For at least the fourth time in my life, I am a YMCA member.

This time, my health insurer’s “Silver Sneakers” program pays the tab in an effort to keep me in good health.

The venue for this latest join-the-Y decision is the venerable five-story brick Brookville YMCA building that opened in 1917 in the heart of downtown. It includes a pool, showers, dining room, gym, exercise rooms, classrooms, and offices.

I found the answer to a puzzlement. Why, I wondered, would the “Silver Sneakers” program pay hundreds of dollars for an annual YMCA membership — when I might not use it all that often?

“Umm … Mr. Bonavita, we pay on a per-visit basis, not a per-year basis,” was the saccharine response of the helpful fellow who took my inquiring telephone call. That makes sense. I used my 16-digit identification number to sample the Brookville Y’s rooms.

“Rooms” is appropriate. The Brookville YMCA has stairs, stairs and more stairs that connect a free-weight room (with some machine-tethered stations), a machine-laden weight room (with some free weights), spin-bicycle classrooms and a raft of rooms for everything from yoga to toddler activities.

In earlier years, the YMCAs I joined in DuBois, Warren and Erie were fairly modern layouts, one or two levels at most, with lots of space. My impression: “Let us entertain you!”

But their precursor, my first YMCA, the long-demolished darkly brooding brick building in Warren in which I learned to swim, play basketball and tinker with weights in the 19403-50s was, as I remember, four levels. It contained rentable sleeping rooms for transients, green-shaded tables for billiards, leather chairs and lamps for a reading room — and the trademark YMCA swimming pool, weight room, etc.

Brookville’s YMCA, though built along those lines, is airier, more open and well lit, doubtless through renovations.

Look around as I did, I have not seen giggling groups of stark naked pre-teen boys scuttling between the pool and the locker room.

Yes, stark naked.

Back in my pre-adolescent Stone Age, circa 1950, the YMCAs in Warren and other places followed the Greek fitness model that encouraged pride in bodies and stark naked swim classes for Tadpoles, Minnows, Fish, Flying Fish and, perhaps, Sharks. I did get to Flying Fish, meaning I could splash through freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, underwater and butterfly, more or less. I never did get to Shark.

What else I got were red marks from being butt-snapped with wet towels by older boys and threats of snaps aimed you-know-where. The adult instructors, who did wear swim trunks, drew the line at that last hazing technique, but tolerated lesser stings and red marks as part of growing up. It was a different time. Instead of “Let us entertain you,” that stern edifice suggested, “Young gentlemen, you shall commence to become fit — right now!”

These days, the hallways and rooms of the Brookville YMCA reflect the shouts and laughter that are part and parcel of the camaraderie of swimming pools, weight rooms and fitness classes. There is only the barest trace, not noticeable at all unless, as I did, one deliberately sniffs after it, of “eau de sneakers,” that moist, musty smell that inevitably arises around enclosed pools, locker rooms, shower rooms and weight rooms.

Brookville’s YMCA also has another “blast from the past,” a walking track suspended above and around the perimeter of its basketball court. The old Warren YMCA’s was wider, a bona fide running track that doubled as a spectator gallery when young men and adult men played in basketball leagues. The ladies of that era in that town had their own facility, a YWCA, but they daintily traipsed (Yes ladies, you did traipse!) to the men’s building for carefully chaperoned swim lessons.

During our recent winter sojourn in Florida, I “worked out” (that is an overstatement) at a fitness center. The exercise, light as it was, seemed to make me feel better. So I thought I ought to try to tighten up my flab.

Though now a generational geezer, I still manfully grunt and growl when pressing or curling weights. I do not use the ladies’ pink dumbbells of 3 or 5 pounds, but the free weights I do use fit the description of “baby weights.” I have 80-year-old bone ends. They break easily, and often no longer heal well. Prudence is advisable.

So, gym bag in hand, I intend to stride manfully into the YMCA about three times a week and, if all goes well, avoid crawling pitifully as I try to get back to my car to drive home.

Oh. That is an intention, not a commitment.

And my sneakers won’t be glitzy as in the “Silver Sneakers” program name. They will remain a sensible, solid shade of geezer gray.

Denny Bonavita is a former editor/publisher at newspapers in DuBois, Brookville, New Bethlehem and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: notniceman9@gmail.com.