ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, May 9, 1996 TAG: 9605090020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
LESS THAN TWO weeks ago I saw Artie Levin at the Roanoke YMCA, looking hale and taut as ever. He was showing some people around the exercise room, in his characteristic mode, always the instructor.
It had been a long time. So I decided not to dismount from the calorie-burning gizmo I was riding and go over to shake his hand - as a proper disciple of sweat should have done. Probably he wouldn't remember me, I figured.
Now, after unfolding the newspaper Saturday morning and learning that Artie had died at 82, I'm sorry I didn't make the effort to say hello.
For my entire life, I've assumed Mr. Fitness was indestructible, and there was every reason to believe it. After all, he was a constant part of our lives, those of us of a certain age who grew up in Roanoke or within television-antenna range of the city.
I was a schoolboy when I came to know him. Sometime during the mid-1960s, our classrooms were endowed with black-and-white television sets mounted on tall roller carts. We'd watch space rocket launches, state funerals and some educational programs.
Mornings, as regular as clockwork, the teacher would turn the dial to WDBJ and Artie's daily morning exercise show. There he'd be, always dressed in a black jumpsuit, grinning, skipping and clapping his hands, while Irving Sharp played Mr. Fitness' bouncy theme song on the organ.
We'd stand in the aisle next to our desks and, with his enthusiastic encouragement, mimic his calisthenics: deep-knee bends, jumping jacks, toe-touches, deep breaths.
Like an affable drill sergeant, Artie would gyrate and say, ``C'mon Jimmy, c'mon Debbie, that's the way Stevie, you can do better than that, Robert!"
And you'd think, "How can he see me?''
Artie was what they used to call a "personality," in the olden era when television stations worked much harder to fill their allotments of local air time. Instead of the contemporary syndicated game shows or sitcom re-runs, there were quiz programs, chat shows, live bluegrass hootenannies and lots of cartoons.
Cheesy, perhaps, but these programs showcased local people, and they turned the on-air announcers into small-town celebrities. It was a big deal when you were a kid to encounter somebody famous at the Mick-or-Mack (``Wow!'' It's Dudley Townsend!'') because that was as close to fame as you were going to get, at least in Roanoke.
In those days, television was a relatively young and innocent medium. Our mothers plopped us down in front of the TV without a concern they'd uncorked a bottle containing some terrible, mind-bending genie.
One summer I successfully coerced my dad into taking me to the annual celebrity softball game between WSLS and WDBJ at Salem Municipal Field. Artie was playing the outfield. Somebody hit a ground ball toward him and he let it go through his legs.
"See," said my dad, whose primary form of exercise in those days was lift-and-swallow elbow bends with 12-ounce pilsner glasses, "that's what happens when your leg muscles get overdeveloped."
These days, TV exercise shows have proliferated like dandelions, and you can't flip the remote control without seeing some Spandexed, steely bunned, ab-chiseled enthusiast urging you to feel the burn. Artie Levin was unique, way ahead of that aerobic curve and the national health-conscious mania that's ensued.
And for years he was the most publicly prominent member of Roanoke's Jewish community, back in the days when our Southern mountain town had considerably fewer notes on the ethnic scale.
Artie's son, Larry, was a classmate of mine from elementary through high school, a tough football player built strong and compact like his father. I'll never forget the day in fourth grade when they interrupted class to tell Larry his mother had died. It was a heart-wrenching moment in time, during the 1960s when we seemed to lurch from trauma to trauma, from assassinations, to riots and wars.
Not long after that, my father and I ran into Artie Levin. My dad said something to him I've never forgotten. He told Artie, "I grieve for you."
In recent years, after Artie wasn't on television anymore, you'd see him riding around town on his bicycle - still ahead of his time and the growing public interest in cycling - or read about him competing in a triathlon. Focused and zesty, he seemingly hadn't changed a bit. That was a comfort to a grown-up kid in an uncertain world.
Now he's gone, along with other local television colleagues - Cousin Irving Sharp, Tom "Uncle Looney" Hughes, Andy Petersen - who have died during the past year or so. And so an era is gone, along with so many of the people that helped make coming of age in Roanoke, Va., different from anywhere else.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: A study in motion: Levin predated the national fitnessby CNBcraze and wasn't shy about instructing others about the benefits of
exercise. Clockwise from left: 1. In 1983, putting a class through
its paces in downtown Roanoke; 2. as master of ceremonies at the New
River Valley Senior Olympics in 1985; 3. in 1982, the first to sign
up for the Lung Power Challenge benefit ride; 4. in a WDBJ-TV photo
from 1962, ``Mr. Fitness'' at his fittest.