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Jan 15

Fort Lee doctor who invented ‘wogging’ was more than the creator of a fitness fad – NorthJersey.com

Fitness Comments Off on Fort Lee doctor who invented ‘wogging’ was more than the creator of a fitness fad – NorthJersey.com

It's not walking, and it's not jogging. It's wogging.

Walking sounds boring, theinventor, Dr. Thomas Patrick, Jr., told The Record in 1980. Jogging sounds like work.

Wogging sounds silly. Patrick was not.

The Fort Lee resident wasthefirst African-American physician at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. He practiced medicine in Harlemfor decades, but isbest known for thelaughable moniker he popularized for speed walking.

Fort Lee's Thomas Patrick was the inventor of "wogging" and the first black physician at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.(Photo: NorthJersey.com file photo)

Wogging was basically walking, he admitted, but the fad had a greater significance. Theres nothing wrong with hamburger, but if you give it a fancy name and serve it to the Prince of Wales, it suddenly becomes a big deal, he said.

Optimistic thinking aside, Patricks heart was in the right place. Walking three miles in 45 to 60 minutes four times a week was a basic, attainable way to maintain fitness for people of all ages, he told anyone who would listen.

He wrote in a 1978 letter to a New York newspaper that the activity was fitting for the 99 percent of New Yorkers who wont, cant or shouldnt jog. The letter launched a brief wogging craze,making it a typical fitness fad.

Patrick fielded calls from publishers asking him to write a book, shoe companies seeking endorsements and clothiers pitching hats and shirts. Wogging and charity wog-a-thons were adopted by his hometown of Fort Lee, and more than 200 fitness groups endorsed the exercise.

Dr. Thomas Patrick Jr. proudly displays his sweatshirt proclaiming his favorite form of exercise - wogging - at home in Fort Lee, N.J. November 10, 1989(Photo: Ed Hill, Exclusive rights NJMG)

Over the next decade, Patricks routine remained mostly unchanged. He said that hed wake up every morning, place a granite weight on his abdomen and lift it 1,500 times in 10 minutes with his stomach muscles. He started with a 55-pounds slab a weight gradually reduced to 18 pounds by 1989. When hegot out of bed, hed balance on one foot to put on his socks one at a time in another agility-building exercise.

Never one to loaf around, the retired physician was still attempting to learn Japanese (adding to his extensive German, Spanish, English and French vocabularies), promoting wogging and working out daily at age 81. He was also serving as the co-chair of Fort Lees bias committee, investigating discriminatory hiring practices. It was a role he was sadly suited to hold.

Equipped with a phenomenal intellect, Patrick attended Harvard University in the late 1920s. Stronger, faster and fitter than most, he joined the schools wrestling team but only briefly. He could defeat opponents, but not racism.

"Woggers" return from the second tower of the George Washington Bridge in their effort to raise money for the Leukemia Society during the second annual Wogging Day walk event in Fort Lee, N.J. October 2, 1988(Photo: Peter Monsees, Exclusive rights NJMG)

My coach came up to me before one meet and said, Your man wont wrestle you. Because youre colored, he said.

Patrick graduated from Harvard in 1930, but the aspiring doctor found his options for medical school as welcoming as the racist wrestler he never faced. He found opportunity in Germany and the medical school at the University of Berlin.

There, he was able to skirt racism, while serving witness to the parallel rise of antisemitism and Adolf Hitler. What he saw stuck with him, he told The Record. In 1938, three years after returning to New Jersey with a package for Albert Einstein in hand, Patrick helped two Jews flee to America. He assumed their fate was bleak. I guess I saved their lives, he said.

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As a Harlem-based physician, Patrick saved more lives out of his West 139th Street office over five decades. He also helped traindoctors at Columbia-Presbyterian, where he broke the color barrier when he joined the staff in 1938. I was the first, he said. Others had tried, but I was the first.

Patricks watchword was sensitivity. It was something he carried with him until the very end. His insight into health and his self-awareness even enabled him to predict his own demise.

In his 1980 interview with The Record, he said he expected just to sort of disappear around the year 2000.

Patrick died on Dec. 29, 1999. He was 91, and far more than the inventor of a forgotten fad.

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Fort Lee doctor who invented 'wogging' was more than the creator of a fitness fad - NorthJersey.com

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