A nostalgic glance backward, 1976
In her closing remarks to the 1976 annual gathering of her institute, Ida turned, unusually, toward history. She was eighty-two. The advanced classes of 1975 and 1976 had been the most productive teaching years of her career, and a new generation of practitioners was now carrying the work into cities and countries she had never visited. The pivot in this talk — from the institutional present to the founding past — was deliberate. She had noticed that many of the newer trainees did not know the names of the people who had made the practice possible in the first place. So she stopped the forward motion of the report and walked them backward through the mid-1960s, when there were no classes, no institute, no recipe taught in numbered sessions — only her hands, a few colleagues, and a circuit of demonstrations held wherever she could find a room.
"One of them is Rosemary Fitus. Many of you have known Rosemary, some I fear don't know her, but Rosemary and I were the people who got together and organized Rolfing as you know it now, And Rosemary and I worked, well I sometimes think of that old saw about how we did all we could on six days of the week and the rest we did on the seventh."
Ida opens the retrospective by naming Rosemary Feitis, her closest organizational collaborator:
Rosemary Feitis was the editor and organizer behind the scenes. She had taken Ida's manuscripts in hand, sat with her through the writing, and helped construct what would eventually become the 1977 book. But Feitis was also a practitioner, and the two of them — Ida said in the same talk — gave sessions on six days of the week and tried to write on the seventh. Into this two-person operation, in the late 1960s, came Dick Demerle. He was not, by Ida's account, primarily a writer or a theorist. He was the one who traveled.
Demerle and the licensing problem
What Demerle did was solve a problem that, in the late 1960s, threatened to keep the practice confined to California. State medical boards in those years were aggressive about unlicensed bodywork, and a person who arrived in, say, Texas or Florida and began putting hands on bodies for a fee could find themselves cited within days. Ida herself had been thrown out of various professional rooms over the decades — she made a joke of it elsewhere in the transcripts, listing the medics, the osteopaths, and the chiropractors who had all at one time or another shown her the door. Demerle's response to the licensing landscape was characteristically practical. He went and got the licenses. Seven or eight of them, in different states, under whatever credentials those states recognized — massage, physical therapy, the various categories available to a bodyworker in that era. The point of the licenses was not to practice quietly under cover. The point was the opposite: to be legally protected while doing demonstrations and public talks.
"And then there was Dick Demerle, and Dick Demerle managed to get himself licensed in some seven or eight different states so that he could go into those states demonstrating Rolfing, letting people know what it was about, what it was like, and so forth and so forth, And in those days he was again a voice crying in the wilderness and now I feel we have no voices crying in any wilderness anymore."
Ida describes what Demerle did and why it mattered:
The phrase Ida uses — voice crying in the wilderness — is borrowed from the Gospels, where it describes John the Baptist preparing the way for what came after. She uses the phrase deliberately. In her telling, Demerle was preparing ground. He was not yet teaching; the formal training programs did not exist. He was creating the conditions under which a person in Atlanta or Houston or Miami could have heard of the work and considered receiving it. The licenses gave him standing. The standing gave him rooms to speak in. And the rooms gave the practice its first public audience east of the Mississippi.
Bill Williams and the Florida explosion
After Demerle, in Ida's chronological telling, came Bill Williams. Williams was the third figure in the founding circle, and his geography was specifically Florida. Where Demerle had spread himself thin across many states, Williams went deep into one. Ida describes him with a phrase she clearly relished — silver-tongued — and the picture she gives is of a single charismatic practitioner igniting an entire state's interest in a way that the small West Coast operation could barely keep up with.
"And then, oh yes, then a little later a very silver tongued appeared on the scene, a really silver tongued rolfer appeared on the scene, his name was Bill Williams and he came from Florida. And Bill listened to the gospel up in Big Sur, and he he went back to Florida and he started preaching it, and he preached with such a silver tongue that he got the whole state of Florida, and I used to think in those days every citizen of the state of Florida came and wanted to be roughed, and they didn't want to be roughed next week, they wanted to have been roughed last week."
