Remembering Muscle Beach

New Book Celebrates Santa Monica Heyday
Peggy Clifford
Mirror Editor
It was long ago, in a time very different from today,
yet it probably couldn’t have happened anywhere but Santa Monica --
“the zenith city by the sundown sea,” as its boosters once called
it, the beach town whose leaders have tried, intermittently, to ignore
the beach, shut it down or dress it up, and, inevitably, failed,
because the beach is the primary fact of Santa Monica.
“Remembering Muscle Beach” (Angel City Press, 1999)
by Harold Zinkin with Bonnie Hearn recalls, in grand detail, one of
the most glorious, significant and ultimately shameful chapters in
Santa Monica’s history.

Helen Smith, shown with Moe Most, swinging on the high
bar
Zinkin became the first Mr. California in 1941. In 1945,
he won the national AAU weightlifting championship, light heavyweight
division, and went on to invent the Universal Gym Machine. He was
here, at Muscle Beach, at the center of it all, and his memory is as
sharp as the extraordinary photographs which illustrate his story.
He begins the book with an apt quotation from Camus:
“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an
invincible summer.”
In the mid-1930s, when the country had been brought low
by the Depression, a bunch of boys began gathering at The Beach, after
school and work. Zinkin mopped the cafeteria floor at his school and
later set pins in a bowling alley for 25 cents an hour. Then, he and
his pals, drove 21 miles from east L.A. to The Beach.
“It began,” Zinkin and Hearn write, “as a place
where a few friends could work out in the sand and grew to include a
mismatched but amiable group of athletes, circus performers,
wrestlers, college gymnasts, movie stunt people....On weekends the
crowd of spectators could easily top ten thousand, all lining the
sidewalk to watch amazing stunts.”
Stuntmen and circus performers went to the beach to
practice their craft. The “kids,” boys and girls, went there for
fun and stayed on to make lives, and livelihoods, out of it. Future
stuntman Russ Saunders, future gym impresarios Vic Tanney and Joe Gold
and Jack LaLanne (who used to drive all night from his Berkeley health
club), along with Zinkin, were among the young athletes who became
regulars at what Zinkin calls “the birthplace of the fitness
movement,”

Another hard-working Sunday in the 50's.
“Muscle Beach really was glue,” he says. “You
became part of it. You became part of the activities. There wasn’t
anywhere else in the world where you could find that kind of life or
know people like these.”
Legend credits a physical education teacher, Kate Giroux,
with persuading the City of Santa Monica and the federal Works
Progress Administration (WPA) to install a tumbling platform and other
equipment on the beach. In fact, according to Zinkin, Paul Brewer and
Jimmy Pfeiffer, who took gymnastics at John Adams Junior High, and Al
Niederman, a former gymnast who worked as a mechanic for the bus
company, built some basic equipment themselves and finally persuaded
the City to kick in some money. As for Giroux, at one point, she tried
to get the Muscle Beach habitués banned from the beach.
No one knows where the name came from, but some of the
regulars, like Brewer, didn’t like it, nor did they like to be
labeled “Muscleheads,” as they were, but they loved gymnastics and
people loved watching them. Just south of the Santa Monica Pier, the
Beach became more and more popular with athletes -- including many
young women -- and spectators. In 1935, the City of Santa Monica hired
UCLA coach Cecil Hollingsworth to teach gymnastics at Muscle Beach. By
the late 1930s, there were 50 or 60 regulars and thousands of
spectators came to see them perform on weekends.
Writers and photographers did countless stories and
eventually The Beach was known nationally and internationally. To
Zinkin and the other regulars, its fame was irrelevant, it was, he
writes, “our education, our club, our cause. It was our youth.”

Pudgy Stockton holds Glen Sundby in a handstand.
When America went to war in 1941, Muscle Beach went with
it.
The City of Santa Monica sent Zinkin, Saunders and Ran Hall out to
promote the sale of war bonds. Subsequently, they and most of their
pals served in the armed forces. One of then, John Kornoff, appeared
on the cover of LOOK magazine, bare-chested, holding a rifle, as a
symbol of the American fighting man. As much as anything else, Zinkin
believes, that photo was “the beginning of a change of attitude
regarding fitness,” but, he adds, “It was certainly revolutionary
to see a Muscle Beach regular glorified instead of vilified.”
Joe Gold, served in the Coast Guard, and suffered spinal
injuries that later made it necessary for him to use a wheelchair, but
it didn’t stop him from founding Gold’s Gym and world Gym.
After the war, “No longer kids, the Muscle Beach
regulars tried to find their places in the world that was ever so
slowly starting to accept them...(and) show business was a natural
next step.”
Stars worked out with them. They worked as stunt doubles
and one, Steve Reeves, became a star himself. As some of the regulars
went off to work as chorus boys with Mae West, weight lifters and
wrestlers began to join the gymnasts at The Beach.
In 1952, Zinkin opened a gym in Fresno. Within three
years, he had five gyms and a TV exercise show, but he began to hear
stories about trouble back at Muscle Beach.

The kids at the beach became as involved in the mounts
as the adults.
The crowds of spectators had got too big for the City to
deal with and it wanted to turn the space into parking lots. In
addition, it was rumored that the owners of the Ocean Park Pier
alleged that the free shows drew paying customers away from the Pier,
while the owners of the Surf Rider Hotel found the entire scene
offensive. In any event, the City closed Muscle Beach down after five
weight lifters who lived in a boardwalk apartment were reportedly
found partying with two underage girls. The headline in the Evening
Outlook read: Officials Stirred as Sex Orgy Bared.” Although the
cases against the weight lifters were dropped, the City bulldozed the
area, claiming it had become a magnet for “perverts” and
“narcissistic parasites.” Several months later, the City reopened
it, as “Beach Park 4.” Use of the name “Muscle Beach” was
forbidden, as were weightlifting and any events not approved by the
City’s recreation department,
It was never the same. Zinkin concludes, “Muscle Beach,
as we knew it, may be gone, but the Muscle Beach attitude is not.
Those of us who were around in the early days feel vindicated -- happy
to be alive and still flexing our muscles.”
Evoking a unique time and place and some unique young
people, “Remembering Muscle Beach” finally sets the record
straight and fills in another gap in the great and wonderfully strange
Southern California saga.
It should be noted that in tardy recognition of this
vanished era, as well as that “invincible summer,” the City of
Santa Monica is resurrecting Muscle Beach as part of the South Beach
rehab.
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