Word: spa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...West German newspapers. "Or why is it that you must stop and rest halfway, with your heart beating in your throat?" The answer, according to the ad, is not to take the elevator but to take the cure at Bad Tölz, a gemütlich Bavarian spa* where "a new, particularly iodine-rich spring gives your blood vessels elasticity, your heart strength, your nerves fresh vigor." Like all the 140 officially recognized watering places in West Germany, Bad Tölz is itself in the pink of condition, thanks to a booming health cult that in 1963 will...
Unlike most Anglo-Saxons, for whom "taking the waters" went out with gout, Germans today fervently believe that any resort with Bad (meaning bath) in its name is good for what ails them. In fact the spa empire stretches beyond Germany's present borders. From Marienbad, now part of Czechoslovakia, to Baden, outside Vienna, where King Saud, his four wives and entourage are pumping $1 million a month into the local economy, hotel rooms in health resorts are booked solidly through summer and fall. In West Germany alone last year, Kurgäste, or cure-guests, cast $375 million...
...means more to Germans than treatment for any specific ailment. It assures them sympathy in antiseptic surroundings, connotes that the cure-guest has patriotically worked himself to exhaustion, and allows patients endless opportunity to discuss a favorite topic: food and its effect on the digestive tract. Nearly all spa patrons go on rigorous diets, which make them feel better about overeating the rest of the year. Most treatments seem worse than the ailments they aim to cure. Rising at dawn, the dedicated Kurgast gulps beakers of water whose mineral content-notably sodium chloride, sulphur and iron-makes it smell like...
...special one for Saratoga: the 100th anniversary of that shimmering summer day when Lizzie W., a three-year-old filly with a one-eyed jockey in the irons, ran three grueling miles to beat a colt named Captain Moore in the first race ever held at The Spa. Last week everybody celebrated-inlanders and outlanders alike. Bearded men and crinolined ladies bounced through the streets in horse-drawn carriages; diamonds glistened like dewdrops of Saratoga Vichy at black-tie parties. Sousaphones harrumphed, fireworks whiz-banged, and chicken sizzled to a crunchy golden brown. Welterweight Champion Emile Griffith was signed...
Then there was the income tax, the world wars, and a kind of modern-times puritanism that mournful Saratogians refer to scathingly as "Kefauver fever." The Spa seemed suddenly spent. The Club House became a museum, and the last open crap game had to start floating 13 years ago. The United States Hotel became a parking lot and stores, and the Grand Union is now a shopping center, with a supermarket of the same name. Broadway is a honky-tonk jumble of shoeshine stands, rooming houses and has-been hotels...