NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (Dec. 8, 2017) — Like many others that fateful night 37 years ago, I learned that John Lennon had been killed from Howard Cosell. Yeah, that Howard Cosell.
It was a Monday night, and the Patriots were in Miami playing the Dolphins. In December of 1980, Howard was still presiding over Monday Night Football, in his inimitably pedantic, bombastic, half-in-the-bag fashion. In the pre-cable era, MNF was the week’s premier sports broadcasting event; my dad and I always watched it together, as an act of ritual.
Howard was respectful of this traumatic news — as respectful as his on-air persona would allow. In other words, he treated the murder as he would a punt returner who’d broken clear of the pack with only the kicker to beat. See that bizarre media moment, preserved for all time, here. ESPN would later weigh in with its own meta-media doc, here.
I was 16 years old in December 1980. My dad was not yet 44, 10 years younger than I am today. We were stunned by this news, naturally. It was legitimately unmooring to have it delivered by such an unlikely source, in such a peculiar context. The Pats’ left-footed, English place kicker — John Smith, who hails from Leafield, Oxfordshire— was lining up a field goal attempt when Cosell abruptly altered the narrative. The only thing that would’ve made it more bizarre? If Smith had hailed from Blackburn, Lancashire.
John Lennon was 41. Same as my Mom
We quickly called my mother into the room. She was the founding and still presiding Beatles lover in our family, and John was clearly her favorite. She was 41 in 1980, essentially the same age as John Lennon. She had latched onto them from the start. Indeed, my dad had teased her for digging a band whose enthusiasts were, at that stage, mainly 13- and 14-year-old girls.
But my mom has always possessed a keen musical sensibility and her early support for their chops were more than justified in the years to come. She wordlessly teared up while listening to Cosell bloviate, then left the room.
Not sure why, but the holiday period tends to include a lot of Beatles content on PBS. Just last week I watched Ron Howard’s “Eight Days a Week,” along with something called “Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution,” as part of a fundraiser. All these years later, the Beatles are considered subject matter for the whole family, apparently.
If you should get the chance, make time to watch the superb documentary “LENNONYC,” about his post-Beatles years in Gotham (I saw it on PBS, but today you can catch it online, here). The Seventies proved an eventful decade that followed hard on the band’s official break-up back in April 1970. For Lennon it featured a gaggle of outsized characters and spanned a remarkable procession of music-making, protesting, drug-taking, deportation-resisting, legal wrangling, breaking up, getting back together, child-rearing and, ultimately, growing up.
That was the message one took away at film’s close: Here was a guy who had finally shed the latent adolescence of rock stardom and become a man, in his own right, only to be killed by a psychopath at the exact moment that maturity was to be revealed. Lennon’s his gorgeous new album, “Double Fantasy,” had been released on Nov. 17, 1980. I don’t know that it gets much sadder than that.
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (Oct. 19, 2017) — One of the great privileges of child-rearing is what I call the Transportation Effect, whereby adults — in playing or otherwise communing with their kids in an appropriately committed fashion — are transported back to a time in their own lives when, say, erecting the most efficient Hot Wheels match-race scheme was about the most engrossing thing imaginable. Halloween, with its attendant masquerading and confectionary trappings, transports like few other phenomena. Because candy nostalgia trumps Hot Wheels nostalgia all day long.
A couple years back my fully transported mother actually demonstrated apple-bobbing to my children, full dunk and all — something she never did for my benefit during the umpteen Halloweens of my own childhood. But the point is taken: Hayrides, costumes, haunted houses, pumpkin carving… They’re all transcendentally nostalgic acts.
But they’re all secondary to the hoarding of candy.
I re-entered the Halloween scene in the late 1990s, on account of my young children (Silas and Clara, who are 21 and 19 today). Walking the neighborhood, my own well spring of candy knowledge took me aback. For example, I couldn’t help but notice the surprising re-emergence of the Clark bar — that peanutty, soft-but-crunchy Butterfinger forebear.
After plucking one from a neighbor’s bowl, I stood there on the street and stared wistfully at the little red packaging. I nearly shed a tear. Not because it was so very fun sized. [There is nothing “fun” about small candy bars.] But rather because I remembered a time when Clarks were “right there,” a legitimate option in the full-sized, 10-cent category at J&A News Agents in downtown Wellesley, Mass., circa 1974.
