Dalton — On a crisp late-October morning, Hinsdale resident Michelle Pyser served up an ace at the Dalton Community Recreation Association gym. The pickleball enthusiast said she joined the center years ago when her children were small, but the group now serves her new passion so Pyser and her husband can keep their game skills sharp. Although the couple could have chosen other venues for their go-to court, they returned to the CRA. “This is our hometown, and we have a history here,” Michelle Pyser said. “Our kids grew up coming to the CRA and participating in sports, and it’s just a welcoming, wonderful place for the community to participate in physical fitness.”
Dubbed “the fastest growing sport in the nation,” pickleball play is now offered at the CRA, and it is this ability to flex with the times that has kept the center at the forefront of the central Berkshire community for 100 years. Executive Director Alison Peters attributes the nonprofit’s longevity to its ability to pivot, to evolve, “to keep its pulse on the community and get a sense of when things are changing.” She explained, “Today we run a lot of different programs, but the mission is the same. We’re still providing recreational, cultural, social, and educational programs for the community.”
Peters considers “bringing people together” to be the work of the CRA. “You have your son or your daughter who is playing soccer, and they’re starting out when they are five or six years old,” she said. “The kids get together and get to know each other; the parents meet each other on the sidelines or at practices and they start sharing information. The next thing you know, they’ve got good friends.”
The CRA opened on November 9, 1923. To pay homage to that milestone, a celebration is planned for Nov. 6–10, with complimentary festivities ranging from a drumming cardio class to waterworks aerobics, not to mention a two-hour session that teaches pickleball. Teen programs will also be available, as well as a November 10 community dinner ($10) to close the festivities. On the anniversary date of November 9, all CRA memberships will be offered at a 15 percent discount for applicants who appear in-person.
“What we’re trying to do is highlight some of the programs we offer on an every day basis,” CRA Director of Recreation Dustin Belcher said. “We’re opening it up to the community for free—come in, try out programs.”
A few programs have already taken place this year to commemorate the CRA’s significant milestone, with the group’s pertinent history shared at various annual events such as the 2023 May Day Races and the Gib Kittredge Auction and Awards ceremony. A video has also been prepared to bring the CRA’s history to life.
With the help of the Dalton Historical Society and a former CRA director who maintained scrapbooks, Peters and Belcher delved into the background of the center, assembling informational and pictorial notebooks for every decade the CRA was in existence. Those notebooks—that include old activity schedules, a 1925 doll parade, and a 1926 swim flyer—will be on display at the CRA over the upcoming celebration week.
When the facility initially opened, times were different and society was different, Peters explained. “If you notice from the front of the [W. Murray Crane Community House] building, we have two doors, one was for women, on the right, and the other was for men, on the left,” she said. Each gender had their own wing in the structure, but men and women were able to meet in the lobby, albeit with separate gym and swim times. “When you read some of the history, the men would meet to play pool and smoke and write letters, and the women took sewing lessons and first aid [and] did gymnastics,” Peters said. “So that was 1923.”
Photographs dating back to the 1940s show a home economics class being held in the center’s gymnasium. The Crane building basement originally housed a wooden bowling alley, but that amenity was removed in the 1990s as the center wasn’t seeing enough interest in the large space, Peters said. “This is the type of thing that’s happened over time: It evolved,” she said.
Except for the racquetball court added in the 1980s, the original footprint of the Crane building has remained the same, she said. However, a home next door to the main structure—Mill and Main—was purchased in 2018 by Mill Town Capital and has been provided at no cost to the CRA for its programming and administration. The campus also expanded to include a youth center. Remarkably, Peters said the 60-foot pool that exists in the Crane building basement today was in place 100 years ago.
On opening day in 1923, every Dalton resident was considered a member of the CRA, she said. “Now we are much more inclusive,” she said. “It’s not just Dalton; we serve all of Central Berkshire, all the hill towns, Pittsfield, anybody can join the CRA.”
Today’s CRA membership tops 1,000 persons, split evenly between children and adults, with Dalton residents comprising about half of its members, followed by Pittsfield, Hinsdale and other towns, Peters said.
Child care has evolved to be a mainstay of the CRA. Child care didn’t exist 100 years ago as someone was always home to care for the young ones, Peters explained. “That’s not the case anymore,” she said. “We have a lot of [single-parent] families. We have a lot of [families] where both [parents] are working.”
So, the organization added after-school programs in all three elementary schools in the Central Berkshire Regional School District (Craneville, Kittredge, and Becket Washington), as well as a drop-in program at the CRA Youth Center to its menu of responsibilities. Summer camps were incorporated into the center in the 1950s, with the early years functioning to get the children outside and out of the house and, in later years, to fill a need for parents when they are at work, Peters said. Camp topics have also shifted to include last year’s video media session, with directors eyeing more technology activities for the future.
