Life April 9 1951 Page 137

continued on page 138

WOMEN

DANCING AT TOPS PARTY LADIES LOSE OUNCES WHIRLING AROUND. THEY PLAY GAMES WHICH REQUIRE BENDING 

TOPS TAKE OFF POUNDS

A kind of Fat Ladies Non-Anonymous helps girls to fight for their figures 

During the war, when she had a job in a Milwaukee brewery, it was the sensible custom of Mrs. Esther Manz to wear slacks. It was also the pleasant habit of her employer to call a short halt in midmorning and midafternoon and serve each employe a glass of the company product. Mrs. Manz had always been a bit overweight, and this kind treatment soon betrayed her. She found she was too fat to get into her slacks. 

Then, unlike most U.S. adults who are overweight -as 25% of them are-Mrs. Manz did something about it. She quit her job and started TOPS ("Take Off Pounds Sensibly"). Today, three years later, there are TOPS clubs for some 2,500 overweight women in Wisconsin, Michigan, California, Massachusetts, Illinois and South Dakota, and Mrs. Manz is kept busy answering phone calls (she has had 5,000) and letters (40 a week) and visiting the 43 clubs in Milwaukee. 

TOPS, which has no dues and gives Mrs. Manz no salary, is neither fad nor cult. In some ways (next page) it is modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, but unlike AA it does not operate in privacy; excess weight being what it is, is hard to keep secret. At weekly meetings TOPS members gather to weigh in, sing songs ("Every mealtime check your eats; count the calories, dodge the sweets"), dance (above), play games and plan low-calory meals which are the basis of their reducing method. By sticking to the TOPS diet its members lose weight steadily and have often accomplished wonders of reducing in a remarkably short time (p.140). 

WEIGHT OF FAT is dramatized by lady with 16-pound bowling ball. She has lost 24 of her original 274 pounds.  

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The average price of a new home then was $9000 about 2.56 times the yearly average wage of $3510. Which was about 2.34 times the price of a new car $1500. Today?