Briar Patch
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He begins by asking several women (women are more psychically receptive to him, he says) to come up on stage and write names and colors and draw illustrations on a blackboard which is out of his sight. (The "precautions" he uses to keep from seeing the blackboard, like a piece of plywood he holds up in front of his face, are so ludicrous and simpleminded that if indeed his whole act is a fake it is a staggering example of convoluted genius.)
The first thought to be transmitted is the word green, Uri asking the audience on the count of three to say in their minds the color that "Sue" has written and erased on the blackboard.
"Please," he says, "I really need everybody to think it. Don't say to yourself 'My neighbor is thinking it so I don't have to.' "
When he counts to three it seems that the audience has done as asked. Everybody is with him, a sacrament of the word green etching itself into the half-visual movie screens of 2000 minds. The mind swell reaches Uri, and he succeeds. There is greater applause.
A few more telepathic demonstrations and it is time for the pyrotechnics. A hundred people volunteer spoons and keys and rings and watches. Uri chooses a watch that hasn't worked in 9 years and his hand over it. Then he presents it to the audience in true John Cameron Swazey style. Two or three other watches are attempted, but they cannot be resurrected, just as some of the proffered spoons cannot be bent. "Does anyone here have a spoon they really like?" he says. And when one is given to him, he is able to bend it severely, the whole process shown in close-up on the videotape screen above the stage for the benefit of the people in the $2.50 seats.
Shortly after that one he begins making overtures about ending the performance. "Don't you people want to go home?" he says.
He then answers questions for a while, recounting his life history, his work at SRI, his feelings about Guru Mahara Ji ("Please understand me, I don't want to make judgments. It just bothers me that people bow down to him." He drops information about the book about him by parapsychologist Andripa Puharich, due out in December, which he seems to believe will more or less alter the course of civilization.
In his hotel room the next morning, an hour before he is to leave for Houston, Uri speaks enthusiastically about the performance: "I feel that the people were so good and so with me that I was very disappointed I couldn't give them more. Everybody tells me, 'Look, if only one little thing happens that's enough.' But if you have 2000 people in front of you and you know that they've all paid to see you, you can't overcome that feeling that you want to do more and more."
We try another telepathic transmission, at my request. I draw a foot with a line under it. Uri's not getting anything. "Draw something else," he says, "This time start at one point and make the drawing in your mind exactly as you've done it on paper."
What I've got on paper is a rabbit, or rather a circle with two ear-like protrusions and two eyes. Those ears are hard for me to draw somehow up there in my mind, and that may be the reason why Uri receives everything but the ears. It's a mild success, again more interesting in the ritual than in the result.
I have in my pocket a piece of silverware, a metal version of the "spork" that Colonel Sanders gives you to eat his mashed potatoes with. I don't want to go into the more perverse details of my life, but this spork has some emotional value, and I'm thinking what a perfect thing it would be for Uri to bend. But I don't suggest it: it begins to seem like a violation of taste. Either you believe or you don't, and I do: there are enough bent spoons around already.
YOU MEAN FISH DO IT TOO?!
IN LATE SEPTEMBER HEARINGS WERE being held in Austin on textbooks proposed for adoption in the public schools. Ms. Barbara Glenn of San Antonio complained about women being stereotyped in various texts. She cited this passage: "Boys can flop. Girls can plop. Can fish flop and plop?"
"Plop," Ms. Glenn testified, "is a word that is a little more negative than flop."
ONE STEP AT A TIME, BOYS.
THIRTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD DON Dixon is no slug. The Raldon Corporation which he put together in 1969 is one of the biggest home-builders in Dallas County. But when Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper, the paternoster of Aerobics (exercise to deliver oxygen to the heart, lungs, and blood vessels), now living in Dallas, ticked off precoronary warning signals for underexercised execs in a speech to the Young Presidents' Organization last November, Dixon could relate—the high price of empire-building.
Now everyday at noon Dixon drives over from Raldon's glassed-in-offices overlooking northwest Dallas to the nearby plantation-like home of Dr. Cooper's Aerobics Institute where he changes into red shorts and jogs two miles in the midday sun. On his first pass around the grounds last year, Dixon ran a mile and "nearly died."
Ten strenuous months later, still thick-set but 15 pounds trimmer, chewing on the plastic tip of a cigar instead of inhaling cigarettes, his resting heart beat down from 76 to 54 and his cholesterol level reduced, Dixon has reconstituted himself with the kind of exercise that demands oxygen and forces his body to deliver it. That what aerobics does. And that's why Dixon is no longer the near-perfect profile of a cardiac accident waiting to happen.
