Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
Speaker 2: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 2: And when I find my ball in a brid Egg
Speaker 2: Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg Friday, Frida Egg Egg,
Speaker 2: Frida Egg, Bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run
Speaker 2: off of the hump. Hello, and welcome to the Frida
Speaker 2: Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today we're
Speaker 2: talking about how and why country club life started in America.
Speaker 2: So the US Open is at the country Club and
Speaker 2: Brookline this week, and a Brookline is often said to
Speaker 2: be the nation's first country club. Now, I'm not sure
Speaker 2: how accurate that claim is, but it was definitely one
Speaker 2: of the first. It's been active since the early eighteen eighties,
Speaker 2: and it's offered golf since the early eighteen nineties. Before
Speaker 2: that period, there just weren't many places like it in America.
Speaker 2: By the end of the eighteen hundreds, though it was
Speaker 2: a different story. The eighteen nineties in particular sought an
Speaker 2: explosion of golf focused clubs in the US. And I've
Speaker 2: often wondered why this happened then, Why was it that
Speaker 2: about one hundred and thirty years ago, Americans suddenly wanted
Speaker 2: to go out and form country clubs and play golf. Well,
Speaker 2: the best answers to that question that I've found are
Speaker 2: in a book called Golf and the American country Club,
Speaker 2: which was written about fifteen years ago by Richard J.
Speaker 3: Moss.
Speaker 1: But believe it or not, everybody calls me Pete, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I tied just I taught college history for almost forty years,
Speaker 1: mostly in Maine at Kolby College.
Speaker 2: Pete has also written other books, including The Kingdom of
Speaker 2: Golf in America and Eden in the Pines, a History
Speaker 2: of Pinehurst Village, both horrific as well. But in Golf
Speaker 2: and the American country Club, Pete gives his most concise
Speaker 2: argument as to why places like the Country Club and
Speaker 2: Brookline came about, and basically, he says it had a
Speaker 2: lot to do with big changes that were happening throughout
Speaker 2: the country in the late eighteen hundreds, the late Victorian period,
Speaker 2: as we'll call it. The cities were getting bigger and
Speaker 2: more hectic, corporations were becoming more powerful, immigration was increasing,
Speaker 2: and essentially, many middle to upper class people in America
Speaker 2: wanted to get away. These people included what would become
Speaker 2: known as the Apple Tree Gang. That's where Pete and
Speaker 2: I pick up in our conversation, and just as an FYI,
Speaker 2: we recorded this about a year ago for a bigger
Speaker 2: project that never quite came together, and so there are
Speaker 2: some references to COVID times that thankfully were more relevant
Speaker 2: than they are now. All right, let's get to it.
Speaker 2: So I know that you did most of your research
Speaker 2: years ago on this, but I was wondering if we
Speaker 2: could start by talking about the Apple Tree Gang, who
Speaker 2: they were and what they did.
Speaker 1: You know, all I think of when I think about
Speaker 1: the Apple Tree Gang is that there were Scots to
Speaker 1: the for the most part, and they very often had
Speaker 1: some connections and went back to Scotland, and they wanted
Speaker 1: to play golf in America. And they started out really crudely.
Speaker 1: I think that's the main thing. I mean, they started
Speaker 1: out playing in an apple orchard. You know, when I
Speaker 1: think about clubs, I always think about some sort of
Speaker 1: development that everybody thinks that these clubs are, you know,
Speaker 1: born in one day and the next thing, you know,
Speaker 1: one day you don't have Tubble Beach and the next
Speaker 1: day you do. The clubs in the eighties, the first
Speaker 1: clubs in the eighties and the nineties were really really
Speaker 1: didn't no word for how simple they really were. I mean,
Speaker 1: the reality is they often rented the land. That was
Speaker 1: how That's the indication of how tentative they approached this.
Speaker 1: And you know, as personalities, they were upper middle class
Speaker 1: suburban New Yorkers, and they got together, they were friends,
Speaker 1: and they played on in a very crude fashion. Then
Speaker 1: the next thing, you know, they bought some land and
Speaker 1: the next thing you know, it was Saint Andrews of Yonkers,
Speaker 1: you know, uh. And and the history of the clubs
Speaker 1: from that period are very often like that. Even if
Speaker 1: the people were very wealthy and could afford to just
Speaker 1: you know, gohole hog and buy land and get a
Speaker 1: designer and do that. But that wasn't the case. There
Speaker 1: was very modest investments. You know, it was a new
Speaker 1: It was sort of tentative. They didn't know if they
Speaker 1: could get a membership. I mean that varied, of course.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean I think there are you know,
Speaker 1: there are places that were sort of born, uh you know,
Speaker 1: a whole hog out of something else. I think Brookline
Speaker 1: was to be all about horses at one point, right,
Speaker 1: and and it wasn't and then you know, golf sort
Speaker 1: of crept in and it's not about horses at all anymore.
