neighborhood children. In a matter of weeks the class size had grown to 75. The schools offered their gyms for classes as long as she accepted all applicants. In 1949, new students entered her classes. To gauge the effectiveness of her program she borrowed and applied to practical use a fitness test devised by Kraus and Sonja Weber of New York Presbyterian Hospital. The Kraus–Weber test involves six simple movements and takes 90 seconds to administer. To her surprise, 58% of the new students failed the test, while only 8% of the students who had been in the program failed. For the next seven years Prudden and her volunteers tested 4,458 children between the ages of 6 and 16 in the United States. The failure rate was 56.6%. While climbing in Europe, Prudden and Kraus arranged to test children in Europe. In Italy, Austria and Switzerland, the children tested exhibited an 8% failure rate, averaged over the three countries. In 1952, Bonnie (still known as Ruth Hirschland) and Kraus began writing papers for medical and physical education journals concerning their findings (e.g., "Role of Inactivity in Production of DiseaseHypokinetic Disease"), and various media outlets began to pick up the story. Prudden bought an empty elementary school in White Plains, NY in 1954 and after renovating it opened The Institute for Physical Fitness. It housed three gyms, two dance studios, a Finnish sauna, a medical unit, two massage rooms, lockers, showers and an office. Taking classes barefoot was a requirement. Equipment, painted in bright colors, was designed after curbs, boulders, fences, railroad tracks, and walls of a less mechanized day. Chinning bars were built in every doorway. Every child used the 42 stairs between basement and top floor for conditioning, discipline and special muscle building. Outside was an obstacle course that included America's first climbing wall, cargo nets, hurdles, parallel bars, ladders, ramps, balance maze, tightrope, slalom poles and a rappel roof. In 1955, armed with statistics and a personal invitation to the Eisenhower White House, Bonnie Prudden and Hans Kraus presented their findings on the fitness level of American public school children compared to that of their peers in Italy, Austria, and Switzerland. This became known as "The Report that Shocked the President" or the "Shape of the Nation" and was the beginning of a change in American attitudes toward physical fitness. Kraus's presentation followed with the medical implications of