“What’s this Clark thing?” Silas asked me, without a scintilla of guile. Poor lad. He had no idea.
Candy Nostalgia: Charleston Chew Edition
It’s this sort of benign, ignorant prompt that sends me winging back in time. Indeed, my kids’ questions serve as able catalysts. We were in Cloutier’s, a local convenience story, the other day when Silas, the more adventurous eater of the two, pointed to the Charleston Chews and expressed curiosity.
What’s this? Never had a Charleston Chew? Well, that won’t do.
No childhood is complete, after all, without a working knowledge of the Charleston Chew’s stupendous, metabolic duality. I bought all three (chocolate, strawberry and the ever-underrated Vanilla) and we shared a third of each. Then we went home, froze the remainders and, 40 minutes later (any sooner and the effect isn’t complete — the stuff you remember!), we all experienced the crackling-hard but ultimately chewy, half-eaten Charleston Chew. Their first time! And I was there to witness this tri-lateral genius.
I related this story to a group of late-30/early-40somethings at a cocktail party shortly thereafter. A woman interrupted me halfway through. “Wait,” she said urgently, “where did you find Charleston Chews?”
“They have ‘em up at Cloutier’s.”
“Get OUT! I thought they were gone forever!”
I bought three more that week and figured I’d leave them on her doorstep, but my kids and I ate them instead.
Candy-Related Recall
Thanks to me, I suppose, my children have developed a healthy appreciation, not just for candy, but for candy history. They really want to know what I enjoyed as a kid; I am duly transported and we’re all amazed at the volumes of my candy-related recall.
Bubble Yum was the source of mass hysteria among the pre-teen set upon its introduction in the mid-1970s.
Silas and Clara could not believe, for example, that Starburst haven’t been around since time immemorial. Indeed, I remember their introduction some time during the mid-1970s. Skittles came later, I tell them.
The Great Bubble Yum Run of 1974 left them equally fascinated. This vast improvement in bubble gum technology, this new state of the art, sent 9- and 10-year-old boys scrambling all over town to buy up the few available test packs. With no real knowledge of inflation, the kids go goggle-eyed at the idea that candy bars used to cost just a quarter. “That’s nothing,” I tell them. “I remember paying 7 cents for a Baby Ruth at Bernie’s, Montclair, New Jersey, as late as 1971.”
“What’s Bernie’s?”
“That was the candy story your Aunt Janet and I used to walk to when we lived in New Jersey.”
“You walked to the candy store? It was that close?”
“Well, yeah. It was on the way to school.”
“WOW!!!”
I don’t have war stories. This is all I’ve got to pass on to later generations.
An Era of Innovation: Right Now!
Another example of limited edition candy marketing, and a good one. Dark beats milk in almost every case.
Keeping it all in perspective , I tell them they’re fortunate to live in a time of unprecedented candy innovation. Here’s an era where most everything that was any good still lives — save the superb Milk Shake bar I coveted as a 6- and 7-year-old but haven’t seen since. What’s more, we live in an era when candy purveyors, in search of gimmicky limited-edition sales, apparently, have dreamed up some ne, genuinely exciting twists on old favorites. Some fall flat, of course (the craven “Inside Out” Reese’s Cup), but have you checked out the dark-chocolate Kit Kat? Stunning.
If you haven’t seen or dared try the Pina Colada Almond Joy (with white chocolate), please take my advice and get thee to a participating convenience store post haste.
The irony here is that I’ve become, in my advanced age, something of a candy snob. Most mass-produced American milk chocolate tastes waxy to me. The relative unpopularity of dark chocolate continuall disappoints me. In my view, dark is vastly superior on its own and would, if substituted for its milky cousin, improve almost any candy product you can name. Moreover, my mother passed on to me a love and appreciation for fine, pectin jelly beans. As a result I look down my nose at these newfangled “jelly bellies” with their foppish, speckled shells and their contrived flavors. Buttered popcorn indeed. What complete and utter dross!
The inimitable Chocolate Babies: One has to wonder what Project Rescue would have to say about this, erm… confection.