Speaker 2: And and so when you talk about a group like
Speaker 2: the Apple Tree Gang, literally at the beginning, they're playing
Speaker 2: in an.
Speaker 1: Apple orchard, right and rented land, I think from a butcher,
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 2: And so tell me about the style of golf that
Speaker 2: that they would play in that I did.
Speaker 1: You know that that's just really hard to imagine. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it's it's more, Uh, it certainly isn't about
Speaker 1: whacking the ball large distances. I think it's more, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a game of sort of gigantic coquette. Instead of wickets,
Speaker 1: you have a hole, and you know you're not hitting
Speaker 1: the ball very far. You're not playing in any sort
Speaker 1: of pristine conditions. You can only imagine how bad the
Speaker 1: greens were, you know. I mean, the greens are probably
Speaker 1: just you know moan circles. Especially on the early municipal courses.
Speaker 1: They would just go out and you know, two hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty yards in moa circle, and then go three
Speaker 1: hundred yards in moa circle, and then they would go
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty yards in moa circle. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was just there was a process of refinement that
Speaker 1: was incredibly long from something I've had just tried to
Speaker 1: describe to you know, the perfect golf courses now you
Speaker 1: know the perfected golf courses that we have that are
Speaker 1: you know, unbelievably refined places that a lot of money
Speaker 1: has been lavished upon. The early ones were really cheap.
Speaker 1: Nobody wanted to really make any much of an investment,
Speaker 1: and it all grew from that.
Speaker 2: Taking a step back, taking a wider view here for
Speaker 2: a second, I wonder if you could tell me a
Speaker 2: little bit about the kind of cultural mood in the
Speaker 2: late eighteen hundreds and specifically the factors in American culture
Speaker 2: that led to the rise of the golf focused country club.
Speaker 2: What were kind of those impulses that drove people to
Speaker 2: want to participate in something like this.
Speaker 1: Well, I think there were a number of them, and
Speaker 1: they're sort of it's hard to arrange it by importance,
Speaker 1: but health was an important one. That the cities of
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century were pretty ghastly places, again hard
Speaker 1: for us to imagine. Their disease was much more common,
Speaker 1: and there was certainly the idea that you wanted to
Speaker 1: participate horses and carriages and stuff. There are all kinds
Speaker 1: of subtle influences. But it was also in a lot
Speaker 1: of Histhorians have talked about this. It was a time
Speaker 1: when everybody was forming clubs for everything. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of and a lot of associations. One I think
Speaker 1: that somebody has used the phrase and era of associations.
Speaker 1: I think the bar associations all are formeders, the American
Speaker 1: Medical Association is formed during this period, all kinds of
Speaker 1: I think the Boy Scouts were formed during this period,
Speaker 1: and there was the idea that you could improve your life.
Speaker 1: But being in these associations, they could provide clubhouses, and
Speaker 1: they could provide events. One suspects they could provide romance,
Speaker 1: men and women met one another. And if you look
Speaker 1: at the individual towns. I know that a student of
Speaker 1: mine wrote a really good paper on Waterville Main and
Speaker 1: it was just Chocolate Block with organizations.
Speaker 2: So I'd like to maybe explore a few other factors
Speaker 2: that you talked about in your book as well. I
Speaker 2: can prompt you on some of these. You refer to
Speaker 2: the promotion of mental and physical health that golf and
Speaker 2: the country club offered. Could you tell me a little
Speaker 2: bit about the about about late Victorian anxiety and depression.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well they called it neurasthenia. And it's oddly something
Speaker 1: we recognize in ourselves that there's something about modern mechanized, urbanized,
Speaker 1: suburbanized society that just doesn't do this any good. I
Speaker 1: mean to say it makes us sick is sort of dramatic. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there are people who will say that. And
Speaker 1: the involvement in something outside and particularly this is going
Speaker 1: to be a new term from that I've thought about
Speaker 1: since I wrote anything about golf called skilled practices. Taking
Speaker 1: up a skilled practice, so two of them that you
Speaker 1: might want to well, Tennis is obviously one, Golf is
Speaker 1: obviously one. Fly Fishing is one that has been much
Speaker 1: buttered about lately, and that a skilled practice outside is
Speaker 1: good for you. It takes you away from the concerns
Speaker 1: of your job, or the concerns of your family, or
Speaker 1: the Russian pell mell of cities and makes you focus
Speaker 1: on learning how to hit a six irons or backhand,
Speaker 1: or you know, how to keep your fly line out
Speaker 1: of the bushes. You know, having that outside of your
Speaker 1: economic life and your social life is good for your
Speaker 1: mental health.
