This handy diagram helped listeners follow along with the exercises broadcast on WMC.
Dear A.N.: This question didn’t, at first, interest me because the Lauderdales have always opposed short-lived fads and follies, such as the curious notion that exercise is good for you. A passing fancy, certainly. Besides, bright spandex leotards and leg warmers are not a good look for me, not even with matching head- and wristbands. Trust me on that. Don’t make me post the pictures from the aerobics class I took that year at camp.
But since you (and others, I presume) are still reading this, it’s obvious that I didn’t discard your letter. Instead, I pondered what “radio exercise” could mean. After all, in the “golden days of radio,” when families gathered around the Zenith and listened to their favorite shows, those radio consoles and receivers were mighty heavy, with sturdy wooden cases. So perhaps someone had indeed developed a program that involved lifting the radio overhead 20 times, rest and repeat. Of course, that notion quickly struck me as foolish.
And then, while relaxing with a bottle of Kentucky Nip after thinking so hard about it, I remembered something from the Lauderdale Library. After a grueling 12 minutes of diligent searching, I found this old illustrated brochure, published in the 1920s, for something called The Early Bird Club. Shown here, this describes at some length the very thing you mentioned, A.N. It was a program hosted by the WMC radio station, with exercises conducted under the guidance of a certified “physical director” named Cyrus “Cy” Cooley.
The cover announces that this was “a morning program of physical exercises and devotional period sent to you daily, except Sunday, by the Young Men’s Christian Association of Memphis.”
The brochure explains, “Radio exercise has become one of the most popular developments in radio broadcasting. It has grown from an experiment conducted by the Chicago YMCA over a single station in 1922, to worldwide usage, with such programs conducted in practically every large city in America.” In Memphis, the WMC Early Bird Club began airing in 1928, but I can’t say with any certainty how long it remained on the air.
The name came from the schedule. The program would begin at 7 in the morning with “light setting-up exercises,” followed by 15 minutes of “breakfast music.” Then you had 15 minutes of “reducing exercises,” 15 minutes of more “breakfast music,” and a 15-minute “devotional period,” with the show ending at 8:15.
Now this is yet another reason the Lauderdales would have objected to it. We, as a family, never tried to do anything before the crack of noon.
A photo shows The Early Bird Club staff, which included announcer Buddy Herbert (called, for some reason, “the Tired Hand”), Harry Northrop (“the Live Dummy”), Cooley himself, and pianist Irma Hubbard. If we can believe the photo, it’s amusing that the “Dummy” actually performed the exercises announced over the air by Cooley. This being radio and all, how would anyone have known if he simply stood there and pretended to do them, puffing and groaning into that tall microphone, while Hubbard plinked away on the piano?
The Early Bird Club and other shows like it that promised listeners “health and happiness by radio” were surprisingly popular in the 1920s and into the 1930s. As the booklet declares, “thousands of participants, following a delightful [their words, not mine] exercise period, go into their day’s work with increased pep and enthusiasm.”
So what, exactly, did the show require listeners to do? A helpful chart demonstrates more than a dozen exercises they would perform, such as “arms front horizontal,” “arms vertical,” “neck clasp,” “leg forward,” and — quite frankly, the only two I might actually enjoy — “sitting” and “lying.” On your back, they meant.
Cyrus “Cy” Cooley was the physical director for several radio exercise programs, clubs, and organizations in Memphis.
Listeners were encouraged to “open the windows wide, drink a glass of water before starting, wear light and loose-fitting clothing, use a small mat, and smile and enjoy your exercise.”
The booklet includes complicated charts showing the normal height and weight for listeners of all ages, started at 5 and ending — rather ominously if you ask me — at age 50. After that advanced age, I suppose, if you were somehow still alive (this was in the 1920s, remember), I guess your only exercise was confined to listening to the radio. It also offered 18 “health rules,” such as: “Ventilate every room you occupy,” “Eat slowly and chew thoroughly,” and “Keep serene. Worry is the foe of health.”
My favorite in this long list was #16: “Avoid self-drugging. Beware the plausible humbug of the patent medicine faker.”
WMC wasn’t the only station in town, and it seems others jumped on the bandwagon with similar programs. Also in my archives is a brochure for the Radio Gym Class sponsored by Forest Hill Dairy, which aired daily on Memphis station WNBR. To my surprise, the director was also Cyrus Cooley, who said, “Our program is planned for the whole family. Old and young alike can build a healthier body more resistant to disease and infection by regular participation.”
So who was Cooley, I wondered? Well, the Forest Hill brochure described him as a “home-town boy who made good.” Born in Memphis in 1899, he played football for what was then called West Tennesee State Teachers College in 1916-17. He then “took a time-out to establish the National Underwater Swim Record in Nashville,” according to the folks at Forest Hill. After a two-year course at Chicago Physical Education College, he became the physical director of Chicago’s Central YMCA, that city’s largest. “No newcomer to radio, he participated in the first broadcast of exercises, through station KYW, in 1922.”
In 1927, he returned home to Memphis, where he conducted physical-education classes at the YMCA, Evergreen Women’s Club, and Nineteenth Century Club. What’s more, he designed and built the Alicia Golf Course, one of this city’s first privately owned links. No trace exists of it today, except for the street off Poplar called, as you might expect, Alicia. During these days, he and his wife, Mary, lived at 462 Angelus Place, if you’re curious about such things.
The brochure concluded in this way: “It is indeed with pride that we of Forest Hill Dairy offer our friends in Memphis the services of such a leader in his field. You can count on lasting benefits from the course of morning exercises given under Cy Cooley’s direction.”
All that activity and exercise certainly benefitted him. Cooley passed away in 1989, at the age of 91. As for “radio exercise,” I imagine it went out of fashion when that newfangled gadget called “television” made its appearance in homes across the land.
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Email: askvance@memphismagazine.com
Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, 65 Union Avenue, Suite 200, Memphis, TN 38103
