His hands are like rocks — and after 50 years of construction work, when he reaches out for a handshake, they crease like thick leather mitts. His pinky fingers were broken years ago while racking up a game of pool, and now, they lay slightly crooked. He shakes them out a bit, pulls his tired fingers into fists, and then lets his joints go loose.

“It’s rough, but I’m making it,” he said. “They’re softening up a bit.”

If Ralph Brown Sr. is in pain, it doesn’t show on his face. Thick laugh lines show up on his dark skin as he smiles and types on the keyboard in front of him, off-rhythm with the slow R&B song playing from the computer next to him.

Similar songs played on the radio when this space held a barbershop. Brown’s newest transformation is taking place in a room where he used to get his hair trimmed. It’s part of a computer literacy course that is bringing basic skills to members of a generation that never had the opportunity to learn them.

The Forest City Lodge, more commonly known as the Elks Lodge, has been in Ithaca since 1912. It moved to the brick building on the corner of Green and Corn Streets in 1962. The old shop in the second floor closed down when the barber, Clarence Welch, died about two years ago.  The room sat neglected until last summer when Gossa Tsegaye, professor of television-radio at Ithaca College, and Lucy Brown, an Ithaca activist known by all as Miss Lucy, started making plans to hold computer classes there.

Tsegaye arranged to have old computers donated from Cornell University, which would later be fixed up with new hardware and software.  He solicited help from Ithaca College, finding two students from the Park Scholar Program, seniors Michelle Diemer and Amanda Butts, to teach the classes, and sophomore Feleg Tsegaye (no relation), a Martin Luther King Scholar, to offer technical assistance.

Diemer and Butts created the lesson plans, tailoring the curriculum to meet individual needs. For one student, that meant learning how to use the table function to organize his medications. Another is learning how to make flyers.

“You have to totally remove yourself from the situation and ask yourself, ‘If I knew nothing about this, how would I approach it?’” Butts said.

The program is about “demystifying the fear” of the unknown, Professor Tsegaye said, and bringing the older generation a new sense of confidence in conquering something daunting.

“Little things like this,” he said, “ignite the soul.”

Leslie Floyd Carrington, one of the Elks Lodge students, helped renovate the barbershop and revitalize the space with patched walls and bright paint. He said he was never the smartest kid in school and had been afraid of computers.

“It just looked complicated to me,” he said. “And after starting the class, it’s not really as bad as I thought it was. And I enjoy it. I thoroughly enjoy it.”

Tsegaye said all people have an innate desire to know more, to better themselves and their situation.

“But there are issues because of your gender, because of your race, because of your social or political background, your status in society, whatever reason has blocked you from getting there,” he said. “And hopefully, hopefully this process is going to be able to tear down the wall of ignorance.”

So now, every Saturday, in a room that used to be covered in dust and peeling wallpaper, the new students take 45-minute computer classes. Computer desks and chairs have been added to the room and are pressed tight against the blue and orange walls. The hands of the few participants who have been with the program since it started in February have become comfortable and confident resting on a computer mouse or picking at a keyboard. And more students have joined as word spread throughout the club.

Upstairs in the lab, one man sits at his new laptop, being introduced to e-mail for the first time. He sits on the phone with his daughter who lives in California.

“It’s ‘at’ gmail.com,” he said. “Like the ‘a’ thing.”

A message appears in his inbox. Diemer and Butts show him how to open it by clicking on the bolded text.

“Hello.  How are you doing today?” it reads.

A few minutes later another message, this time with an attachment, comes through. It’s a picture of his daughter’s new house, a place he hasn’t had a chance to visit. At the end of the class Diemer tells him to let her know if he has any questions about the new account.

“You can email me,” she said.

“Oh … yeah,” he laughs and begins to pack up his laptop.

Miss Lucy, a member since 1995 and lifetime Ithaca resident, said she learned how to use computers years ago as an office assistant at Cornell University. An IBM serviceman with a bald head and baby-blue eyes told her how the machines would work.

“I could not conceive what the man was talking about,” she said. “It just made no sense to me at all. The only thing that I could relate it to was the theater.”

For Miss Lucy, the computer lab is the newest activity in a long litany of community service projects, the materialization of a drive she said is simply part of her DNA. It’s a way to help the lodge – a place she said has acted as a gathering space for the town’s black community.

“African-Americans, we always did domestic work, worked hard and everything, and you could go to the Elks and have a drink with your friends,” she said. “That’s all it was. And what’s added to that whole process is the community stuff.”

Senior citizen dinners and children’s programs are a regular part of the Lodge’s community activities.  But Tsegaye said the group has gotten a bad reputation in the area, with people seeing the building as simply a bar rather than a place for community outreach.

“We are so focused on remembering the negatives, we tend to forget the positive things,” he said. “I think hopefully that this [computer class] will give another spin to what this organization can do.”

When Annie Carter, a lodge member since 1971, finishes her lesson upstairs, she sticks around for a bit to catch up with friends. It’s loud. The people gathered in the bar shout above the television, laughing, leaning back in their chairs or against the counter, comfortable, like they would be in their living rooms.

Carter has been trying to learn how to use a computer for 20 years. One class she took in the late 1980s cost her $85, a figure she said she’d never forget.

“The last day of class [one woman] was crying because she felt that she just wasted her money and she really didn’t accomplish anything,” she said.

But now, from the second floor of a building that to her feels like home, Carter is finally learning to type. Her nails, covered in purple polish, tap slowly against the keys.

“I feel so good about it,” she said. “I don’t feel stressed.  I feel relaxed.”

Last week Tsegaye was able to get four more computers from Cornell University for members of the group, including Carter, to take home.  More computers are being assembled almost every week in the old barbershop. Last week they set up a new printer, and a few weeks before that, new desks. Tsegaye and Miss Lucy are hoping they will soon have the ability to keep the room open as a community computer lab.

A few weekends ago, Roger Richardson, director of Ithaca College’s Martin Luther King Scholar Program, stopped by the lab. He looked over the room where he used to get his hair cut, a place that he said helped him connect with the town’s black community when he first moved here in 1980. He said that next year, he hopes the Martin Luther King Scholars will become involved in the program. Diemer and Butts are graduating at the end of the year and are looking for new students to take over in the fall.

“It’s been a really cool example of connecting Ithaca College to the rest of the community in one more way,” Butts said.

Brown has given up typing with all of his fingers. His hands simply don’t bend that way. But he’s gotten fast using a two-finger method, leaned over the keyboard at a slight hunch. He forgot his glasses and has to get close to the computer to read the small text. The sentence fills out on the computer screen.

“I’m practicing what I’ve learned in computer class,” he types. “I’ve learned a lot.”

On May 10 there will be a graduation ceremony at the Lodge. Tsegaye will pass out diplomas, recognizing that these students have passed their computer literacy course. They’ve done more than just learn basic skills, he said. They’ve started to bridge a gap that far too many people are afraid to touch.

“I see the disparity between the haves and the have-nots and when I say the haves and the have-nots, [I mean] not so much monetary, but knowledge-wise,” Tsegaye said. “Hopefully this will close the digital divide between those who are info-rich and info-poor.”