Speaker 2: On another note, So there's the there's the mental health piece,
Speaker 2: which I think a lot of people will recognize. Now
Speaker 2: that's the big word on golf at the moment. We're
Speaker 2: all feeling cooped up, and you know, I sort of
Speaker 2: recognized that in these late nineteenth century Victorians that they
Speaker 2: were feeling kind of cooped up in their houses as
Speaker 2: the cities were growing around them. I wonder if you
Speaker 2: could also talk about the decline in what people perceived
Speaker 2: as the traditional order in this era and how that
Speaker 2: factored into the rise of the country club.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that that's really hard to I mean,
Speaker 1: I recognized that, you know, it was happening, and I
Speaker 1: think maybe the best place to see that as a gender,
Speaker 1: the whole idea that women should, you know, be domestic
Speaker 1: and stay at home, and that it was it was
Speaker 1: actually bad for them. It was prescribed in the late
Speaker 1: nineteenth century that you know, the first prescription for neurasthenia
Speaker 1: was to go home and be very calm, set in
Speaker 1: your room. And you know, we have a lot of
Speaker 1: both fiction and nonfiction testifying to the fact that women
Speaker 1: were defined that way. And it's really interesting that in
Speaker 1: twenty five or thirty years the idea that they should
Speaker 1: be out and about and play golf, and people put
Speaker 1: a lot of emphasis on the limits that were imposed
Speaker 1: on women in golf. I think it's this is important
Speaker 1: that they were playing at all, and that they were
Speaker 1: involved in it. I think it's crystal clear to me
Speaker 1: when I read all about all these clubs that while
Speaker 1: they may not have played the game as much as
Speaker 1: men did, they certainly were dominant in the clubhouse. The
Speaker 1: social life was was certainly not something that women shied
Speaker 1: away from, and they you know, they were part of
Speaker 1: the whole thing. But they also played, certainly, you know,
Speaker 1: the USGA had tournaments for them, and there were you know,
Speaker 1: there were women playing, and by the twenties they were
Speaker 1: really good women playing.
Speaker 2: So this was a change in the social order that
Speaker 2: the country Club seems in many ways to support, or
Speaker 2: or or to even be a driver for. Even as
Speaker 2: the country club did distinguish the genders and keep them
Speaker 2: apart in some ways, it also gave the quote unquote
Speaker 2: new woman an outlet for kind of physical activity and
Speaker 2: social activity.
Speaker 1: I mean, you certainly have one offs that are that
Speaker 1: are kind of important, Marion Holland's being one. I mean,
Speaker 1: Marion Holland's not is every where. It's a fascinating story,
Speaker 1: but it's just a one off. You know, a rich girl,
Speaker 1: her father loses all her money, so she goes out
Speaker 1: and becomes rich herself, and you know, she plays virtually
Speaker 1: every sport, and you know, I think horses and tennis
Speaker 1: and golf being the three major ones. And then she
Speaker 1: goes to California, strikes oil literally and then builds builds
Speaker 1: past the tiempo has something to do with Cyprus Point,
Speaker 1: and I think the evidence is pretty clear she had
Speaker 1: something to do with Augusta. And so you know, that's
Speaker 1: just the one off. And I think she's certainly gay,
Speaker 1: I don't think, and I think you know that that
Speaker 1: didn't seem to inhibit her in any ways, not to
Speaker 1: suingest that you know, there wasn't a vicious bias against
Speaker 1: gay in general, but certainly you can see that this
Speaker 1: club life had a room for that, or at least
Speaker 1: certain varieties of that club life. We're a lot more
Speaker 1: tolerant maybe than the general uh, you know, society. But
Speaker 1: and Marion Allen's is at least one piece of evidence
Speaker 1: of that.
