In the last two decades, the Lewis-Clark Valley Boys Club has mushroomed in membership and activities, but the facilities are the same as those used in the 1950s. And the next year shows no hope of expansion.
The Boys Club building at Vollmer Park serves the youth of Lewiston, Clarkston and the Orchards, “and we’re almost at the saturation point of boys we can handle,” according to Dr. Franklin Hyke, newly elected president of the club’s board of directors. “That’s why we’ve called on the school districts.
“We’ve been able to hold our own for the last few years by farming some of our boys out to the schools in the area. The school board allows us to use their facilities in the school system,” he said. “Other than that, we’re boxed in.”
The valley club has booster groups in both Clarkston and the Orchards, and plenty of members, but that’s all.
“A splinter group, the Orchards Adult Council, helps us to raise funds, and we have a branch at Clarkston, but no facilities,” according to Hyke. “We did have an Orchard clubhouse, but it burned down a few years ago. The population of the Orchards is just about equal to downtown Lewiston, so we should have a comparable facility up there.”
But it won’t come in the foreseeable future.
“We have no plans for building anything new. As far as expansion of our present club, we’re dickering with the owners of some adjacent property. We have four lots in east Lewiston that were donated to us, and we’re trying to trade them for better property,” Hyke said.
The Boys Club has 1,271 members, and almost 300 boys show up at the club every day for pool, basketball or other sports and recreational programs.
“We had 426 boys in uniform for football and 528 for basketball,” according to club Manager Don Uglem. Both sports increased about 15 per cent from last season.
“In the last five years, we’ve grown by 800 members,” Uglem added.
The Boys Club had a bus route through the Orchards and Clarkston during Christmas vacation, and the club will bus boys to the club from the beginning of March until vacation starts. But not during the summer.
“We can’t run a bus route during the summer, because we only have one bus and we use that for tours, fishing trips and camping,” Uglem said. “In the last couple of years, we have been able to keep up with our expanding membership by working out of the school gymnasiums in the area.”
While there are no plans for expanding, there are also no plans for freezing membership.
“We haven’t even thought about that,” Uglem said.
If it comes to the point when the club has to either freeze membership or sell the bus to meet the bills, “We’ll face that when we come to it,” he added. “Actually, we don’t worry too much about it. If we have more kids, that means we have a wider base of community support.”
Community support was the only thing that put the Boys Club in business 20 years ago, according to Irving Faling, second president of the club and lifetime member, and that is the basis for his dream of expanding into Clarkston.
The club runs on a budget of $41,000, and 60 per cent of that comes from the United Crusade drive. That doesn’t leave much room for financial day-dreaming, since the club finished 1969 about $50 away from debt.
Unions Helped
“Every union in town helped to build the club,” Faling said. “All the trades cooperated, and the members of the unions helped put it together. The building material was financed by raffles and donations. Service clubs donated rooms in the basement... so many people have worked on it so far.
“We had a caretaker, Matt Miller, who spent the coldest months of the winter stoking stoves to keep the building from freezing up while we were building it. He lived in a little apartment we fixed up for him in there. He finally contracted pneumonia and died,” Faling recalled.
“There’s a lot that could be done now,” he continued. “There’s no doubt that another unit could be built at Clarkston by working with the suppliers, the unions and the service clubs. I believe it could happen all over again.”
This story was published in the Jan. 7, 1971, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.