Ida describes Bill Williams's effect on Florida:
The structural pattern of the founding circle, as Ida lays it out, begins to become visible here. Feitis ran the operation in California with her. Demerle covered the legal and geographical groundwork across many states. Williams converted Florida. Each person opened a region or a function, and the work spread by personal contact and by reputation, not by institutional advertising. There was no institute to advertise from. The Rolf Institute would not be founded until 1971, and the systematization of the work into ten numbered hours was still being refined inside Ida's own teaching. What Demerle and Williams were demonstrating was the work in its earlier, more provisional form.
Julian Silverman and the Esalen amplification
The fourth name in Ida's roster is Julian Silverman, whom she identifies as a figure who came to Esalen from a stint in Washington. Silverman was not a practitioner. He was a researcher and administrator — eventually he would become Esalen's director — and his role in the founding circle was different from Demerle's or Williams's. Where Demerle gave the work geographic reach and Williams gave it converts in Florida, Silverman gave it institutional cover at Esalen and, through the speaking he did in Florida alongside Williams, a kind of intellectual credibility the practitioners themselves could not quite supply.
" And then there was remembering Bill Williams, I remember Julian Silverman of Esselen, now of Esselen. In those days he was closer to the establishment than he is now, and he had just come from"
Ida brings Julian Silverman into the list:
What follows the Silverman introduction, in the same chunk, is a story about Silverman going down to Florida and speaking at meetings Williams had organized — the two of them working in tandem. According to Ida, Silverman could get audiences in Miami so worked up that they claimed, had Ida herself been present, they would have carried her around the town on their shoulders. The detail is comic, but it tells you what the founding circle was actually doing: building, in city after city, a public audience for a kind of work most listeners had never heard of and could not, by description, quite understand.
Why she named them
The sentence in which Ida sums up the founding circle is the one most worth pausing over, because it is also the sentence in which she names what she is most afraid will happen. Ida had watched, by 1976, several waves of newer practitioners come into the institute who did not know the names of the people in front of whom they would not have had a profession to enter. She did not want those names lost. She made the point in two parts: first, that Feitis, Demerle, Williams, Silverman were not practitioners in the sense the institute was now training, and second, that this was precisely why they should be remembered.
"And you see, they weren't Rolfers as much as they were founding friends of Rolfers, and I do not like to have their contribution and their friendship forgotten."
Ida states her reason for the inventory:
Founding friends — the phrase carries a weight in Ida's usage that may not be obvious at first read. A founding friend is not a colleague in the sense of being a co-author or co-teacher. The founding friends were not on the institute's faculty. Some of them had never been trained in the recipe at all. But they had each done something that made the spread of the work possible — Demerle the licensing, Williams the Florida demand, Silverman the institutional amplification — and Ida understood that without them the work would have remained a small private practice in California. The institute existed because the founding friends had created an audience for it to exist among.
The Esalen welcome
Behind Demerle and Williams and Silverman, in Ida's account, stood Esalen itself — the Big Sur retreat center where so much of the early work was demonstrated and where Ida taught her first formal classes. Esalen was not a person; it was an institution and a place. But Ida personified it in her remarks, crediting Dick Price and the staff with offering, in her phrase, a welcome on the doormat. The welcome was concrete: she was given access to the famous baths for sessions, given lecture time, given the use of meeting rooms, given the social network that flowed through Big Sur in those years.
"And then of course there was Esselin itself, Esselin and the friendly moving spirit of Esselin, Esselin and Dick Price, who gave us welcome and who gave us cooperation and who gave us the use of the baths for the rolfing procedures and so forth and so forth. And always there was a welcome on the doormat at Esselin and we were delighted to see it. And Esselin, I think many of you recognize the fact that no other media, no other media, newspapers, periodicals, books, nothing would have could challenge the supremacy of Esselen, the supremacy of the gossip circuit of Esselen in spreading that gospel of Rolfing. And in the lunchroom and in the baths this story got around and as you know people came from all over the world and stayed at Essil in a few weeks and in so doing got inoculated with the knowledge that there was this technique of ralphing, that it worked, it was good, many times they tried it and they carried the knowledge back to their various parts and really and literally the story got around."