But my candy past, especially as it rushes back to me in middle age, is almost completely middlebrow and unashamedly so. If I ate it as a kid, I’ll eat it now, with nearly the same abandon and ardor — though I draw the line at Jujubees and Chocolate Babies, the two candies my paternal grandfather always had on hand. Jujubees, you’ll recall, are horrible things, the concoction of some perverse confectioner whose sole contribution to the genre, it would appear, was an item that never gets stale because it starts out that way. Chocolate Babies? Does anyone even remember these things beside me and my siblings? They were vaguely Tootsie Rollish in taste and texture — and shaped like small, brown, human fetuses! Possibly the most grotesque candy product this side of Crunchy Frog.
Late One Halloween Night…
With little prompting, I think you’ll find that most adults have candy histories as wide-ranging as my own. Late on Halloween night one year, Silas and I arrived at our neighbor’s place for one final stop. Field and Suze had company but they kindly invited us in, promptly served Silas a piece of apple pie (to go along with the Snickers, Milky Ways and Three Musketeers they had on hand for the occasion), and poured me a glass of wine. We sat by the fire and conversation soon turned to the candy, as we all agreed that Three Musketeers was the most overrated candy bar on the planet. So boring. Salvageable only when frozen. The new limited edition mint version is actually an improvement.
I offered that Milky Ways were only slightly more interesting, and isn’t it funny that the mere addition of peanuts can turn a worthless bar like Milky Way into the sublime tour de force that is a Snickers?
Well, Field rejected my whole premise, maintaining there were great differences between the Milky Way and Snickers. No, I countered, a Snickers is merely a Milky Way with peanuts. He couldn’t accept this, and so proposed the only reasonable course of action: a side-by-side surgical procedure and examination of the candies in question. With great solemnity he proceeded to the front door, snagged both items from the bowl, unwrapped them, sliced them open and studied the evidence. Eventually I was proved correct. Never underestimate the transformative power of a peanut.
Sky Bar, a New England Candy Co. (or NECCO) product and probably its finest. Not hard to best the execrable NECCO wafer, however.
Back in front of the fire we moved to other subjects of interest: The relatively recent introduction of the Snickers Ice Cream Bar, which reproduces the Snickers taste and integrates an ice cream element with genuine aplomb; the superb new Milky Way Dark, the answer to my prayers; and even the quirky, four-compartment Sky Bar, which has somehow survived into modern times. We agreed those Sky Bars now on shelves may well be the same ones we spurned as 10-year-olds.
“Field tells me you’re a writer,” one of his guests remarked at one point.
Click photo to hear The Feelies pay homage to Jimi Hendrix during their encore at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 14, 2017.
Nerd rockers The Feelies played The Sinclair in Cambridge over the weekend. For all the band’s laudable work churning out two solid sets, the encore left the greater impression. This is perhaps by design, from a band that does encores like no one else and whose 21st century incarnation just happens to have played out like one long, extended encore.
Formed in 1976, this Hoboken 5-piece achieved a modest commercial success and sizeable cult following comprising not insignificant numbers of Velvet Underground devotees. The 1980s would produce four superb studio albums. Eventually they’d break up (1992), re-form (2008), go out on limited tour (trademark diffidence in tow) and eventually release two new discs, including this year’s In Between.
And yet, I come before you not to reflexively extoll the virtues of The Feelies sound, which I love, but about which reasonable people can disagree. I’d rather applaud the remarkable structure of their shows. We’re all familiar with the two-sets-plus-appended-encore format of most club dates. Here The Feelies do not break any molds.
When it comes to the content of those encores, however, they deviate from the norm to stirring effect.
I’ve long maintained that any band — even one whose original music I can’t get enough of — should be obligated, by law, to play at least one cover during a live show. Covering someone else’s material exhibits range; it provides insight into a band’s outside influences, tastes and admirations. It is at once self-effacing and evidence of a certain kind of bravado.