Speaker 3: Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over
Speaker 3: at Gooder. Nothing kicks off some aer quite like the
Speaker 3: US Open. And we're here this week at Brookline, and
Speaker 3: one of the things that I made sure to pack
Speaker 3: was my pair of Gooders. These are great sunglasses. They
Speaker 3: are polarized lenses, they have golf specific lenses, they are
Speaker 3: non slip, and best of all, they carry a relatively
Speaker 3: reasonable price point. So the nice thing about this is
Speaker 3: you can mix and match. You can get a bunch
Speaker 3: of different styles, and they are high quality sunglasses. You know,
Speaker 3: the same type of quality you're going to get from
Speaker 3: an expensive pair, but for an affordable rate. If you
Speaker 3: use the promo code t FE, you will get fit
Speaker 3: fifteen percent off your entire order at Gooder dot com.
Speaker 3: That's g oo dr dot com and use the promo
Speaker 3: code TFBAT checkout for fifteen percent off your order.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we have the gender narrative here, which is
Speaker 2: which is incredibly interesting. You know, something that seems to
Speaker 2: have certainly been breaking down in the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: and that the club seems to be an attempt at
Speaker 2: a kind of bastion against, is the decline of local control.
Speaker 2: And this might be kind of hard to define exactly,
Speaker 2: but the decline of that sense that you know, people
Speaker 2: who lived in a particular place were controlling their lives
Speaker 2: and the invasion of the national and the international and
Speaker 2: the corporate into people's local lives. Could you talk about
Speaker 2: that a little bit and how the how the country
Speaker 2: club responded to it.
Speaker 1: Here's the deal I think you just did.
Speaker 2: Sorry, that's my tendency when I ask questions.
Speaker 1: Sometimes No, that's the perfect And certainly, you know, if
Speaker 1: we think about the iconic clubs, it doesn't that doesn't
Speaker 1: come through. But when you come through the idea and
Speaker 1: I try to find one, I think I found. I
Speaker 1: found there's all kinds of them. From say, nineteen oh
Speaker 1: five to nineteen thirty, I mean every small town and
Speaker 1: I don't mean village, but I mean, you know, with
Speaker 1: a substantial base of lawyers and doctors and middle class
Speaker 1: people wanted to have their own club. And I think
Speaker 1: one of the reasons they wanted to have their own
Speaker 1: club was just exactly for this local control deal, this
Speaker 1: local control feeling. And you're absolutely right. This is a
Speaker 1: time when corporations, national corporations are taking over national transportation, railroads.
Speaker 1: Cert historians have generally accepted that as a team for
Speaker 1: the period well, you know, eighteen eighty to nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1: In that fifty year period, you know, we went from
Speaker 1: a time when you know, you probably met the same
Speaker 1: people and dealt with them economically on the streets of
Speaker 1: where you lived every day. And by the end of
Speaker 1: the period, you didn't do that anymore. Ever, you work
Speaker 1: for a big corporation. The stores that soldier food weren't
Speaker 1: run by you know, a guy you knew, or owned
Speaker 1: by a guy you knew, that they were owned by
Speaker 1: a big corporation. Everything. And there's a famous book called
Speaker 1: The Incorporation of America.
Speaker 2: Trying to think who wrote Alan Tracktenberg.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Alan Trachtenberg, And you know, I mean it's all
Speaker 1: detailed in there. And you know the LLC funny. I
Speaker 1: just talked to a guy on the phony the other day,
Speaker 1: was doing a work on the idea that the rise
Speaker 1: of the LLC, the limited liability corporation, that corporation was
Speaker 1: the singular most important fact in American history, that it's
Speaker 1: the structural outline of life in America. And you know,
Speaker 1: he's got a point. And I think the country club
Speaker 1: was an attempt to assert or create a place where
Speaker 1: local people stayed in control. They've made an investment and
Speaker 1: they ran it their way, and it became a matter
Speaker 1: of local pride, you know, it became almost I think
Speaker 1: one of the things was that there was a sort
Speaker 1: of civic pride element to a lot of small local
Speaker 1: clubs that if you had one, you were kind of
Speaker 1: on the map as a real city, as a real town,
Speaker 1: and to some degree people use those as to draw tourism.
Speaker 2: So you that the country club in this vein was
Speaker 2: an attempt to recreate the long lost you know, maybe
Speaker 2: not completely real, but somehow culturally remembered village. And of
Speaker 2: course you don't literally mean that the country clubs were
Speaker 2: designed as villages. So what do you mean when when
Speaker 2: you say that the country club tried to recreate that?
Speaker 1: It's it's first of all, it's just a matter of size.