Ida turns from the named individuals to the institution that held them:
The gossip-circuit theory of cultural spread is itself worth noting. Ida did not believe the work spread because of any single charismatic performance, or because of any particular book or article. She believed it spread because people who had received sessions talked to other people in informal settings — the baths, the lunchroom, the residential workshops — and those people then carried the curiosity home with them to places no formal advertising could have reached. Demerle's role, in this theory, was to make sure that when a person in Houston returned home from Esalen wanting to know more, there was a licensed practitioner that person could actually go and see.
Fritz Perls and the Esalen years
One more figure deserves naming in the founding circle, though Ida discusses him in a separate part of the same retrospective: Fritz Perls. Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, was for several years a resident teacher at Esalen and an enthusiastic recipient and proponent of Ida's work. He was, by all accounts, a difficult man, and Ida acknowledges this with a slight smile in the transcript — but she also says, plainly and without hedge, that he was much beloved at Esalen and that the practice owed him a debt that would not be repaid for years. Perls's contribution was different in kind from Demerle's. Where Demerle worked the geographic margins, Perls was at the cultural center — a major teacher at the most influential personal-growth institution in the country — and his enthusiasm for Structural Integration carried it into a network of psychotherapists and growth-movement figures who might never have encountered it otherwise.
"talking about Rolfing every step of the way. And this again was what put us on the map because people in spite of of his temperament, people loved Fritz. And there are in this room many people here who will bear witness to the fact that Fritz was a much beloved teacher in Esselen, and I am full of regrets these days when in classes I say, yeah do any of you remember Fritz and every once in a while there's a class where no one remembered, no one knew Fritz, they only know of him. This is a cause of sadness to me because it will be many and many a long day before Ralfas really are out of their debt, their indebtedness to Fritz and what he did for them in those early days. Well that takes us pretty much to the place where you people begin to come on, where most many of you, most of you, begin to come on the scenes and begin to get better acquainted with what goes on, what has goes on still in terms of Rolfing and what we want to do."
Ida turns to Fritz Perls's role in the same nostalgic vein:
The Perls passage is the clearest expression of Ida's anxiety about institutional forgetting. She had begun, by 1976, to walk into classrooms full of newer trainees who did not know who Fritz Perls was. The same forgetting was already happening with Demerle, Williams, Silverman, and Feitis — slower, because those names were less famous, but inevitable. The retrospective talk, read as a whole, is best understood as Ida's attempt to slow that forgetting down. The naming of Demerle in the middle of her list was not incidental; it was part of a deliberate inventory.
What the early work actually looked like
It is worth pausing on what Demerle would have been demonstrating in those seven or eight states. The practice he carried was not yet the ten-hour recipe in the form it took by the mid-1970s. The systematization was still evolving inside Ida's own teaching, and the early demonstrations were often shorter — sometimes a single hour, sometimes work on a single region of the body. Ida describes elsewhere in the transcripts what that early style looked like, and the contrast with the mature recipe is instructive.
"Now, what was the specific line of thought that got you from individual work with an arm or a foot or an ankle? Well, the arm didn't fit into the body. So you went further up or down. That's right. When did you begin to get a notion that there was there were stages, one after the other, which would be the exact way to realign the body? Like, why what stage comes before another stage in structural integration? The body talks about it. That's all I can say. The body talks about it and those people who are in the audience, and I imagine there are a good many of them, a number of them, who have studied in my classes, know what I mean when I say the body talks about it. And if you will start with a program, start with your first hour, which I teach you, lo and behold, by the time they come in in the second hour, every one of those 10 people will show you the same mal symptom. Will show you that their legs are not under them. Will show you that their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you."
