Magana Baptiste and her late husband Walter, shown at top, were pioneers in the yoga and fitness movement. Now 84, Magana still teaches yoga twice a week.

Yoga centers might be as commonplace as Starbucks, but once upon a time in San Francisco there was only the Yoga Philosophic Health Center.

The center was opened in 1955 by Walt and Magana Baptiste, already the darlings of the Bay Area's beauty-and health-conscious set. Eleven years earlier, as news magazine articles of the day will attest, Walt (who became Mr. America in 1949) and Magana (first runner-up in the 1951 Miss USA contest) had started a gym near Union Square that introduced to the general public the strange notion of bodybuilding, complete with barbells and resistance machines.

Despite the couple's popularity among the well-heeled and well-toned, years went by before more than a handful would brave their $5 per month yoga classes. It was all too weird, this Indian music and incense burning, this talk of harmony and inner peace, this twisting like a pretzel and standing on one's head. Those who came would beg the Baptistes not to tell their spouses they were taking this "yogurt". With the '60s, of course, yoga caught on, and their thousands of students over the next four decades would include socialites and celebrities, from Lenny Bruce to Herb Caen, and the couple would appear on radio and TV, including "The Ed Sullivan Show." By then, Magana had added what was called Oriental dance to her repertoire, and was teaching women the exotic art of belly dancing while putting on stage shows across the country with her dance troupe.

Magana Baptiste was reminiscing the other day in her studio and home in the Jordan Park section of the city. Flower bouquets, wrapped gifts and leftover cake from her birthday filled the dining room-turned-office. She just turned 84, an age one would guess from her history but definitely not from looking at her. Moments earlier, she had been twisting and bending as freely as a leaf in the wind as she led a dozen students through their yoga practice. Walt, her husband of 56 years, passed away, but she is continuing their legacy, teaching twice a week and running what is now called the San Francisco Royal Academy of Belly Dance. She is also the matriarch of what yoga magazines call the Baptiste Dynasty: Her son, Baron, yoga instructor to movie stars, is the author of several books including the bestseller "Journey Into Power"' daughter Sherri is a well-known yoga instructor in Marin County and has written a "Dummies" book on yoga; and daughter Devi teaches Middle Eastern dance at the family center here on Euclid street.

"Be sure to read this on, because this one calls me a pioneer," she says, poring through a thick pile of magazine and news clippings.

Baptiste does consider herself a pioneer, but she says so as if she's the luckiest woman in the world. She not only doesn't brag about her many accomplishments, but she also forgets to mention most of them. It's only when a visitor happens on a news story or stumbles on a plaque or trophy in her house that she says, "Oh, yes," she was the lead dancer in a Rock Hudson movie, and "That's right," she was named a Yogi by an Indian guru, and on and on.

She is a tiny woman, barely over 5 feet tall. She wears her shoulder-length hair a medium brown with side bangs and a flip like Mary Tyler Moore. Even close-up she looks like a woman in her 50s. Only the liver spots on her hands really give her away.

She's always looked younger than her years, she says. She credits yoga and its positive spiritual outlook with keeping her feeling and looking young.

"I love yoga because it makes you feel a lot of joy," Baptiste says. "When you're happy, you always feel young."

To this day, Baptiste can bend and touch her toes, do splits and arch her back till her head's nearly touching the ground. Standing on her head is one of her favorite postures, she says, and she does so twice a day, to bring blood and energy to her brain.

Baptiste leads her Wednesday evening or Saturday morning yoga class in the former living room of her house. The room is filled with candles, small sculptures of Indian gods and goddesses, and gongs brought home from her travels throughout Asia and the Middle East where she visited to expand her knowledge of yoga and dance.

A few of her students are up in years, with white hair and deep wrinkles. One of the women says she's been a student since 1972, and lifts a leg over her head as if to prove it.

Though many of her students have years of experience, the pace of the class is slow and focuses more on achieving calm than in acrobatics. "Ankles up," she calls out. "Like you're going to fly."

