From the start, the PCYF viewed children in terms of a market, with fitness as the product, describing their work as “sales promotion.” One PR professional advised PCYF administrators to make kids “want fitness the way every teenager yearns for a blue convertible.” The PCYF established partnerships with corporations as well as the advertising firms they employed, developed relationships with national nonprofit associations, held yearly conferences, and sponsored an annual youth fitness week in May, explicitly timed to function as a counter to Soviet May Day festivities. Encouragement to take up fitness showed up on television and radio (both in commercials and segments within programs), in billboard and marquee advertising, on mail postmarks, and in the distribution of fitness “kits,” with logs to record various achievement benchmarks.
There were clear ideological elements attached to these campaigns. General Mills developed packaging for Wheaties cereal, for instance, featuring two-time Olympic gold medalist and ordained minister Bob Richards, who told cereal consumers, “It’s never been more important for Americans to improve their fitness,” alluding to Cold War hostilities and the potential for battle.
But the campaigns also lifted the idea of fitness more generally. Prior to mid-century, the idea that one had to work to maintain one’s body was unheard of. The PCYF’s work increased awareness of the sedentary nature of postwar suburban lifestyles, and along with research on the role of preventive medicine in health, helped to establish that the body was a problem and fitness was the answer.
Dixie Qualset, a massage studio owner sponsored by Ben-Gay ointment, became another well-known face of this period. Associated more for her “magnificently developed set of pectoral muscles” than any militaristic messaging, she toured the nation and appeared on TV as “Miss Youth Fitness,” speaking on the need for children’s recreational opportunities. State and municipal governments held their own events. National organizations, such as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and Camp Fire Girls, as well as religious denominations, like the Latter-day Saints, also developed programming and outreach, adapting the PCYF’s fitness campaigns to their own ends.