In a separate interview, Ida describes how the ten-session sequence emerged out of earlier piecemeal work:
The implication for the founding circle is significant. Demerle was demonstrating a practice that was still under construction. The seven or eight licenses he held were licenses to do something that did not yet have a finished form. This makes his early advocacy even more notable in retrospect: he was traveling and demonstrating a practice for which the full theoretical and structural explanation had not yet been written down — Ida's book would not appear until 1977 — and he was doing so on the strength of personal contact with Ida and the conviction that the work could change a body.
Changing the gospel
By the time Ida gave the 1976 retrospective, the work had developed substantially beyond what Demerle and Williams had demonstrated a decade earlier. Ida was aware of this and explicit about it in the same talk. She acknowledged that some of the older practitioners — those trained in the late 1960s and early 1970s — were beginning to complain that the institute kept holding new classes and updating the teaching. Her response is worth recording in full, because it speaks both to her respect for the founding circle and to her insistence that the work could not stand still.
"I hear a certain amount of complaints going on these days because some of you who are in those older earlier brackets of Rolfing are complaining because we have so many new classes and we keep telling everybody about the difference in the teaching nowadays from the old teaching and so forth. But actually you see if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world we also would be in the garbage pail, I fear. It is this capacity for change and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change that keeps us as a valuable contributor to the culture of today. And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity."
Ida addresses the older practitioners' complaints about updated teaching:
The balance Ida struck is delicate. On one hand, she insisted that the founding friends — Demerle and the others — be remembered, that their contributions not be forgotten, that the institute know its own history. On the other hand, she refused to treat their early version of the work as the canonical version. The practice they had carried was, in her phrase, still good — but it did not yet work deeply enough. The institute owed them gratitude; it did not owe them stasis. Demerle's licensing across seven or eight states had made the modern practice possible; the modern practice was not obligated to remain the practice he had demonstrated.
Art form to scientific analysis
Ida had a theoretical framework for the change she was describing, and she articulated it in the same talk. Every revolutionary idea, she said, begins as an intuitive art form in the mind of the innovator, and only later progresses into an analytical and replicable system. The early Esalen years, she argued, had been the art-form stage. The founding friends — Demerle on the road, Williams in Florida, Silverman amplifying, Feitis organizing — had carried the work in its art-form phase. The institute's job, by 1976, was to move the practice into the next phase without losing what the founding friends had achieved.
"At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication."
Ida frames the founding period as the art-form phase of a longer intellectual evolution:
Read this way, Demerle's role becomes clearer. He was not asked to be a theorist; he was asked to be a demonstrator. The licensing he secured and the demonstrations he gave belonged to the art-form phase of the work — the phase in which the practice spread by direct perception, by the visible change in a body that an audience could see for themselves, by personal contact and informal transmission. The systematization of the ten-session sequence, the development of the advanced classes, the theoretical writing — all of that came later. By the time Ida was giving the 1976 talk, the art-form phase was nearly twenty years in the past, and she wanted the people who had carried it remembered.
The two ways
One last passage from the broader transcript record is worth including, because it captures something about Demerle that the main retrospective leaves out: he was, at least in Ida's memory, a person willing to do things differently. The reference is glancing, almost an aside, in a chapter from her public-tape series about how she taught the recipe's opening hour. But it survives, and it is the only place in the transcripts where Ida names Demerle outside the founding-friends inventory.
"I can get the osteopath to throw me out. I can get the chiropractor to throw me out, and I can get thrown out. Very. It used to be a saying in our family. We had two ways to do things the right way, and I had the Demerle way. Well, at any rate, this is the story."
In a teaching aside about her own family's running joke, Ida names Demerle:
The joke is affectionate. Ida is not faulting Demerle; she is acknowledging, in a single phrase, that he had his own style. Read alongside the licensing story, this aside takes on additional meaning. A person who gets himself licensed in seven or eight different states in order to demonstrate a practice that mainstream medical boards do not recognize is, almost by definition, doing things the Demerle way. The right way, in Ida's family joke, would have been to wait for institutional sanction. The Demerle way was to go ahead without it.
