book – Remembering Muscle Beach

Five of us from Canada made the pilgrimage to the Santa Monica Gymfest, California in the late 1970s.

What an era!

Remembering Muscle Beach: Where Hard Bodies Began : Photographs and Memories (published 1999) documents how it all got started.

… Harold Zinkin (the first Mr. California as well as inventor of the Universal Gym Machine) tells the story:

He shares not only the stories of Hollywood celebrities who frequented Muscle Beach—including Mae West, Jane Russel, Jayne Mansfield, and Kirk Douglas—but also provides an insider’s account and photographic view of how this small strip of sand became a haven for the health-conscious and bodies beautiful.

Remembering Muscle Beach: Where Hard Bodies Began : Photographs and Memories

There was always a strong gymnastics connection.

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.”

New Book Celebrates Santa Monica Heyday – Peggy Clifford, Santa Monica Mirror Editor