Our current national campaign against obesity looks backwards to an earlier day when our grandparents kept their weight down by walking everywhere, performing manual labor, avoiding fast foods, and chain smoking several packs of cigarettes a day.
My town, Amesbury, hosts innumerable fitness activities including the annual “mud run,”, so I recently suggested to Mayor Thatcher W. Kezer III that he revive the Sadie Hawkins Day Race.
Sadie was a creation of Amesbury’s Al Capp, creator of Li’l Abner, in times auld lang syne one of the most popular comic strips in the world. Sadie, the “homeliest gal in the hills,” grew tired of waiting for the fellows to come a courtin’. Her father was worried about Sadie living at home for the rest of his life, so he decreed the first annual Sadie Hawkins Day, a foot race in which the unmarried gals pursued Dogpatch’s bachelors, with matrimony the consequence of capture.
Indeed, some ideas have consequences. Beginning in 1937, Sadie Hawkins Day races were held at hundreds of high-school and college campuses, where they were considered a woman empowering rite, long before the modern feminist movement began.
Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsberg, once Boston’s most popular rock and roll disk jockey, tells me these races were held regularly at Wellesley College, now better known for its distinguished faculty than its fleet-footed students.
Our local race could start at Al Capp’s house in South Hampton, NH, ending at the newly dedicated Al Capp Amphitheatre in downtown Amesbury, where Mayor Kezer could join the new couples in Holy Matrimony.
Combat obesity! Promote family values! Organize a Sadie Hawkins Day Race in your town!
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As for my walking, working, and non-smoking grandparents, when they were my age three of them were dead, the men for almost two decades. Go figure.
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