Reading through The DAC’s history, it is interesting to note how the definition of “fitness” has evolved. Over the years, The DAC has expanded and contracted this definition to include gymnastics, football, boxing, basketball, billiards, group fitness and a wide variety of what we might today call “self-care.” 

In decades gone by, the Club has featured an impressive array of saunas, steam rooms, nap rooms, beauty parlors and sunning contraptions. In the 1920s in fact, the Club was “primarily a place to get sun, steam and hot water baths and then take a nap.” By the 1980s, all but two of the quiet “nap” rooms were gone. The 1982 Health Club Manager Melvin “Torch” Morford wrote: “Members don’t have the time or the need for naps so much. They often use the Health Club in connection with exercise.” It seems that trend has continued. 

These photos, from the 1984 DAC history book, show some of the more impressive “self-care” facilities from our past.

Pictured: sunning on the deck (notice the straw mats); O.M. Berve, the DAC’s physical therapy director, demonstrating use of the “Howard moist steam cabinet” in 1963; an 80s-era sunlamp that claims it “uses only A and B wave, not the shorter C waves which burn and dry skin.”; an 80s-era coed whirlpool.