red sports car, waving to people and looking like he was having a great time, she said.

Taking her head gestures as a cue, I pointed in the direction her head nodded and said, "Oh, yes, Jack lives out of town--to the East." I said it in a sort of question/statement sort of way, and she nodded, and said, "Yep, up on Little Morro Creek Road." It was as if she had given me a bar of gold. Quickly I retreated to a cafe with free Internet service (sorry, Starbucks), found Little Morro Creek Road on a map, but saw that it wended its way into the hills for miles east of town. A focused Internet search using various combinations of Jack's name and the road yielded a number which I was pretty sure was his home address.

So, I clambered back into my car, sped over to Little Morro Creek Rd. and drove along it. The housing pattern was unusual--some small homes were clustered right near the road next to huge mansions well back from the road. I assumed that in the "old days" it was simply a rural drive but, with the advent of lots of money and the development of multiple resort-like communities in America, Little Morro Creek Rd. had become an "escape" for the very wealthy. Jack certainly fit into that category. Well, as I saw his home, set back from the road, I decided simply to sit in my car, reverently as it were, and say a "get well" prayer for Jack. I left feeling as if I had been on a sort of mini-pilgrimage, and I knew I would never forget the day.

Why Jack LaLanne was Special to Me

Most people will say that they remember him from his fitness show in the 1950s-1970s. That is not why I remember him today. I think he bulks so strong in my mind today for two reasons: because he, by "going for it" physically encourages me to be a sort of "Jack LaLanne of the mind," and because of his attitude towards physical culture. A word on each, in reverse order.

An interviewer in the 1980s once commented to him, 'You must like working out, since you do it so much.' Jack's answer, calculated for maximum effect, was something like this: 'I hate working out, but I know I have to in order to get the results I want.' That, it seemed to me, was pure genius. Why? Well, we live in a "follow your bliss" era. People out there, life-coaches, inspirational speakers of all kinds, etc. tell us to "follow our passion," or to "find what moves us and go for it." If we build it, we are assured, they will come. But the piece missing from these banal nostrums is that the path to get to where we want is often not a fun path at all. It may be pure hell, in fact. Several years of life, then, might have a sort of near-grimness as we dedicate ourselves to goals that might escape us or be almost too challenging for us. Hard tasks strip away all our pretensions, all our claims to be something special, all our feelings of brilliance or "uber-talentedness." They make us face ourselves as inadequate and needy humans, and we sometimes wonder if we are capable of anything. Jack teaches us that the life of discipline is often not a fun life. But you like the results.

I have found this especially to be true in the past year. I thought that 2009 was my difficult year (I wrote four books on different subjects during that year) until I met 2010 and 2011. Why? Because now I have taken up Sanskrit and Chinese, and I work on them daily. Any person who thinks he/she is smart, ought to take up those two languages simultaneously, while trying to make a living. They are new, strange, exhilaratingly wonderful, difficult and alluring. They hold the key to thousands of years of human experience, spiritual, historical and political. I so much want to have them both at my fingertips. But I can't get there without the daily (often painful) discipline of speaking, trying to decipher four to five words that have been combined into one (through complex Sanskrit Sandhi rules) and writing. I don't like it at all, really, but I know I have to do it to get where I want. I have Jack LaLanne to thank for crystallizing this philosophy better than anyone.

Conclusion

Finally, I love Jack LaLanne as a symbol of the person who encourages me to be a "Jack LaLanne of the mind," but who was never ashamed to promote himself for the sake of the larger concept to which he was devoted. For me, the idea is clarity. It is so simple-like fitness--but it is the word that has been, for years, stitched to my very soul. We waste more money in American life not because of drugs or betting on sports or obesity, but because we don't have a disciplined approach to clarity in our communication, written and oral. The clarity revolution is coming, but it is like 1938 for Jack LaLanne--he was preaching his message about fitness and no one listened--or people listened and ridiculed. But Jack gives me strength to persevere. Maybe even until I am 96, too.

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