While puttering around the Lauderdale Library last night, looking for squirreled-away bottles of Kentucky Nip, I came across a very interesting booklet called “Noe’s Graduated Exercisers,” written by a Memphian by the name of Roy Noe. So I thought I’d tell you about this fellow. That’s him at the left. Got a minute?
At the age of 5, Noe tells us in his booklet, “a severe attack of spinal meningitis left me in a delicate condition. In my early youth, a siege of double pneumonia developed into chronic lung trouble. For years I was sickly and weak, spending all I could earn for medicine and doctor bills.” Oh, it’s a sad story.
While pining away, Noe says he read about a 45-year-old man who regained his health through regular exercise, so he set out to do the same, by purchasing a set of dumbbells. He soon discovered a problem with this approach: “During this period I was a salesman for a large corporation,” he relates, “and my carrying these heavy dumbbells around with me created considerable joking and ridicule on the part of the other salesmen and hotel clerks.” Well, no wonder. Who carries dumbbells in their luggage?
So Noe came up with his own, more portable, gadget — a pair of wooden handles clamped to a strip of rubber — which he called Noe’s Graduated Exerciser. I’m not sure, exactly, what the “graduated” part of the name means. But you grabbed each end and pulled it, and Noe writes that this device, “primitive as it was, proved capable of doing all the things that the other, costlier exercisers failed to do, and more.” In fact, in just 16 months, Noe claimed that his weight jumped from a puny 139 pounds to a robust 172, his chest expanded by 8 inches, and his waist size dropped from 31 to 28 inches.