“One of our big partners is the school district,” Belcher said. That partnership resulted in a bus stop being added in front of the CRA Youth Center to transport children in afterschool programs. With the aid of a grant, tutoring and summer school programs for youngsters are also available at the center, Peters added.
To meet the needs of the area’s aging but active population post COVID, the center brought in pickleball, fitness classes, yoga, ping pong, corn hole, and water aerobics—exercises that provide not only health benefits but friendship. For instance, the CRA Mermaids grew out of the CRA’s aquatics program, with a circle of ladies meeting monthly for dinner and to make a donation to a nonprofit organization. “The CRA was the seed that started this great [group],” Peters said.
Although its financing mechanisms have evolved over the years, Peters also credits the CRA’s success to the local community and the vision of W. Murray Crane, a Dalton stalwart responsible for the center’s main structure that bears his namesake. When Crane died in 1920, he left funding to construct the CRA building in his will, and the Crane family has been a strong supporter of the organization ever since, she explained to The Edge. Funds from local businesses and civic organizations have also assisted CRA programs, Peters said. “But the really big part of this is our volunteers,” she said.
According to Belcher, the CRA currently staffs about 1,100 volunteers who do a myriad of jobs, from selling paper goods at the annual Crane Paper Sale to coaching youth sports. The CRA maintains FAN Club, an acronym for friends, alumni, and neighbors who volunteer to draft letters to local individuals asking for support for the organization.
A few years ago, the CRA needed a new gym floor, an expensive endeavor that was made palatable when a local volunteer-based group removed the old floor and laid the new planks, Belcher said. “That’s one example, [and] there’s many of those over the 100 years as we learned about the history of the CRA, of times people in the community stepped up,” he said.
However, the organization has also had its share of hard times, weathering those storms through the generosity of others, determination, and inventiveness. “Like everybody, when the economy goes down, we struggle,” Peters said. At those times, large donors may need to curtail their spending, and that includes funds provided to the CRA, she said, with the center needing “to find ways to fill that gap,” an effort that could take a few years.
“We have gotten much better about diversifying so that we are not relying on two or three particular organizations; we are not as vulnerable now,” she said.
Belcher said that the center’s doors are open even if school is closed, whether that reason is a snow day or a pandemic. During COVID, the CRA found a way to open for local children—by masking, socially distancing, and using all three campus buildings—after being approved by the Massachusetts Department of Health to offer child care, he said. “We were a place where essential workers could drop their kids off to do remote learning,” Belcher said.
For Peters, the situation had a silver lining: the socialization the children experienced at the CRA. “These kids were able to come in every day and the chatter, oh my gosh, they were so happy, they were so excited to be with kids,” she said. “It was truly a big help to the community.
The CRA was the first center in Berkshire County to restart youth sports after COVID, with staff cleaning the baseball bats between batters and catchers wearing masks beneath their catchers’ masks since they were within six feet of a batter, Belcher said.
At the time, crafting greeting cards for shut-ins was the norm as were food drives, with the center’s popular music series Concerts on the Lawn expanding from three concerts in the summer to weekly or twice weekly sessions, with that expansion maintained even post-COVID, Peters said. “We had circles on the lawn; people had to call ahead and reserve [a spot],” she said. Initially, only 50 attendees were allowed due to spacing restrictions, but that amount doubled after regulations eased.
According to Belcher, CRA membership has rebounded to pre-COVID levels, with much of the growth seen among the youth, a statistic that has driven greater children’s programming. Peters credits Belcher with the positive numbers stemming from the center’s well-organized, quality programs.
With an eye to the future, the CRA has been working for the past year with a consultant to identify what the community’s needs are and how the center can help fill those needs. That action found that middle school programming and day care are core issues within the central Berkshires, with the center preparing to soon survey middle schoolers as to their interests, as well as evaluate the possibility of adding day care to its already state-licensed repertoire of programs before and after school.
Except for the Mill and Main home, the CRA campus is owned and managed by the Winthrop Murray Crane Trust’s six trustees, according to the CRA website. The organization is governed by a 20-member Board of Governors that meets monthly and is included in its Executive Board of Governors that convenes on an as-needed basis. “I think when W. Murray Crane decided that he was going to leave money in his will for the CRA, I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if he had such great vision and was able to recognize how much impact it would have on the community,’” Peters said. “Because I really do feel like it has given Dalton its identity and its sense of community.”