Speaker 1: It's a matter of having a community of the size
Speaker 1: of which you determine how big is your club going
Speaker 1: to be? Is it going to be three hundred or
Speaker 1: three thousand or whatever. And it's also limited in space
Speaker 1: and scope. You know, people say, well, you know, that's
Speaker 1: kind of a weird idea, And I said, well, why
Speaker 1: did Jack Nicholas call his place, Mirfield village. It's not
Speaker 1: a village. It's a massive, you know, golf project with
Speaker 1: suburban houses attached. You know, this gets even weird weirder.
Speaker 1: You know why is Greenwich village called Greenwich village. That
Speaker 1: doesn't make a lot of sense unless just the word
Speaker 1: village means a lot to people. It means something smaller,
Speaker 1: something more intimate, something limited in scope, something not particularly
Speaker 1: dynamic in terms of forging into the future, and you know,
Speaker 1: changing things that it's a commitments to traditionalism, you know.
Speaker 1: So it's really I mean, the village word gets used
Speaker 1: a lot for things that really aren't villages. There's a
Speaker 1: weird psychological phenomenon going on there. And the only thing
Speaker 1: I've ever said is a sort of commitment to traditionalism,
Speaker 1: a commitment to stability, uh uh, you know, and the
Speaker 1: idea that this this isn't a dynamic urban place.
Speaker 2: And an attempt to create tradition out of thin.
Speaker 1: Air, right out of names.
Speaker 2: Yeah, instant tradition, which was just so American. Another piece
Speaker 2: of this seems to be the rise of immigration in
Speaker 2: the late eighteen hundreds from Eastern and Southern European countries
Speaker 2: as well as from Latin America and the desire to
Speaker 2: create a more racially homogeneous zone away from this city.
Speaker 2: Would you say this was an important factor and could
Speaker 2: you talk about it a little bit?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, I mean I think there are two things,
Speaker 1: and it's ethno religious and that I think the conflicts
Speaker 1: are as much as Protestant leadership class trying to have
Speaker 1: a space without Jews or Catholics, and in a much
Speaker 1: smaller sense Catholics and Jews trying to have some spaces
Speaker 1: without Protestants. But the conflicticularly between Protestants and Jews was ferocious.
Speaker 1: I mean in the Pinehurst books, I mean I ran across.
Speaker 1: I mean they had a program I was going to
Speaker 1: say massive, but a very substantial program to keep Jews
Speaker 1: out of the hotels, from ever coming here. And then
Speaker 1: the deeds here forbid anyone to sell land to Jews
Speaker 1: or obviously African Americans or Indians. And so the idea
Speaker 1: of creating these sort of free of Jewish influences and
Speaker 1: free from Jews by Protestants was a tremendous factor in
Speaker 1: big projects like Pinehurst, in smaller country clubs everywhere. Vance
Speaker 1: Packard actually came up with a couple of examples from
Speaker 1: his research that I used where Jews were perfectly integrate
Speaker 1: in the town, they did business with one another because
Speaker 1: they simply had to. And then when the Protestants created
Speaker 1: a country club, they excluded them all, they refused to
Speaker 1: have memberships, which he thought was a real important sort
Speaker 1: of thing. That these new inventions like huntry clubs kind
Speaker 1: of reinvigorated the conflicts.
Speaker 2: So do you think that these we could use the
Speaker 2: term racially homogenous or ethno, religiously homogeneous clubs. Do you
Speaker 2: think they're in some ways a direct response to rising
Speaker 2: integration in the other spheres of society?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Oh do you mean, did you say integration
Speaker 1: or immigration?
Speaker 2: Well, I guess both. I did say integration as any.
Speaker 2: So you know that one of the you know, there
Speaker 2: was this there was this really thorough attempt to try
Speaker 2: to keep Jewish people out of Protestant clubs, while at
Speaker 2: the same time, in many ways Jewish people were making
Speaker 2: in roads in society and politics.
Speaker 1: No, no, I think that's true, and I think it's true.
Speaker 1: Of I think the sharp lines between Catholics and Protestants
Speaker 1: blurred a lot, and I think obviously one of the
Speaker 1: secrets here is intermarriage. You know, and I think the
Speaker 1: statistics show that, you know, the twentieth century, intermarriage between
Speaker 1: the three main religions has gone up pretty steadily. It
Speaker 1: used to be a big issue, and it just you know,
Speaker 1: well it still is to some extent, I think, but
Speaker 1: it isn't like it used to be, where the three
Speaker 1: groups are sort of heyometrically sealed off from one another.