Coda: what the inventory means
The 1976 retrospective is, in the end, the only sustained statement in the entire transcript record about Dick Demerle. The references are concentrated in a single chunk from a single talk, and they are brief. But the brevity itself is part of the meaning. Ida was not writing a biography of Demerle. She was naming, in a single rapid sweep, the small group of people without whom her work would have remained private. Feitis organized. Demerle traveled and obtained legal standing. Williams converted Florida. Silverman amplified. Perls — separately, in the same talk — gave the work its cultural credibility through the Gestalt and personal-growth networks. Esalen held the whole thing together as a meeting ground.
What the inventory says about Ida herself is perhaps the more important thing. At eighty-two, in front of a room of younger practitioners, she chose to spend her closing remarks naming people most of those practitioners had never met. The institute she had founded was thriving; the work was spreading internationally; she had every reason to talk about the future. Instead she talked about the past. She named the founding friends precisely because she understood that institutions tend to forget the people who made them possible, and she wanted, while she still could, to write those names back into the institute's memory. Demerle's name is preserved here in a single paragraph of a single talk. Without that paragraph, his contribution would already be lost.
See also: See also: the 1976 IPR Convention talk in full (IPRCON1) — Ida's most extended biographical retrospective, covering the founding years from roughly 1965 through the establishment of the Rolf Institute in 1971, and the source for almost everything in the historical record about Demerle, Feitis, Williams, and Silverman. IPRCON1 ▸
See also: See also: the RolfB2 public tape, where Ida names Demerle in the context of her family's joke about the right way and the Demerle way — the only mention of him outside the formal retrospective. RolfB2Side1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Structure Lectures opening (STRUC1), where the introducer recites Ida's biographical credentials — Barnard PhD in 1916, Rockefeller Institute employment, the late-1920s European trip and the Schrödinger lectures in Zurich — establishing the scientific framing that Ida and her founding friends carried forward into the Esalen years. STRUC1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class first-hour debrief (T1SB), where a senior practitioner reflects on Ida's own life as an integrated example of the work she taught — describing how she had integrated her life toward understanding Structural Integration, the same integration she demanded of the founding friends. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: an early-1970s interview (PSYTOD1) in which Ida describes the training pipeline as it existed once the institute had formalized — biological-science reading, auditing classes, screening of candidates — the systematized successor to the informal apprenticeships through which Demerle, Williams, and the other founding friends had originally come up. PSYTOD1 ▸
See also: See also: a public-tape passage on training standards (RolfA5Side1) in which Ida laments the proliferation of unaccredited massage trainers in California and contrasts them with the licensed, accountable practitioners she had built her network around — a concern that traces directly back to Demerle's earlier insistence on getting properly licensed in every state where he worked. RolfA5Side1 ▸
See also: See also: a 1975 Boulder advanced-class debrief (B2T3SA) in which a senior teacher describes the difference between teaching and therapy — a distinction Ida insisted on, and the same boundary the founding friends had to maintain when demonstrating publicly in states with strict medical-practice laws. B2T3SA ▸
See also: See also: a 1975 Boulder advanced-class leftover session (B4T7SB) in which Ida and the senior practitioners discuss the problem of mixing trainees from different levels in a single class — a logistical challenge the institute had only after the founding-friends era, when the work moved from informal demonstration to formal multi-tier curriculum. B4T7SB ▸
See also: See also: a 1974 Open Universe Class introduction (UNI_021) describing how the research and educational program around Structural Integration was extending into university settings — the institutional fruit of the public groundwork the founding friends had laid a decade earlier. UNI_021 ▸
See also: See also: a 1974 Open Universe Class lecture on the spiritual dimensions of the work (UNI_032) in which a senior teacher reflects on the synergetic and religious framing of the practice — illustrating the wider intellectual culture into which Fritz Perls and the other founding friends had introduced the work at Esalen. UNI_032 ▸
See also: See also: a public-tape reading (RolfB4Side1) in which Ida reads aloud a letter from Jack Downing reporting from Oscar Ichazo's Arica training in Chile — an example of how, by the mid-1970s, the international body-oriented network the founding friends had helped seed at Esalen was now sending its own emissaries back with new ideas. RolfB4Side1 ▸