By Gillian Flaccus ASSOCIATED PRESS
9:36 p.m. August 9, 2004  - David Harrison Levi
LOS ANGELES Gypsy Boots, a California fitness icon, author and health 
guru who paved the way for generations of beatniks, hippies and
health-food junkies, has died at age 89. Boots, born Robert Bootzin,
died early Sunday at a convalescent home in Camarillo after a brief
illness, said his son, Daniel Bootzin. 

Born Aug. 19, 1915, in San Francisco to Jewish immigrant parents, Boots
defined what it meant to live close to nature decades before the
nation's current obsession with organic foods, yoga and exercise. 
During his life, he tried a number of careers, from author to
entertainer to hay baler to trendy restaurateur ^ but never shed his
long hair and thick beard or his passion for natural foods and a
near-Spartan existence.

"What people have a hard time understanding is that in the early 1960s,
there were no hippies and nobody had long hair, nobody had a beard,"
said Daniel Bootzin. "He really was that way way before anybody had that
look. As a child, I was painfully aware that he was extremely different
than anybody else."

Boots' philosophy of clean living, exercise and healthy eating ^ laid
out in his books "Barefeet and Good Things to Eat" and "The Gypsy in Me"
^ attracted thousands of fans worldwide and netted him 25 appearances on
the Steve Allen Show in the early 1960s. 

Inspired by the German "Naturmensch" movement, Boots and a "tribe" of
fellow bohemians spent the 1940s living off the land in Tahquitz Canyon
near Palm Springs, sleeping in caves and trees and bathing in
waterfalls. Photos from that time show a robust and tan man, often
shirtless and shoeless, with a shaggy beard and long hair. 

His lifestyle was immortalized in the 1948 Nat King Cole hit "Nature
Boy," which was composed by fellow "tribesman" Eden Ahbez, said Gordon 
Kennedy, a longtime friend who has written a book about Boots and other 
Nature Boys called "Children of the Sun." 

etc.

----------------------------------------------------------------------