Speaker 1: You know, certainly a whole different world in nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: one when you were putting a club together, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, the assumption was you just wouldn't have Jews
Speaker 1: or Catholics. In some few cases, you know, Jews made
Speaker 1: clubs for Jews, and there were a few Catholic clubs.
Speaker 1: There are even a few Black clubs. You know, it
Speaker 1: gets complicated with a lot of forces. But I think
Speaker 1: you're probably right that integration in a larger society led
Speaker 1: inexorably kind of heart, you know, and in our own time,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, it took augusta seventy years to
Speaker 1: finally you know. And then I think the gender issue
Speaker 1: is a separate issue, you know, I think there are
Speaker 1: all male clubs left, but you'd be hard pressed to
Speaker 1: name them. They don't have a very high profile.
Speaker 2: And in fact intentionally keep a lower profile. They want
Speaker 2: to stay out of the public discourse because they saw
Speaker 2: what happened with Shoal Creek and Augusta. But you know,
Speaker 2: so that's one aspect of the club's purpose and one
Speaker 2: that perhaps has not aged well or not had a
Speaker 2: great impact on either golfer or American society. But the
Speaker 2: other part of the club's purpose as a place for
Speaker 2: golf is more appealing. And I wonder if you could
Speaker 2: talk about that a little bit. You know, surely part
Speaker 2: of the reason for the rise of the country club
Speaker 2: in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century is
Speaker 2: simply the appeal of golf as a game, and specifically
Speaker 2: the appeal of golf as a game to Americans. So
Speaker 2: what was it about golf?
Speaker 1: Well, I do There's a couple of things. One is
Speaker 1: it was Scottish. Now, whether it was or not, you know,
Speaker 1: you can you could get an argument, but scott things
Speaker 1: Scottish were just deemed to be acceptable. Then I think
Speaker 1: it had allure that anybody could play the game, that
Speaker 1: you didn't have to be a big male, you didn't
Speaker 1: have to be fast, And I think it was I
Speaker 1: think it really good. Good question is is it benefits
Speaker 1: a little bit from being totally nonviolent. You know, I've
Speaker 1: played golf for seventy years. I doubt you could tell
Speaker 1: me a sport that I could play for seventy years.
Speaker 1: I'm certainly not going to play football for seventy years,
Speaker 1: or baseball or basketball or hockey, for God's sakes. But
Speaker 1: I've played golf quite successfully and it's gotten me out
Speaker 1: and it's been very satisfying to me. I think that's
Speaker 1: a big thing, you know, and in an odd way,
Speaker 1: it's democratic physically, you know, the game's accessible physically. Actually,
Speaker 1: I read a book the other day and it was
Speaker 1: really weird, and he talked about the fact that, well,
Speaker 1: what happens when people come up and they want to
Speaker 1: learn a sport In America? Most sports humiliate you in
Speaker 1: the beginning. I mean, you know, the first time you
Speaker 1: go out to play tennis, I mean it's humiliating. And
Speaker 1: golf maybe might not be so humiliating because everybody is humiliated.
Speaker 1: It also has a set way of teaching the game
Speaker 1: that's pretty good in comparison to other games, you know,
Speaker 1: and the club was perfect for that. The club was
Speaker 1: a way in which you could go learn the game,
Speaker 1: keeping the humiliation down to a minimum. You could do
Speaker 1: it kind of in private, and then until you could,
Speaker 1: you know, actually really play, you could, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of work on it. But you golf had a lot
Speaker 1: of benefits compared to the other sports that you might
Speaker 1: have taken up at the time. You know, it's a cliche,
Speaker 1: but it is a lifelong sport.
Speaker 2: And one of the funny things that I learned in
Speaker 2: reading your book is that compared to many other upper
Speaker 2: class leisure pursuits, golf was in fact quite cheap. And
Speaker 2: so that's another way in which it was democratic. I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think that the municipal courses very often
Speaker 1: were free, the early ones. You know, I think the
Speaker 1: idea that is expensive is is just simply looking at
Speaker 1: you know, the Cypress points and the Augustas and the
Speaker 1: vast sums of money. And I mean, so that's where
Speaker 1: that comes from. But early on, I grew up in Jackson, Michigan.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that rings any bells to you,
Speaker 1: but it was a real golfy town that too municipal
Speaker 1: golf courses that were really inside the town limits. And
Speaker 1: when I was young, my mother used to give me
Speaker 1: fifty cents and then drive me out to Elsharp Park. She'd
Speaker 1: slow down to about five miles an hour and push
Speaker 1: me out of the car and tell me that she'd
Speaker 1: be back at about five point thirty to pick me up.
