Bibles & Beds

After the chorus boomed out It's a Grand Night for Singing, a parade of buggies, wagons, ancient cars, a color guard on horseback, judo wrestlers, weight lifters and other performers swarmed about a huge birthday cake in Chicago's International Amphitheatre. Before more than 11.500 onlookers, a series of historical tableaux reincarnated yesteryear's fiery crusaders (Billy Sunday, Dwight Moody) and tycoon benefactors (Marshall Field, Colonel McCormick). plus scenes from the Civil War, the Great Chicago Fire and old Skid Row days. It was all part of the jazzy ("Y's UP") 100th anniversary celebration of Chicago's Y.M.C.A.

Back in March 1858. when visiting farmers slept on the dirt floors of shady saloons and prostitutes strolled along unpaved streets, the Chicago Y. was founded by a group of reformers called the Chicago Young Men's Society for Religious Improvement, at a meeting over a lakefront store just one street away from gangland's "Hairtrigger Block." By the end of the first year, the organization had grown to 355 members, chalked up (thanks to traveling Preacher Henry Ward Beecher's drawing power) the tidy profit of $246.85.

With John V. Farwell and Evangelist Dwight L. Moody in charge, the Y. barged into the Civil War with a vengeance, charged into Army camps, held as many as ten prayer meetings a night. In his spare time, silver-tongued Methodist Moody went on the prowl for gamblers, exhorted them to trade in their playing cards for hymnals (legend has it the Y. was soon stuck with a storeroomful of decks).

In 1868 a brand-new five-story building, costing $199,000, burned to the ground, but even before the flames were put out, Farwell and Moody were raising funds for another hall. The Y. was up in 1869, down (through the Great Fire) in '71. up once again in '74. A few years later tin bathtubs were installed, and proved so popular that they caused impatient queues. Contractor John Scully punched pipes through the partitions separating the bath cubicles, gave Chicago its first showers (with one trouble: bathers had to skip from scalding-hot to ice-cold jets). After Billy Sunday abandoned his post as centerfielder for the White Stockings (later the Chicago Cubs), became the Y.'s whoop-it-up religious director (1891-94), the organization was on its full-steam merry way. Today it is the largest Y. in the world (39 branches, 119,000 members), runs 13 summer camps, offers thousands of lonely strangers in Chicago a welcome bunk.

Last week, as old memories were revived and new goals defined, Dr. Kenneth Hildebrand, pastor of the nondenominational Central Church of Chicago, said glowingly of the Y.: "All through its history, it has tried to relate religious theory and principle to action. It's made religion an everyday concern, not just a Sunday thing."

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