OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 November 1943, Page 2

OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

FORTY YEARS ON (To the Editor) Sir,—Your interesting series of articles anent Y.M.C.A. activities, over a period of nearly forty years since its inception, would seem to invite a few reminiscences of even earlier vintage without losing sight of the goal aimed at by those responsible for the maintenance and still further betterment of an institution which has as yet not received the wholehearted public support it so richly deserves. Not a few of our township’s pioneer personages (many .since then alas no longer with us to add spice to such gatherings) have attended Y.M.C.A. celebrations with younger generation relatives of theirs soon destined to become grandfathers and grandmothers, in turn, attending like functions —and, so the years roll on!

Days of which these articles speak, follow closely preceding ones when such marvels in locomotion as the old penny-farthing bicycle the writer’s old printer friend (the late Mr Bill Hounslow) used to ride over the rough and rutted macadam roadways, with marvellous aplomb. Then came the hardcush bike—and it was hard —as the writer (perched on Bill’s new-style contraption’s handlebars) can still joyfully recall—and those still rougher and ruttier more distant highways beyond our then more sport loving, if less populous town.

No Y.M.C.A. banners for boys to foregather under; and St. Matthew’s Boys’ Club (and tender memory of its popular secretary, Billy Bagge) the only real attempt to solve the age-old problem “what to do with our boys at a loose end" —and their dreams of athletic prowess inculcated by seven-year use of old Central School's hobbyhorses, horizontal bars (muscle-grind-ers), giant-stride swing, etc.—in fact, “no anything.” —I am, etc., "OLD BOY.”