Speaker 1: And you know, I would go give my fifty cents
Speaker 1: and I would just play and play and play and
Speaker 1: play and play all day long. So it you know it,
Speaker 1: I guess the way to put it is, it can
Speaker 1: be cheap, and it has been cheap. The idea that
Speaker 1: it's through and through a game only for rich men
Speaker 1: is just, you know, not the case.
Speaker 2: So the last subject I wanted to talk about to
Speaker 2: get us back to one hundred years ago was just
Speaker 2: a kind of general sketch of how country clubs took
Speaker 2: on complexity between the eighteen nineties and the beginning of
Speaker 2: the depression. So, you know, in your book you refer
Speaker 2: to this as a as a process of gathering kind
Speaker 2: of complexity. What do you mean by complexity when it
Speaker 2: comes to country clubs.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of stuff done with grass. Grass
Speaker 1: just became more sophisticated. The United States Department of Agriculture
Speaker 1: even got into the business of Britain and there was
Speaker 1: I forget how it all worked, but there was breeding,
Speaker 1: cross being grass, especially for golf courses, the search for
Speaker 1: the perfect green grass, putting green grass. That took place
Speaker 1: in a variety of ways, depending on climate. So people
Speaker 1: began to spend a lot more on greens. They've been
Speaker 1: spend a lot more on on fairways and grass. I mean,
Speaker 1: as you know, Crump went broke putting in Pine Valley
Speaker 1: and a lot of it was problems with grass, and
Speaker 1: then I think clubs became better. Good question is when
Speaker 1: did steel shafts actually begin to change the game. But
Speaker 1: complexity goes back. In my view. Number one thing was
Speaker 1: the ball, and that was the invention of the wound ball.
Speaker 1: You could literally, you could legitimately with a gut of
Speaker 1: perch ball have a legitimate forty yard golf course, and
Speaker 1: that would be fine because you couldn't you really, children
Speaker 1: and women couldn't hit the ball very far and really
Speaker 1: couldn't play very much. And the wild balls seemed to
Speaker 1: me to have changed a lot. It made the distances
Speaker 1: of the game roughly equivalent to what we have today,
Speaker 1: though you know we have our problems with that. But
Speaker 1: the big jump was in the early right, was it
Speaker 1: nineteen oh one nineteen oh two when they first began
Speaker 1: to appear. And that changed the game, and so people
Speaker 1: had to build longer, more sophisticated courses to respond to that,
Speaker 1: and the clubs became became more complex. For another reason
Speaker 1: that I'm cutting to the number one things here, and
Speaker 1: I think it was the acceptance of death, this tentative
Speaker 1: quality that I talked about in the eighteen eighties and
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties, where you rented some land and your apple
Speaker 1: tree gang or or you know, you put in a
Speaker 1: few holes and you gave it a try. You went
Speaker 1: into the thing now where you collected a couple one
Speaker 1: hundred people, and you collected some money, and you went
Speaker 1: out and you made a down payment on four hundred
Speaker 1: acres of land, and you promise people who gave you
Speaker 1: the money that you were going to build a clubhouse
Speaker 1: and the money that had been borrowed would be paid
Speaker 1: for by dues over and you know, this is a
Speaker 1: perpetual institution and so on. And it's really clear to me,
Speaker 1: and actually in this article that I will send you
Speaker 1: in the International Journal Sport and Layout, how in the twenties,
Speaker 1: particularly the acceptance of debt, which had been seen as
Speaker 1: only what conmen and other such people there, you know,
Speaker 1: and debt comes to American life in lots of ways.
Speaker 1: People tend to buy their cars by the late twenties
Speaker 1: with car loans, auto loans and so on. And the
Speaker 1: clubs us debt very creatively to get going. The idea
Speaker 1: here was you could you could get a instead of
Speaker 1: you can get a club together. If you get three
Speaker 1: hundred people signed on a dotted line, you know you
Speaker 1: could get into the club, build a course, build a clubhouse,
Speaker 1: and you know you had the dues to pay it
Speaker 1: off with. And that has a lot more complex and
Speaker 1: that's really the pattern that you get an unbelievable rush
Speaker 1: of golf courses between nineteen twenty two and nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1: It's really incredible. It's really incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and all the old courses were renovated in that
Speaker 2: time as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And a lot of people who had built a
Speaker 1: course in a city, in a smaller city or whatever,
Speaker 1: sold out, took the money, spent it on a down
Speaker 1: payment on a big patch of land in the suburbs.
