WAY, WAY DOWN IN ILLINOIS` Kaskaskia River Valley there`s a healthy old man who may not have found the secret of eternal life but has found something that makes him feel as if he`ll live forever.

• Doubletake 2 6 24 Tires

Bodybuilder Gene Jantzen says he`s 73 going on 24, and he looks it. Exercise is a lifetime habit he developed long before Nike, Lycra, steroids or Jane Fonda came along. For six decades he has worked out daily by lifting weights and running up and down steep hills around his wooded homesite.

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The tanned, breezy and incredibly fit Southern Illinois native-biceps 16 inches, height 5 foot 6 1/2, weight a steady 165-was into fitness back when fitness wasn`t cool. He remembers bodybuilding with Vic Tanny and Jack LaLanne when the later-to-be-famous muscle men were just California beach bums picking up girls.

Jantzen`s workout history dates to the 1920s when, as a boy growing up in tiny Bartelso, a childhood illness left him so fat his peers shunned him and nicknamed him 'satchel-ass.'

One day, in the winter of 1927, some neighborhood boys asked 11-year-old Gene to go ice-skating with them. Jantzen recalls being elated because he was usually the butt of their jokes and not a playmate. 'When they got me out to the lake, they even helped me to put on my skates, and I couldn`t believe they were being so good to me,' he says. 'Then they pushed me out on the lake to see if the ice would hold.'

It didn`t, and Jantzen dropped into waist-deep water and mud, to the hoots of his companions.

After running home, soaking wet, he sat drying off near his mother`s wood-burning stove, where he spied an old magazine that had been tossed there for kindling. In it he found an ad for a physical-fitness training program and sent away for it.

'It promised to help make a strong man out of you,' Jantzen says. 'It was just a book, but it talked about working out with dumbbells, and chinups and pushups, things that I`d never heard of.'

The rest is Bartelso history. Soon Gene was seen lifting homemade weights and running along country roads to neighbors` puzzled gazes.

'They all actually thought I was nuts,' Jantzen recalls. 'The farmers came into the bank where my dad worked and said, `You better watch that kid, there`s something wrong with him, he`s running out there in the hot sun again.` They were good, gentle people, and they were actually worried.'

But Jantzen was not deterred. By the time he was in high school, he was jogging nine miles into Carlyle to play with friends on the Lake Carlyle beach. Then he would swim downriver to get home in the afternoon.

He saw his first set of real barbells while attending the University of Illinois, and what had been a hobby became a passion. After a cold winter at Champaign, Jantzen wanted some sun, so he transferred to the University of Southern California, where he majored in drama and minored in physical education. There, on 'Muscle Beach' in Santa Monica, he also met, started working out with and, later, competed with Vic Tanny.

In 1946, Jantzen was pictured on the cover of Strength and Health magazine, and the next year, in a national competition, he won the title of

'Best Physique in America.' He also won Mr. New York, Mr. California, Mr. Illinois, Mr. Heart of America and Mr. Junior America titles. He placed third in two Mr. America competitions.

WHILE HE GOT involved in bodybuilding contests, he says he wasn`t oblivious to the temptations of the handsome muscle man, which he listed as exercise, sunbathing and chasing women, in that order.

But because of his strict Catholic upbringing, Jantzen says he eschewed such puruits. Although he hung around gyms to lift weights, he stresses that he lived a clean life even as a young man in sultry southern California. He returned to Bartelso with his wife, Pat, whom he met and married while serving in the Air Force in Nebraska in 1945, and fathered 10 children, living the life of a devoted family man.

Back in Illinois, Jantzen continued to work out. For fun, he used to swim rivers and lakes, including a stretch of the Mississippi River from Alton to St. Louis that`s more than 25 miles. He set a record when he swam 27 miles across the Lake of the Ozarks, and he also swam in marathons in the Great Lakes.

'I did it all just to prove it to myself,' he says, laughing. 'An ego trip, that`s what it was. You get to my age, you don`t mind admitting that an awful lot of this stuff is ego. What other motivation could you have, back in those days when they didn`t give any prizes for it?'

But Jantzen isn`t knocking exercise. In fact, he credits his upbeat outlook to it.

'I don`t think you can bank on living longer because of physical fitness,' he says. 'I could be dead tonight. But my favorite saying-which I think is an original of mine-is, exercise may not make you live longer, but while you`re alive, it makes you feel like you`re never going to die.

'That to me is what counts, in this life at least. If you have to live like these poor creatures in nursing homes, unable to move, I`m telling you. . . .

'I always tell my wife and kids, `If you find me halfway up a hill dead as a doornail, you`ll know I died happily.` The only thing that makes a difference is how you feel every day when you wake up,' he says. 'It`s all about whether you look forward to the day like you did when you were a kid. Not a morning comes along that I`m not enthusiastic about the day ahead.'

In addition to bodybuilding, Jantzen is an accomplished woodcarver and artist who travels from state to state selling his works at flea markets and art galleries.

When he`s not working on his art or working out, Jantzen spends hours at area nursing homes teaching rehabilitative exercise to senior citizens.

A TYPICAL DAY FOR Jantzen begins with 7:30 a.m. mass at church in Bartelso, a few miles down a twisting country road from his home, on a woodsy lot 100 feet above the Kaskaskia River. Then it`s breakfast at McDonald`s in Carlyle, where he favors the biscuits and eggs and shuns the burgers and fries.

After breakfast, he attends to business in town and visits a nursing home. He eats a hearty lunch, then goes to work at a resort area on some family land near Lake Carlyle. At about 6 p.m., he works out, lifting weights and running up and down the steep hills in the woods near his home. After a beer and some pretzels, he works on the faux Indian artifacts or wild-animal figures he sells at flea markets. He also creates more subjective pieces from natural objects, including sticks, feathers and stones. Some of his work is on exhibit at galleries in St. Louis.

Jantzen says he has eaten just two meals a day since he got interested in fitness.

'I have a snack before I go to bed, which I know is not a real good health practice,' he says. 'But my weight stays the same all the time. Your interest in food isn`t as great when you exercise.'

Several years ago, he was diagnosed as having atrial fibrillation, an inherited condition that causes his heart rate to rise dangerously without warning. Although he now takes drugs to control it, Jantzen says he had a lifelong aversion to drugs. He criticizes steroid use.

'(They`re) `pharmaceutical athletes.` There`s no way a man my size can have a 20-inch bicep without taking drugs. Your bone structure just isn`t made for it.'

Doubletake 2 6 24 Tires

Jantzen is generally bemused by the fitness craze that has come along so late in his life. 'All these ideas are as old as the hills. It`s just that people today have forgotten that people way back then said the same thing about how to stay healthy. Back then, you didn`t have to run studies, you just did it yourself and saw what happened. As Shakespeare said, `There`s just nothing new under the sun.` '