The advertising supplement in the Sunday Journal and Star featured a photo of a new building next to an old building with a giant Y painted on its uppermost floor.
“Times have changed, but people haven’t,†the March 1971 story began. “The YMCA, celebrating its first hundred years in Lincoln, still features boys, men and families working together to meet the challenges of everyday and world living.â€
The women, it seems, would come later.
In the meantime, the new Central Y — four years in the making — was hoping to make a splash.
The supplement went on for a dozen pages, touting the Y’s many programs, its past presidents and the featured speaker at its upcoming centennial celebration at Pershing Auditorium: Art Linkletter.
On Oct. 22, 2020, that new Y closed permanently after first being shuttered by the pandemic seven months earlier.
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Molly Nance cried when she cleaned out her locker.
“It was more emotional for me than I expected,†said the marathon swimmer. “It took me five times to remember my combination and when I opened it … the tears just started rolling.â€
Plenty of members mourned the closing, the first time downtown Lincoln would be without a Y for nearly 150 years.
A financial decision, said Barb Bettin, YMCA President and CEO. But not an easy one.
“That’s where a lot of people were introduced to the Y,†she said. “It’s where I started my career. Youth sports was down there, Camp Kitaki as well as the workout facility; at the time it was a unique place.â€
The Y’s footprint is spread across Lincoln now, from Fallbrook in the northwest to the Northeast Y on 70th Street, and Cooper and Copple branches on the southside of a growing city.
“Every time we built a suburban Y, we noticed people changed their habits,†Bettin said. “And downtown really wasn’t built for today’s type of prototype Y.â€
It became a bit of a dinosaur. An aging building with high maintenance costs and lower membership usage rates than its counterparts long before COVID-19.
“They kept it open as long as they could,†said Nick Cusick, past Y board chair. “Everything runs its course, I guess.â€
Cusick is the CEO of Bison Inc. and played pick-up basketball in the second-floor gym for 20 years.
“There were guys from Brunswick … some people from Novartis … all good guys.â€
Most, he just knew by their first names. They would meet for coffee. Talk opposing politics across the table.
“Back in the day when you could do that.â€
The gym wasn’t air-conditioned then and it didn’t take long to break a summertime sweat, even at 5:30 a.m.
He was in the gym one morning in 1999 when a Y staff member came in and called him to the phone.
“Our building at Sixth and L was on fire and ultimately burned to the ground.â€
Cusick hung up his high tops a few years ago and gets his exercise walking his Pine Lake neighborhood.
“My vertical jump was about 2 inches,†he said. “I still miss exercise that comes from something competitive, and I’m certainly saddened by the fact they are closing.â€
But downtown had its challenges, even in the early years.
Darrell Stock was there then. He started his Y tenure as a college student in 1969 at 13th and P — now Tower Square — and moved west two blocks when the new building opened a few years later. He would eventually help lead the downtown Y out of a fiscal crisis that came with owning the Hotel Capital next door.
“The Y was in horrible financial shape,†said Stock, a Lincoln attorney. “The big thing that helped was closing up the hotel and selling to the Arter Group.â€
In 1983, everything above the third floor became Georgian Place with condos.
Those first floors dovetailed with the new building to house exercise machines and group workout space.
Stock remembers the noon crush of exercisers in the ’70s and ’80s.
“Those were the glory days of handball and racquetball. You had to call days in advance to book a court.â€
There were years of swim meets in the nicest indoor lap pool in town. Kids basketball leagues in the gym.
There was the running track — 20 laps to a mile — suspended over that gym. A wrestling room in the mezzanine. “We had to put the wrestling mat on top of the elevator box to get it up there.â€
Jolleen Clymer was the executive director of the downtown Y from 1990 to 2002 and started working there as “women’s physical director†in 1980.
“When I first started, it was 99.9% male-dominated,†she said.
The workforce downtown was predominantly male and the railroad workers who stayed at the hotel — which had been gifted to the Y by Bennett Martin in the 1960s — were also almost all men.
Women like Lynn Roper and Christie Schwartzkopf Schroff got seats on the board and started pushing for equal access, Clymer said.
“I remember when we got to go into the men’s fitness center on Thursday night from 5 to 7 and started a women’s fitness class.â€
And the Y changed.
The Y always attracted movers and shakers. Bob Kerrey had a locker there before he became governor. Jimbo Stuart from NBC Bank. Judges like Bill Blue, Bernie McGinn, Jeffre Cheuvront, Mike Heavican.
It attracted athletes. Marathon winners like Nancy Stanley. Olympic gold medalists like NU women's swimming coach Pablo Morales and distance-record holders in swimming like Nance and Kris Rutford. Former Huskers like Junior Miller and Jerry Shoecraft, Rhonda Revelle and Softball Hall of Famer Denise Day. Wrestler Ed Copple was a lifetime member.
The cast of Sesame Street Live showed up to sweat, and Pink cleared her vocal cords in the women’s steam room.
But the downtown Y celebrated diversity in every way, Clymer said.
“Everyone was an equal player. It didn’t matter if you were a construction worker or the county attorney, you exercised side-by-side.â€
Communities formed, she said.
The Racquet Ball Bunch.
The Weightlifting Bunch.
The Noontime Basketballers.
Walking groups. Running groups.
“There was the ‘Dawn Patrol,’†she said. “They’d meet at 5 o’clock in the morning, work out really hard and then go to coffee.â€
Nance and her group of early morning competitive swimmers were like that.
“It was where we celebrated birthdays and trained for big events,†she said. “When my brother died two years ago of pancreatic cancer, everybody mourned with me and we did a memorial swim for him.â€
JP Green worked the front desk for 10 years; his last day was the Y’s last day.
He took prospective members on tours of the facility and always told them that community wasn’t just a “stale marketing cliché†at the Y.
“It was actually true there.â€
One year for a member of the cleaning staff’s birthday, members chipped in money to buy her an electric train. When another fell ill and ended up in the hospital, members filled a giant card with well wishes.
In 1992, downtown banker John Perkins was killed in a car accident. Perkins exercised at the Y with a close-knit group of friends, Clymer said.
“On Monday, we had a little memorial at the Y, because that’s where they wanted to be.â€
When Gayle Resh joined the Y 25 years ago, she soon began teaching classes. She kept crayons and paper on hand if kids came with their parents to spin class.
Back then, Resh worked at the Regional Center, and a co-worker with a new baby started teaching a step class on another floor.
“I brought the baby to my class because it was easier for me to get off the bike than it was for her to stop teaching her class.â€
The Y’s 70 employees have scattered now. Some to other Y branches and some to other jobs.
“I kept hoping against hope they’d reopen,†Resh said.
Bettin hopes so, too.
“I’m sad, but I’m also hopeful that we can reimagine that downtown Y and that will be our future.â€
As for its past, the downtown YMCA officially got its start in January 1880 with 13 members. (It started as the Young People’s Christian Association several years earlier.)
The new YMCA held regular “Union Prayer†meetings on Sundays and a “sociable†every second Tuesday, paying $12.50 a month to rent rooms in the Davis & Alexander Building on O Street between 11th and 12th.
It moved and grew and moved and grew.
But even in its beginnings, the members of the downtown YMCA cared about one another as was duly noted in the March 10, 1894, edition of the State Journal.
“General Secretary John K. Doan of the Y.M.C.A. has been confined to the house because of the la grippe (flu) most of the week. His friends will be glad to know he is improving and will likely be found in his usual place early next week.â€