The trade-school feature of the Working Boys’ Club may soon be reproduced in the Calvary Parish Boys’ Club in East Twenty-third Street. They have already a useful type-setting class there, and they have that which their neighbors in Fourteenth Street have yet to get: their own handsome building, bought for the club by wealthy members of Calvary Church, in which it had its birth four years ago. More than that, they have a gymnasium that is the chief attraction of all that neighborhood, particularly the boxing-gloves in it. There were some serious doubts about these, and long and grave discussion before they were added to the general outfit. The street was rather too partial to fisticuffs, it was thought, and there were too many outstanding grudges among the boys to make their introduction safe. However, another view prevailed and the choice proved to be a wise one. The gloves are popular—very, and under the firm management of the experienced superintendent, who knows where to draw the safe line, the boys work off their superabundant spirits and sundry other little accounts very successfully in their nightly bouts. The feeling of fellowship and neighborly interest thus encouraged has even led to the establishment of a mutual benefit fund, through which the boys help each other in sickness or distress, and which they manage themselves, electing their own officers.
For anyone who knows the boys of the East Side it is not hard to understand that the Calvary Parish Boys’ Club has registered more than twenty-eight thousand callers since it was opened, only four years ago. It has four hundred enrolled members, who pay monthly dues of ten cents, so that they may feel that the club is theirs by right, not by charity. Though church and temperance stood at the cradle of the club—it was organized at a meeting of the Calvary branch of the Church Temperance Society—there is no preaching to the boys. The only sermons they hear at the club are the sermons of brotherly love and kindness, which the cheerful rooms, the games, the books, and the gymnasium—even the boxing-gloves—preach to them every night, and which the contrast of it all with the street, that was their all only a little while ago, is not apt to let them forget.
A BOUT WITH THE GLOVES IN THE BOYS’ CLUB OF CALVARY PARISH.
A small sign, with the words “Wayside Boys’ Club,” hung for a while over the Third Avenue door of the Bible House. Two years ago it was taken down; the club had been merged in the Boys’ Club of Grace Mission, in East Thirteenth Street. The members were all little fellows. They were soon made aware that they had fallen among strangers who, boylike, proposed to investigate them and to test their prowess before letting them in on equal terms. Within a week, says Mr. Wendell, this note came to their patroness in the Bible House:
“Dear Mrs. ——:
“Would you please come and see to our Wayside Boys’ Club; that the first time it was open it was very nice, and after that near every boy in that neighborhood came walking in. And if you would be so kind to come and put them out it would be a great pleasure to us.
“Mrs. ——, the club is not nice any more, and when we want to go home, the boys would wait for us outside, and hit you.
“Mrs. ——, since them boys are in the club we don’t have any games to play with, and if we do play with the games, they come over to us and take it off us.
“And by so doing please oblige,