Raldon's Dixon is not alone. The Aerobics Activity Center has a waiting list but only a 15 per cent drop-out rate. Seven hundred and fifty men willing and able to pay $350 a year (half the membership is corporate) belong to the Center with its electronically-paced Tartan-covered indoor running track (runners follow the timed lights like a mechanical rabbit), Resolite outdoor walking/jogging tracks, six-laned Olympic-sized conditioning pool and an aerobic arena (i.e. gym) for fitness classes, basketball, volleyball and aerial tennis. The balcony overlooking the indoor track and gym is equipped with rowing machines, treadmills, stationery riding bicycles (one of the staff M.D's, a marathoner, sidelined with a leg injured diving to avoid a car, plugs in a mini-TV to cut the monotony while clocking the miles) and the Universal Gladiator (a grand clanking Rube Goldberg apparatus designed so several weight-lifters can work out at once).
Dixon runs in fast company: Dallas Cowboy Quarterback Roger Staubach; the chairman of Redman Industries, James Redman; and the president, Lee Posey; bank presidents Charles Pittman (Exchange Savings and Loan) and Richard Blackmore (Valley View State Bank); Dallas Federal Savings and Loan Association Chairman Lloyd S. Bowles—the kind of men who have historically made up the city's ruling class. Decision-makers from IBM, Whittier, Chrysler, and Zale Corporation come to Dallas and Dr. Cooper for intensive physicals and an Rx for exercise. Two hundred and fifty women also belong, but since the women's sign only hangs on the locker room from 9 to 11:30 weekday mornings, they pay just $150. A ladies' dressing room is on the drawing boards.
Cooper is in Dallas for the same reason the State Fair of Texas is—"true believer" businessmen made him an offer he couldn't refuse. The former aerospace physician carries on his life's work in Big D because Tyler Corporation, the trucking and manufacturing giant, bought the site and built the plant for Cooper in a unique form of community philantropy. Each October Tyler sponsors a two-mile timed run for upper management types at the Center. Companies such as TWA, Omega Alpha, and Schlitz field their own teams, run in 15-man heats and are highly competitive.
Before beginning an aerobic program, each member must undergo a complete physical evaluation in the Cooper Clinic. So, hooked up to E KG monitoring leads, his heart throbbing with electronic beeps, Dixon mounted the inclined treadmill to test the upper limits of his cardiac work capacity. He panted his way through the required stress test, flagged at 12.5 minutes and seeded himself to the bottom rung in fitness. Today he can endure the tread-mill test for 20 minutes, a strong performance. Cooper classifies an offensive lineman pro football player as "highly conditioned" who can go 22 minutes on the treadmill, 25 minutes for defensive backfield.
To determine the amount of fat on his stocky body, Dixon submitted to three dunks (for an average) in an underwater displacement tank. Fifteen to 19 per cent fat is allowable for men. Women can have 22 per cent. The clinic offers three grades of exams: Type III, the most complete, takes two days, costs $315 including GI X-rays and a glucose tolerance test. Staff docs go over results, prescribe a health program and custom tailor an exercise plan. Out-of-towners, who make up 40 per cent of clinic traffic, get mailed reports.
As a member of the Center, Dixon automatically turned subject for The Dallas Study, Cooper's long-range computerized research attempt to correlate the effects of aerobic exercise on health. All data is processed in the non-profit Institute for Aerobic Research now housed in the Savings and Loan basement across the street. A grant from the Moody Foundation of Galveston is underwriting the statistical analysis of medical records to prove whether or not programmed exercise can reduce cardiovascular disease, lung ailments, ulcers, and even mental disorders.
What makes Dixon run? Ken Cooper, of course, got him going. Lean and intense, the doctor's ardor infects staff and members. Possessed of drive as strong as his high-income prime-movers, Cooper will run with anybody ready when he is. On the track he goads and paces. A champion miler (4 minutes, 31 seconds) back in Oklahoma, he can pull out peak performances leading the pack. Outside the Center is a different story. Cooper gave up dashing around in public on the lecture circuit when he found each stopover had a challenger ready for a showdown.
The Roman Bath quality of the Center and the high price of his preventive medicine leave Cooper open to the charge of elitism, but the doctor hopes to introduce his methodology across the social board. He is interested in geriatric applications and wants to know how exercise figures in mental health. His program has proven results among sightless kids (usually underactive) and asthmatics (generally supercautious about exercising). The Fort Worth school system is adopting the Cooper approach, and in Tulsa, Oral Roberts University will soon boast of its own aerobics center.
If there is a pleasure dome appearance to the million-dollar center, it is off-set by the real exertion acted out there. Preventive medicine is just coming on. You can't get a degree in PM. It is a new frontier. And if bands of Dallas high-rollers dog-trotting on the double is not without comic value, the record stands: of the 3000 men and women cleared for exercise, not one has yet suffered the pain and alarm of what one victim later described as feeling like an elephant standing on his chest—a heart attack.
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