Insight: Strong at Heart, Strong in Spirit

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Bob Lansky was the personification of health for me when I was 10 years old. He was into fitness before it became trendy and believed in passing on his passion for healthy living to everyone he knew.

Ed Pierce still has the Willie Mays baseball
card that Coach Bob Lansky gave to him 
during summer camp in 1964.
COURTESY PHOTO

Lansky taught physical education in public schools in Brighton, New York where I grew up and was a high school cross country and JV wrestling coach. He loved being outdoors and was known for frequently citing “Lanskyisms” which were colorful expressions to fit nearly every scenario regarding athletics.

I first met him when my parents signed me up to participate in summer camp activities on the grounds of Brookside School in our Evans Farm neighborhood. As the camp director, Lansky filled our camp schedule with relay races, kickball, basketball and volleyball games, badminton and tether ball.

He was always the first to arrive each day and the last to leave, constantly preaching about the benefits of drinking milk or eating carrots as a snack instead of potato chips.

Coach Lansky, as he preferred to be called, insisted that we also try some new activities that tested our athletic ability such as archery, crab soccer, bouncing on the trampoline, or horseshoes.

When I balked at climbing ropes to the gym ceiling on a day at camp when it was raining, Lansky chided me by saying “strong like bull or weak like cream puff” and it motivated me to at least try the activity.

I learned from another camper that Lansky never missed an episode of “The Jack LaLanne Show” on television. LaLanne was a fitness guru and nutrition advocate who preached healthy living habits to Americans.

LaLanne was someone that Coach Lansky quoted frequently to his students and campers.

“So many older people, they just sit around all day long and they don't get any exercise,” Lansky once told us during a camp gathering. “Jack LaLanne says their muscles atrophy, and they lose their strength, their energy and vitality by inactivity. That’s why any sort of exercise is important. Mindset matters.”

One summer afternoon in 1964, he pulled me aside after a softball game and asked me how I learned to keep the scorebook. I told him that I played Little League baseball and when I wasn’t playing, our coach would ask me to track that information for him.

The next morning, I arrived at camp to find that Lansky had something for me in his shirt pocket. It was a brand-new baseball card of his favorite player, outfielder Willie Mays of the San Francisco Giants. He gave the card to me and bragged that he had met Willie Mays after a game at the Polo Grounds in the 1950s in New York City.

He said that keeping the scorebook was a special talent and asked if I could look at the box scores in the daily newspaper before coming to camp every morning and tell him how Willie Mays had done during the Giants’ game the night before. The more I read those box scores every day in the newspaper, the more fascinated I became with the baseball statistics on the back of baseball cards.

If I neglected to show up with the daily stats for Willie Mays, Coach Lansky would bark at me with "Lanskyisms" like “Make preparation your separation" or “If it is to be, it’s up to me.” I didn’t fully grasp what those phrases meant at the time, but I sure do now.

During each camp session, Lansky would also have a dance and would offer instructions to the campers about dance moves. I can still recall him playing 45 rpm records repeatedly of Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and “Rag Doll” by the Four Seasons while he taught us various dance steps.

“Dancing ain’t natural but it makes the bones feel alive,” Lansky told us. “Cutting a rug is good work for the ticker.”

Each summer when camp ended, Coach Lansky made it a point to have a party and would give us all blue ribbons for participation. He also handed out awards for teamwork, effort, kindness and individual sports achievements. In 1964, I received a small trophy as “Most Improved Free Throw Shooter” and in 1965, Lansky singled me out for being the “Most Dependable Camper” award for bringing him the daily results of both Willie Mays and third baseman Jim Ray Hart of the Giants.

Now I’ve reached the point in my life where I can look back and reflect on the people who have been influential in helping me to become the person that I am today and Coach Lansky is certainly on that list.

His quirky expressions still register in my brain when unique situations come up, and he could see something inside me when I couldn’t even realize it. Somehow, Coach Lansky sensed that I would go on to become a sportswriter and a journalist and he wanted me to practice reading box scores to glean details about games.

At the close of summer camp each year, Coach Lansky gathered campers in a large circle outdoors and had us join hands, reach to the sky and proclaim, “Strong at Heart, Strong in Spirit.”

He’s gone now but I won’t forget him. <