06E102
Chicken Fat©
In
1961 the world was safe and comfortable for a second grade girl. A place where I could make a quick 5˘ by
showing Doug Reeves my underpants, where you'd duck and cover to survive an
atomic attack; stop, drop, and roll when you spontaneously broke into flame;
and you ran when a stranger offered you candy – a plan that was always iffy
because I'm not sure I could pass up a Snickers. Life was dangerous for young girls with the will power of a dog
in a Snausage factory.
But
all that comfort ended on May 25, 1961 when President Kennedy said this about
the Cold War:
Finally, our greatest asset … is the
American people . . . to strive for excellence in their schools, in their
cities and in their physical fitness and
that of their children.
5,787 words and what does he burden kids with – physical fitness.
The
gates of hell opened that day – a day that will live in infamy for me and my
kind. It was the beginning of the
President’s Council on Physical Fitness – a diabolical plot to torture the
overweight, uncoordinated, and lethargic children of America for watching too
much television, eating too many Twinkies, and having parents who voted for
Nixon.
Kennedy
inspired Meredith Wilson and Robert Preston to team up and create “Chicken Fat,”
a song cajoling listeners to do push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and other
calisthenics in an effort to "give that chicken fat back to the
chickens." A six-minute ditty that
had a good beat, was easy to dance to, and would have made the Third Reich proud.
Better-Dead-Than-Red
madness took over the school gymnasium with the most diabolical government
program ever – the President’s National Physical Fitness Test. (This title has since been usurped by FEMA
and the new Social Security prescription drug plan.) A place that had once been filled with tether ball and square
dancing was now the first defense against Moscow.
The
President’s National Physical Fitness Test involved running, jumping, throwing
and a bunch of other active verbs. You
couldn’t just sit, you had to sit-up.
And, if you met the "standards," you would earn a patch,
preserve democracy, and laugh in the face of Khrushchev.
There
was the 50-yard dash – apparently Communist kids were always dashing 50 yards
so we had to keep up with them; the ball toss, presumably preparing us to hurl
propaganda over the Berlin Wall; and the rope climb, where I learned that
standing on the big knot at the bottom of the rope while pounding on your chest
and doing Tarzan yells will make your friends laugh, but it is not a skill that
will get us to the moon before Russia.
In
the end I did not earn the President's patch, but I did find out that making
people laugh is cool. I'll bet less
than 1% of those physically fit kids still have their patch, but I still have
my sense of humor. In your face
Khrushchev.