COMMUNITY PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT
The plan developed by the National Security League, under its committee on physical reserve, of assuring physical fitness for the nation, is capable of endless possibilities in application and development.
The plan treats each as a separate unit and allows it to adapt the physical-fitness scheme to local conditions, favoring the appointment of neighborhood groups for instruction in physical drill and the "Daily Dozen Set-up," assuring such conditions and applications of diet and hygiene as are particularly demanded by the individual community's conditions and demands.
Every individual detail and local development is left to the committee which each mayor or town or borough official appoints, on invitation of the league.
WALTER CAMP, PRESIDENT, AND JOSEPH C. JOHNSON, SECRETARY, OF THE ORIGINAL SENIOR SERVICE CORPS ESTABLISHED IN NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, IN THE SPRING OF 1917
The ideal toward which every community is working is the establishment, as an integral part of it, of a local fitness plant. This includes first, playgrounds laid out for all recreational sports, in their season. The ideal playground system will have enough room in walks and landscape-gardening for park development—sufficient to meet the community's maximum needs.
Community physical-fitness centers are growing up in which an adjacent lake or river provides facilities for rowing, canoeing, and recreational enjoyment through breathing the fresh air, while taking regular physical, conditioning exercises.
Such an ideal community plant has proven by no means a vision incapable of realization. To-day men and women realize painfully the need for one in their home community and are prevented from the fulfilment of their dream by only two obstacles—lack of funds and adequate organization of the plan.
This work and these centers offer the greatest possibilities in the Americanization scheme, perfection of which is a paramount duty for this country.
SETTING-UP WORK OF A COMPANY OF ONE HUNDRED
DOCTOR ANDERSON LEADING A GROUP IN THE YALE GYMNASIUM
Not only do such plants transpose the astonishingly large percentage of the physically unfit of our foreign and domestic population and reclaim those whose physical imperfections have either become evident through the draft, or which are not known, but it affords the surest possible means of interesting this large element of our population in American institutions, of attracting them to the soundest and most beautiful features of American life, and of convincing them of their comradeship in the strength and sinew of American manhood; in short, of building the foundations of democracy on a base as stable as the eternal granite hills.