"Terrific," she adds, giving a compliment with every new pose. "You're all doing so beautifully."

Though a life of yoga and dance have done much for her, Baptiste says she's always been happy.

She was born Ethel Magana Downie in El Salvador. Her dad was Scottish, her mom Salvadoran. Magana was her maternal family name. Her parents separated when she was an infant, and her mother and three aunts brought her to San Francisco to grow up.

Her mother's family was upper middle class, so the women were immediately able to buy a house on Shrader Streeet in the Haight-Ashbury. Back then, it was an Irish-Catholic neighborhood. She was the only Latina in the neighborhood, she says, but never felt left out. Chatty and pretty and easygoing, she got along with everyone.

Dance lessons at an early age made her gravitate toward the stage, but her dreams of becoming a performer got nixed early on when she got rejected from her only audition at Polytechnic High, a now defunct public school near Kezar Stadium. She still yearned for the stage after graduation, but her mother wanted her to be able to earn a living, so she enrolled at Munson's Business College in downtown San Francisco and went to work as a file clerk and executive assistant at Bank of America.

Alas for her mom, Baptiste and one of her teachers became good friends. The teacher was the daughter of the president of Ecuador, she says, and her home was a gathering spot for many of the city's socialites and artists. One of the guests was the director of the Wayfarers Theater on Clay Street, and he invited her to take workshops there. Soon she was being cast in skits, then plays. In the meantime, Baptiste took diction and voice lessons and dumped her office job to become an instructor at an Arthur Murray dance studio.

Another introduction from another friend changed her life again. One of the dance instructors was having a birthday party at her home in North Beach and invited Baptiste. At the party was a beautiful young man with a muscular physique never seen in those days before working out at the gym became such a mantra. She was 22, he 26. They started talking, one thing led to another, and three months later they were married.

Walt preferred her middle name, and so Ethel Downie became Magana Baptiste. He had a gym on Sutter Street, the Walt Baptiste Bodybuilding Center, and she began working there as an instructor, giving women lessons on how to improve their figures with the use of dumbbells and these new-fangled resistance machines. Except for Jack LaLanne's fitness studio in Oakland, there was nothing else like their gym in the Bay Area, she says. Soon, a Who's Who of San Francisco had joined, and the couple became regular mentions in Herb Caen's column in The Chronicle, and frequent guests on radio and TV talk show.

"The world came to us," she says.

In the meantime, Baptiste began exploring more exotic dance forms and became drawn to the grace and hand motions of Indian temple dance. That led to Middle Eastern dance, with its belly dancing. Within a few years, she was putting on shows across the country and was invited down to Hollywood.

It was the early '50s. One day she noticed a tiny awning on Sunset Strip offering something called yoga. The instructor was Indra Devi, who later became a legend in yoga circles. Coincidentally, her husband was already familiar with the ancient practice, having been introduced decades earlier to the breath work and movements by his uncle, a world traveler. When the couple moved back to San Francisco two years later, they decided to concentrate on yoga in their fitness center. Magana Baptiste added classes in Middle Eastern dance. And though the early years were rough, they eventually took off and for a long while were celebrities themselves.

Being a social magnet had its rewards, and the beautiful couple was invited to all the right parties. Times changed, of course, yoga became mainstream, and their early fans and supporters began to pass away. The full-page stories and the TV guest spots faded with the years, and in the early 1990s, the couple decided to close their last center and just teach out of their home.

Walt died in 2001 at the age of 83 from heart trouble, but Magana staves off loneliness with her classes and her memories. She's written several books on yoga technique that she hopes to have published - "It's all in the breathing," she confides - and wants to get a new computer so she can create a digital archive of the early days of yoga.

Though she can recite endlessly from the writings of ancient and living gurus, her life's philosophy these days is unwittingly from a wise man she's likely never heard of, Yogi Berra.

"Remember," she says as she bids a visitor she's just met goodbye with a tight hug for courage. "Life's not over till it's over."

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