“Touch down every morning. Ten times! Not just now and then! Give that chicken fat back to the chicken. And don’t be chicken again.”
If you ever huffed and puffed climbing a rope to a school gym ceiling in the sixties or strained, red-faced to chin up on the playground in the seventies hoping to win the coveted President’s Council on Physical Fitness award, those words from the “Youth Fitness Song” are probably making you break out in a spontaneous sweat as I speak.
So, all of you youth for Kennedy, drop and give me 50. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
President John Kennedy’s inability to move congress on one his signature issues – massive federal aid to education – indirectly led JFK to embrace The President’s Council on Physical Fitness, a program educating the nation’s children while making kids stakeholders in his vision of a New Frontier.
What began as a modest, and largely forgettable, Eisenhower initiative to close a fitness gap between affluent – meaning flabby – American children and their more Spartan – meaning muscular – communist counterparts in the Soviet Union, Kennedy made it unquestionably his own within weeks of taking office. The president’s more hands-on approach, plus consistent public identification with the council’s mission, breathed life into this physical education effort while at the same time further reinforcing his popular association with youthful athleticism.
Without the power to actually mandate a national exercise program, the President’s Council instead created a well-rounded curriculum which supplemented existing Physical Education in schools and the usual sports activities of youth organizations like the YMCA. Beginning in the 1961-1962 school years, the Kennedy council launched an extensive national publicity campaign promoting its fitness directives which included the president’s Marine-inspired, fifty-mile-hike-in-twenty-hour challenge, along with a number of memorable popular culture tie-ins.
Cartoonist Charles Schulz contributed “Snoopy’s Daily Dozen,” an exercise manual featuring Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang.
And then there was The Music Man composer Meredith Willson’s ubiquitous 1962 workout classic, the “Youth Fitness Song” (known to this generation as “Chicken Fat”). For untold millions of young athletes wearing canvass PF Flyers sneakers (known to later generations as Chuck Taylors), “Chicken Fat” – sung by Harold Hill himself, Robert Preston – echoed through cavernous gymnasiums via tinny public address systems to become the enduring soundtrack of grade school soft ball tosses and jumping jacks. “Push up. Every morning. Ten times! Once more on the rise,” Preston’s infectious Broadway-style cadence went, “Nuts to the flabby guys! Go, you chicken fat, go away!”
Youthful enthusiasm and broad buy-in generated by the President’s Council were childhood’s answer to Kennedy’s grander challenges: asking what you can do for your country, paying any price, bearing any burden, supporting any friend, and opposing any foe.
For junior citizens with limited means to wage Cold War, determined adherence to these prescriptive measures can be appreciated as a sort of sweat equity.
Thousands of children wrote Kennedy, keeping him abreast of their fitness regiments.
One fifth grader in Maryland told the president, “In school we are doing many exercises. Our teacher says that we are doing them for you.” A ten-year-old Girl Scout in Cleveland confided, “I respect your physical fitness program and I went to one at the ‘Y.’ I am fat, but I want to be physically fit so that’s why I went.”
You see, getting the country moving again in the sixties, meant getting the children moving again.
