Every week when I join others in my fitness club's energetic kickboxing classes, I think of my mother.

In the 1950s, she would stop her seemingly endless household chores--taking care of three kids, her own mother and my dad--and turn on the black-and-white Motorola in the living room to WEWS, Channel 5. She'd spend an hour a day, several days a week, working out with a glamorous, super-fit TV personality named Paige Palmer. (She skipped Mondays, when she bowled with an all-women league at Parmatown Lanes. She was much better at it than my brother and me.)

Like a lot of other stay-at-home wives and mothers in northeast Ohio, she quit ironing and cleaning and child-minding and cooking long enough to spend some me-time doing toe touches, twists, scissor kicks, leg lifts, stretch-rope exercises, squats, running in place, deep knee bends, sit-ups and jumping jacks, often while wearing her standard shirtwaist dress.

"The Paige Palmer Show," starring "The First Lady of Fitness," debuted in 1948 and remained on the air for 25........

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