A century of service: Columbus' YMCA celebrates its 100th anniversary
Just about everybody in Lowndes County has a Y story.
Whether at the Frank P. Phillips YMCA downtown, its Caledonia branch, the now shuttered branches at New Hope and Sim Scott, or summer camps at Camp Pratt, those stories have been built over a century.
Jimmy Woodruff’s story took a formative turn on the pool’s high-dive platform when he was 9.
“I climbed up there and walked over to the edge,” Woodruff said. “I remember looking down … and my friends were down there yelling, ‘Jump! Jump!’ For a 9-year-old, it looked like a 20-story building. I was too scared to jump.”
He turned around and climbed down. Days later, he summoned the nerve to try once more. This time, he took the plunge. It wouldn’t be the last time he faced down a scary situation at the Y.
Woodruff retired from a 37-year career with Kroger and became the YMCA’s executive director in February 2020. A month later, the COVID-19 pandemic closed the facility. It reopened later that year under the strain of mask mandates, social distancing and plummeting membership numbers.
Columbus Y Director Jimmy Woodruff, center, and staff members plan the organization’s centennial celebration.
Woodruff and his staff met the moment.
“Whatever we had to do, we did,” he said. “We’re a small town, so we got through this whole thing together.”
Membership and program participation has returned to pre-COVID levels, and this year, the Columbus Y is celebrating the centennial of its founding. The broader YMCA organization was founded in London, England in 1844.
The Columbus Young Men’s Christian Association was organized April 22, 1924, during a dinner at First Methodist Church. A year later, the organization’s first board president and eventual namesake offered an endowment of $100,000 for the project. Phillips left another $100,000 to the Y upon his death in 1942.
In 1926, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Pratt deeded the organization property in south Lowndes County that became Camp Pratt, and the downtown Y formally opened April 24, 1931.
The downtown building has undergone renovations and expansions through the years, even surviving a fire in 1998.
A segregated Sim Scott YMCA built for African Americans in 1964 remained open until 1985. A New Hope branch built in 2001 closed in 2020, three years after The YMCA sold Camp Pratt. The Caledonia branch was built in 2003.
This photo, courtesy of Pam Brownlee, shows the “high dive” and “low dive” at the Y pool, before it was enclosed and the diving boards removed.
Today, the YMCA offers its more than 5,000 members a swimming pool, gymnasium and 24-hour fitness center, as well as youth sports and adult fitness programs. Its Rock Steady boxing class – an adaptive fitness class where Parkinson’s patients practice boxing drills – was the first certified program of its kind in the state.
But for George Irby, who joined the Y in the late 1980s and served two terms on the board, the C in the name matters – whether its conspicuous Bible verses posted throughout the facility, faith-based programs or just an understood behavior code that keeps the place “wholesome.”
Youth, in particular, notice.
“You don’t bring the park to the YMCA,” Irby said, referring to language and behavior to which kids might be more prone in a less controlled environment.
Penny Bowen sifts through an old dormitory on the third floor of the downtown Y. It’s late March, and she has about a month to complete a “memorabilia room” as part of a block party and open house to celebrate the centennial.
She has plenty of memorabilia to work with. An old record player. Old photos of Camp Pratt. Swimming trophies from as far back as the 1950s. Decades-old props from a drama club production. A box full of inline skates once used for an indoor hockey league. Training manuals on everything from how to teach diving to how to become a pastor.
“The Y has done so many things over the years, it’s mind-boggling,” said Bowen, an interior designer who serves on the YMCA board.
Boys stand on a dock at Camp Henry Pratt in the early 1900s.
She “became a believer” in the YMCA 14 years ago. Her father had just passed away, and her mother “was floundering.”
“She came to a little exercise class at the Caledonia branch,” Bowen said. “She just blossomed. … Now she’s a (fitness) instructor there.”
Between her work and her own four-day-a-week workout regimen at the Y, Bowen volunteered to set up the memorabilia room, as well as set up one of the old dorms just like the young men who once lived there would have found it.
Young men looking for work who needed a place to stay could rent one of seven rooms on the third floor for $1 a day until as recently as 30 or so years ago. Each room came with an iron-frame twin bed, a desk, chair, dresser and Bible. Tenants were issued a washcloth and bar of soap and had access to a community shower.
Charlie Box claims James Trotter, who later served as mayor, once lived on the Y’s third floor, but “not a lot of people realize that.” Most folks know Box lived there for a few months, though.
Entering his sophomore year in high school, he moved from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, ahead of his family so he could join Lee High’s football team for summer practice. His father had gotten a job in Columbus but couldn’t move until the fall.
“It was kind of scary, but I wanted to play football here,” Box said.
He found acceptance and help at the Y, he said. When he became the Y’s executive director in 1996, he worked for 13 years to pay that forward.
“The mission of the Y is taking care of young people,” he said. “When I went up there, it was with the attitude of doing that.”
During his tenure, the Y bolstered its women’s ministry, arts offerings and programs for members with disabilities.
The “most important thing we did” came after a child’s accidental drowning in Columbus made local headlines. With no other public pool available to youth, Box arranged for Columbus Municipal School District elementary students to be bussed in a class at a time for swimming lessons.
“We found out a lot of those kids had never been in water any deeper than a bathtub, and they just had a great fear of the water. … They may not have learned how to swim, but they overcame their fear of the water.”
Frank Griffin first got his first YMCA membership at age 3. At 86, you can still find him there some days.
“You might say I grew up at the YMCA,” Griffin said. “… Other than the church and my house, the YMCA is probably the most treasured institution in my life.”
As a 5-year-old student at Franklin Academy, he walked to the downtown Y after school each day and stayed there until his parents picked him up at 5:30.
As a fifth- and sixth-grader, Griffin’s peewee basketball teams traveled to play at the Selma, Alabama, YMCA.
Griffin, a retired banker, spent decades on the YMCA board, many of them as treasurer. One of his first rites of passage at the Y, though, came as a high school freshman earning his spot on “the bench” that once sat outside the front of the building.
“When you got to sit on that bench, you knew you had arrived,” Griffin said. “They didn’t let any young boys sit there. When you got into high school, you could sit on the bench.”
As a junior in high school, Griffin was a counselor at Camp Pratt. He came into town one day to wash his clothes and swung by the Y to visit with friends at the pool. Margaret Burgess, one of his classmates, was also swimming that day.
“We had never really spoken to each other,” he said. “I don’t know, to this day, what possessed me, but I walked up to her and asked, ‘Do you want to go to the picture show?’ … She said, ‘I guess so.’”
Frank and Margaret dated the next three years. They’ve been married the past 66.
STORY BY ZACK PLAIR
PHOTOS BY DEANNA ROBINSON AND YMCA ARCHIVES
