A few weeks back, a handful of regulars crowded into Doug Eidd's office for a late-afternoon bull session with the man whose name is on the sign outside the 55-year-old downtown Dallas gym. I couldn't hear much of what they were talking about — I was strapped into the vibrating-belt machine next to the office, trying to loosen a bum back with the antique once marketed as a weight-loss miracle.

Then, over the din — the clank of the half-century-old weights, the whir of the jiggling machine, the thwack of fists connecting with the punching bag — I could hear Doug loud and clear, his voice a raspy boom bouncing off the sagging pressed-tin ceiling.

"Some people think time doesn't even exist," said the strongman philosopher who presides over a business that looks today as it did when Jack Ruby was still spinning the Carousel Club a few blocks down the street.

I cut off the machine. "You're proof of that," I told him, marveling, as ever, at the 87-year-old man who moved to Dallas from Corpus Christi in September 1962 to run the Commerce Street gym that withstood countless downtown busts and booms. For the last 20 years, I was sure Doug and his gym would outlive us all.

But one week from Saturday, the unthinkable will happen: He will cut off the lights, walk down those creaky stairs in that narrow corridor, lock the door, and that will be that. Doug's Gym — which opened the same year John Glenn orbited the planet and the Beatles released "Love Me Do" and the U.S. and Soviet Union stared down the Cuban Missile Crisis — will close for good.

And not because Doug wants to shutter his no-frills (and, for that matter, no-air-conditioning) gym, not really. But because he has no choice.

Doug has been operating without a lease for a year and spent the last few weeks in limbo, unsure whether his landlord, in the process of selling the 107-year-old storefront to foreign owners, would let him stay a few more weeks or months or maybe even a year. He discovered in recent days that he has only until March 31.

He is being run out, in part, by downtown's resurrection. Rent, which was $250 in 1962, recently skyrocketed to $3,400 — a hard nut to cover with a shrinking clientele paying around $40 a month for the privilege of working out in a time capsule owned by a grizzled sage tougher and kinder than anyone you will ever know. And surrounding construction has chased off some clients who don't want to tangle with traffic and parking.

The building is too valuable now for what the U.K. version of Men's Health called in 2016 "5,000 square feet of fitness history that may be the most durable monument to physical exercise still extant outside of a museum."

Doug never meant to stay. Fifty-five years later, he can no longer stay.

"I can remember the day I walked in here," Doug said Monday. "And if you told me I was going to be here 55 years, I'd have run out of the building. I woulda run out! I wouldn't have stayed here! I woulda thought, 'I couldn't be in that building 55 years.' But nothing bad ever happened to me here to make me want to leave."

Word began circulating among the regulars Monday that there were just days left; the gym, often sparsely populated these days, was a little more crowded than usual. Regulars said their thank-yous between squats and bench presses; former clients stopped by to take selfies with Doug. We knew about the lease and the landlord. Didn't make the inexorable any easier.

A lot of people are upset you're closing, I told him.

"I know they're upset, but life is made to upset you," Doug said. He laughed, or maybe it was a cough. "I remember when my father died, I was upset. When my mother died, I was upset. So there you go. Life is full of things that make you upset. That's the way it works."

"You made a lot of people look good, and there's nothing sad about that," 59-year-old Victor Zimmerman told Doug during a break in his workout. Zimmerman first came to Doug's about 30 years ago, weighing 130 pounds after a bout with testicular cancer. Doug helped him put on weight, build muscle, regain his confidence.

"This man has given me really good advice — financial, romantic," Zimmerman said, speaking for all of us fortunate to have spent time under Doug's tutelage. "He's been a mentor since I was in my 30s. Helped me keep my head on straight."

The gym's demise was always inevitable. Doug ran the business alone for all of its 55 years — counted every penny and every rep. The longest he ever closed was the one week after his wife died shortly before Doug turned 70. For a moment, he considered shuttering the gym then. Coming back, he said this week, was a hard decision.

"But when you sit down and contemplate on it, you realize you have to continue the life," he said. "So I chose the other."

But now the choice has been made for him. There will be a public farewell for him on March 31 at the gym. Then he will spend a week clearing out the place. Doug will sell some of the equipment to clients; the rest he will take to his home in Hurst, where he plans to build a backyard gym.

On Monday, we sat in his office talking about the end of Doug's Gym. I reminded him of that comment he'd made about time not existing. He smiled, said he meant it. Absolutely.

"The [last] day I walk down the stairs, it'll be 55 years — like nothing, like it never happened," he said, puffing on a nub of a cigar. "Looking forward is an enormous amount of time. Looking back, it's nothing. It means nothing. The time goes like that."

And one week from Saturday, so will Doug's Gym. Like that.