In 1869, eighteen years after the introduction of the Young Men’s Christian Association into America, the first Association buildings to contain gymnasia were dedicated, in San Francisco and New York, and in the latter city William Wood took up his duties as the first director of an Association gymnasium. By the close of another eighteen years, when the number of gymnasia reported had increased to 168, and the paid directors to 50, it had become apparent that steps must be taken to provide adequately trained leaders for this phase of work in individual Associations and some sort of general oversight for the whole country. Accordingly in 1887 a department of physical training was added to the Young Men’s Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, a summer school for gymnasium directors was opened at that institution, and the International Committee established a department for supervision of the physical work with a special secretary at its head. Luther H. Gulick, a young student who had just finished his first year in the medical department of New York University, was chosen to fill the office thus created, and was also made one of two instructors in the new department at the Springfield Training School. The other, Robert Jeffries Roberts, was a veteran of twelve years’ experience as director of the gymnasium at the Boston Young Men’s Christian Association, and at that period the most influential and widely known teacher of gymnastics engaged in Association work. His colleagues in the earlier days had been drawn in many cases from the ranks of professional gymnasts, trained in difficult and showy feats of strength and skill. William Wood, an Englishman born in December, 1819, had conducted a private gymnasium in New York for thirty years before he was called upon to superintend the equipment and exercises in the new Twenty-third Street building (1869-1889).[274] At the Brooklyn Association in the eighties was James Douglas Andrews, born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, July 25, 1839, who became proficient in gymnastics and athletics under the tuition of the Huguenins in London, and for nearly a score of years had been in charge of private and other gymnasia in Glasgow, Belfast, Ottawa, Toronto, and at various points on the Pacific coast. John C. Doldt, of the Providence Association, was the first manager and instructor at the Tremont Gymnasium, on the corner of Eliot and Tremont Streets in Boston (opened in 1859), and afterwards travelled about the country as a professional athlete. Roberts himself had come under the influence of Doldt and of Dr. George Barker Winship, a graduate of Harvard College and Medical School, who went about lecturing on physical culture and giving exhibitions of heavy lifting in the sixties, and whose interesting “Autobiographical Sketches of a Strength-Seeker,” published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1862, have already been mentioned (p. 258).