“You have to think of L.A. as a health boom town,” says Kauffman. “Back in the 1880s, as the railway connected L.A. to the rest of the world, people started flocking there because of the warm climate and fresh food. It was this crucible for alternative spiritual traditions. All kinds of health therapies that had been floating around both Europe and America all gravitated to L.A.”
Among the primary strains of what became Southern California’s pastiche of mysticism was the appropriation of Indian and East Asian spiritual traditions, as well as the Eurocentric strain centered around the Naturmenschen, or “Nature Boys.” The latter grew out of a German romantic movement of the 1890s centered around the idea of Lebensreform (life reform), which involved living outside social conventions by foraging, sleeping nude in the woods, and staying vegetarian.
“The Nature Boys were obsessed with California, not just as an actual place, but as an ideal,” says Christina Ward, author of the forthcoming Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat—An American History. “For German culture California was this utopia-type location, so some of these German health doctors and as well as advocates moved to California.”
Robert Bootzin, a German-born health food advocate who went by “Gypsy Boots” and adopted a kind of holy fool persona, was the charismatic face of the movement. He made regular appearances on The Steve Allen Show and became friends with Baker.
Meanwhile, Jack LaLanne, the so-called “Godfather of Modern Fitness,” made a fortune on television with his barrel-chested physique and clean-living ethos. “He was the embodiment of physical fitness,” Ward says. “He had a morning exercise routine when I was a kid and you’d see him on Johnny Carson doing an inordinate amount of push-ups.” By some serendipitous twist of fate, Baker and LaLanne had crossed paths during World War II. LaLanne was the physical therapist in the hospital where Baker had once stayed while recovering from wounds.
As Baker reached his personal nadir, the ideals of the Nature Boys and LaLanne’s zeal for rebirth through fitness were all swirling in the Californian sunshine. “There were Gypsy Boots and the Nature Boys, but he took everything from them and applied it with his own knowledge,” Isis says. “He went for a walk and he sat on a log and he had a vision that he was to open up a new restaurant.”
In 1969, after losing his once-successful restaurants, Baker transformed an old hamburger joint on Sunset Strip into the Source restaurant. This new venture quickly eclipsed his other restaurants. To diners today, the menu of salads and veggie sandwiches is unremarkable, but in the 1970s it was revolutionary.