Speaker 1: You have a lot of clubs that their initial format
Speaker 1: very modest, and in the city very often nine holes,
Speaker 1: modest club us sold that got a big profit and
Speaker 1: moved out into the suburbs.
Speaker 2: Well, this is this frame for understanding this part of
Speaker 2: golf history. It may surprise you, but it actually could
Speaker 2: be quite provocative for certain aficionados of golf course architecture who,
Speaker 2: for many legitimate reasons, lionized the twenties as the golden
Speaker 2: age of golf course architecture. And I'm among those. I mean,
Speaker 2: I love those courses, the ones that survive. But you know,
Speaker 2: the story that you're telling here is almost like the
Speaker 2: dot com bubble or the housing bubble, where these clubs
Speaker 2: really got deep into debt in an attempt to get
Speaker 2: bigger and more complex, and it came back and bit them.
Speaker 1: Then they got wiped out in the thirties, right, the
Speaker 1: ones that plunged too far got wiped out, and we
Speaker 1: don't even know about them anymore. The city's expanded and
Speaker 1: just over random and the ones that were, you know,
Speaker 1: had to wherewithal to deal with the debt. Over time,
Speaker 1: you know, survived and became icons. But the decline in
Speaker 1: the number of private clubs between say, nineteen thirty two
Speaker 1: and nineteen forty eight, he had fifteen years of depression
Speaker 1: of war, and it was just murder. And if you
Speaker 1: were left out and you had too much debt and
Speaker 1: you started to lose your membership, I mean Saint Andrews
Speaker 1: for example, the Yonkers, the Yonkers, Saint Andrews, they were
Speaker 1: really in trouble. They just they just didn't have the
Speaker 1: membership to pay the debt, and they, you know, end up.
Speaker 1: I forget exactly all the things to do, but I
Speaker 1: know that Nicholas. They hired Nicholas to come in and
Speaker 1: redo the whole thing. And and part of the deal
Speaker 1: was he got some land to build some houses on.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of places where people manage
Speaker 1: to have kept the you know, invidious social influences to
Speaker 1: a bare minimum and put golf forward as we're collectively
Speaker 1: making the best course we can make for us to
Speaker 1: play on. And that's it, and that's good. I have
Speaker 1: no problem with it. I think that's you know, I
Speaker 1: think that's a great part of American sport life, and
Speaker 1: which is not doing that well the best. The one
Speaker 1: thing I've been doing there is trucking. In statistics about
Speaker 1: sedentary Americans, we don't even have jobs anymore. Where we
Speaker 1: stand up. Everybody's sitting down. Kids sit down in school more,
Speaker 1: and you know, you sit down on your job, you know.
Speaker 1: And there's some statistics that suggest that there are twenty
Speaker 1: five to thirty percent of adult Americans who don't don't
Speaker 1: do any physical activity whatsoever. And you know, golf is
Speaker 1: a good way to I know, it's kept me active.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm seventy seven years old and I'm reasonably healthy,
Speaker 1: and I still go out and walk around a golf
Speaker 1: course and it keeps me going.
Speaker 2: So just a couple of quick thoughts here. Part of
Speaker 2: what I took away from this interview was that there's
Speaker 2: a light side and a dark side to the beginnings
Speaker 2: of country club life in America. The positive legacy is
Speaker 2: that these clubs were about mental and physical health, going outside,
Speaker 2: moving and playing what I think is the most wonderful,
Speaker 2: beautiful game ever invented. That's good, obviously, that's that's something
Speaker 2: that the early country clubs wanted to cultivate, and it's good.
Speaker 2: The us wholesome part of it is that most of
Speaker 2: the clubs were exclusionary racially, religiously, socioeconomically, and in fact,
Speaker 2: many country clubs were explicitly meant to be spaces apart
Speaker 2: from the modern world. They were meant to be an
Speaker 2: escape from diversity. So I guess when we think about
Speaker 2: the future of golf and country club life in America,
Speaker 2: all we can really do is look to the past
Speaker 2: and consider what's worth preserving and what we need to
Speaker 2: leave behind. All Right, that's it. Make sure to check
Speaker 2: out the Father's Day sale and the Frida Egg pro Shop.
Speaker 2: That's proshop dot the Frida egg dot com fifteen percent
Speaker 2: off everything except for photography. Lots of good deals in there.
Speaker 2: Enjoy the rest of the US open at the country
Speaker 2: club and thank you for listening.