I was in my doctor's exam room, waiting for him to show up, when I noticed these historical pictures of Columbus Circle. I photographed them...badly...to enlarge one prominent advertisement.
Google brought up one mention from the Columbia Spectator, dated December 1902.
And then this, from January of the same year.
So apparently, he's Columbia University's gymnasium director.
Here's a letter to the Spectator, dated December 1898, expressing his concerns for the physical welfare of Columbia students.
Here's a mention in King's How to See New York, A Completely Trustworthy
Guide, published in 1914. You can always trust a guide that says it's
completely trustworthy.
And, an ad for the institution, from the American Physical Education Review, Volume 27.
And a badly scanned excerpt from the Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research (That's "psychical," you'll note. Not "physical").
It's an anecdote from 1901 concerning hypnotizing a patient so he can remember
past lives from a thousand years ago. A Doc Savage adventure!
So: Doc Savage, real guy. I wonder if Lester Dent or his publishers at Street & Smith were familiar with the guy's place, or at least his billboard.
There's still a gymnasium in Columbus Circle. It's an Equinox.
And if I had known the real Doc Savage was basically a gym teacher when I was still a essentially a phys. ed. flunkout, I would have thrown my copies of those Bantam Books reprints in the trash no matter how many James Bama covers they had.
