Lewis Pike; Pioneer in Educational TV

Lewis Arnold Pike, a nutritionist and pioneer in educational television in Southern California, died May 31 of pneumonia at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Woodland Hills. He was 82.

Working alongside early broadcasters like veteran KTLA newscaster Stan Chambers, Pike began his television career in the 1950s producing instructional shows for children. He was best known for a program he created in 1970 called “Viewpoint on Nutrition,” which aired for 28 years and featured Pike interviewing experts and celebrities on health and nutrition.

Calling Pike one of the first educators to recognize the power of television, Chambers credited his former KTLA colleague with bringing educational programming to commercial television stations years before the advent of the Public Broadcasting System.

“We were a small group back in those years,” Chambers said of the people who braved the uncertainties of live television in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. “Arnold Pike was one of the first” in the local educational television arena.

Pike became interested in television during its infancy and wrote articles about the medium in the 1940s, before Los Angeles had any regular television broadcasts.

He produced and hosted his first show, “Playcrafters Club,” on KTLA in 1951 when he was director of radio and television for the California Teachers Assn. Each half-hour show, which aired live five days a week, featured a teacher leading students through an art or craft project.

He later produced a number of other instructional shows during the 1950s, including “Campus Farmers,” “How Does It Work,” “Learning,” “Who Knows This?” and “American Quiz.”

His passion, however, was nutrition, an interest rooted in necessity for Pike.

Born behind a candy store in Brooklyn, N.Y., he said he learned to devour licorice sticks instead of carrots, and soda instead of milk. By high school, he was a self-described “89-pound weakling” who flunked the girls’ physical.

He was so small that on the first day of high school the coach thought he was in the wrong place and pointed him to the junior high down the street. “It took an entrance card to prove I was a high school enrollee,” he wrote in a 1973 book based on his nutrition show.

He continued to endure physical humiliations until some friends introduced him to Physical Culture magazine, one of many publications produced by Bernarr Macfadden, a weightlifter and food faddist prominent in the 1920s and 1930s who is sometimes called the father of physical culture in the United States.

Later, his friends took him to a lecture by diet guru Gayelord Hauser. Soon after, Pike junked his unwholesome diet, made dumbbells out of a pair of lead pipes and started working out. By the end of high school, he had shed his weakling image and was chosen Brooklyn Boys High School’s Man of the Year.

After serving in the Medical Corps of the Coast Guard during World War II, Pike studied chiropractic and moved to California. He became West Coast editor of Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine, writing monthly reports on the nutritional and fitness practices of movie stars such as Esther Williams and Red Skelton.

Hollywood “appealed to him quite a bit,” his son Todd Pike said. After a successful appearance on Ralph Edwards’ “Truth or Consequences” game show, Pike began to study broadcasting.

His longest-running show, “Viewpoint on Nutrition,” was shown locally on KABC-TV and on 60 other stations around the country for almost three decades.

Pike, a longtime resident of Montebello, retired in 1998. He is survived by his wife of 45 years, Ann; sons Mark and Todd of Los Angeles; a grandson and three sisters.