A Window on The Feelies Soul
In this respect, The Feelies consistently hit it out of the park and they do so with an emotional intensity they don’t always apply to their originals. After playing not a single cover during the first two sets at The Sinclair, they re-emerged to produce their specialty: the rare all-cover encore, a half dozen tunes that, taken together, provide a veritable window on the band’s soul:
Astral Plane, The Modern Lovers
Paint It Black, Rolling Stones
I Can’t Stand It, Velvet Underground
Got to Get You Into My Life, The Beatles
Real Cool Time, The Stooges
Damaged by Love, Tom Petty
See No Evil, Television
Are You Experienced?, Jimi Hendrix
I watched this show with a couple certifiable Feelies Freaks who admitted afterward that both formal sets had come off as a bit labored. The band played a bunch of new material from InBetween, i.e. songs still to be polished in the live setting. While they nailed plenty of oldies from Time For a Witness, Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth, there wasn’t exactly a surfeit of energy up there. Of course, with The Feelies, stage histrionics are not what they’re selling.
In any case, once the encore kicked off, they summoned reservoirs of new life. Even Glenn Mercer, the famously cadaverous and impassive lead singer/guitarist, perked up. Mid-Stooges, after two sets of studied catatonia, he could be seen bouncing about the stage and rubbing his guitar against the mic stand.
All-Cover Encores: Rare Stuff
I don’t know of any other bands that deliver all-cover encores, aside from those who do nothing but covers. In some small way, The Feelies are innovating here — which is ironic, for in most every other respect, they have stubbornly refused to evolve.
When Yo La Tengo debuted with Ride the Tiger in 1985, these two Jersey-derived bands could easily have been mistaken for one another. Here was a pair of similarly skilled, post-punk, Velvet-obsessed, art-house darlings. Yo La Tengo actually has a thing for covers, too. But while YLT moved on — issuing a dozen increasingly expansive, sonically adventurous albums — The Feelies never abandoned their own specific brand of jangly, guitar-driven avant-pop, proving just how much there is to mine from such a seemingly constrictive niche.
And you know what? Their encore habits further demonstrate their desire to cling just as tightly to their earliest influences. Today, of course, there are websites devoted entirely to the fan-chronicling of set lists, even those performed by obscure bands from the 1980s. The Sinclair show has not yet been logged for all time, but here we gather from www.setlist.fm a further sampling of encore tunes from The Feelies’ Detroit show at The El, in July:
Dancing Barefoot, Patti Smith
White Light, White Heat, Velvet Underground
I’m a Believer, Neil Diamond (The Monkees didn’t write this, silly)
Everyone’s Got Something but Me and My Monkey, The Beatles (or this one)
Child of the Moon, Rolling Stones
Take It As It Comes, The Doors
Seven Days, Bob Dylan
Alt Audience Engagement
I’ve seen The Feelies three times now, all post 2008, and I just love the way these guys deploy their encore/cover strategy to paint for the audience (and re-experience for themselves) a rich picture of their collective musical tastes circa 1978, when the band was just getting going, young and impressionable.
This gambit functions additionally as an ingenious audience-engagement strategy. Everyone at The Sinclair was at least as old as I am (53). Who in their 50s doesn’t want to hear one of their favorite bands cover Television, or Patti Smith? And I find this sorta touching: The Feelies rarely leave out the Beatles and Stones — because, honestly, how could anyone, even the most overly curated latent punk aesthete, come of age in the early 1970s and completely resist their many, many charms? After all, when The Feelies were coming up, 1969 just wasn’t that long ago.
What sort of new music are The Feelies into these days? The Lord only knows. If the contents of their encores are any guide, the answer is “not much”. They knew Tom Petty has recently passed away —evidence of a basic musical awareness. Otherwise, the course of modern rock these last 25 years would appear to have made little to no impression on their song choices.
They’re a band whose predilections and influences, like their own sound (even today), remain frozen in amber. It’s hard not to love them for it.
Ed. — This story first appeared in March/April 2003 issue Golf Journal magazine.
By HAL PHILLIPS The Swift River started rising in the rural Massachusetts town of Greenwich on Aug. 14, 1939. Soon enough the fairways at Dugmar Golf Club had become unseasonably soggy. After a time the bunkers and teeing grounds were completely submerged. Had the pins not been removed years before, their flags would have been some of the last things visible before this 9-hole track and the rest of Greenwich were lost for good.
It’s been 68 years since Greenwich and three neighboring bergs were systematically condemned and flooded, all in the name of Metropolitan Boston’s chronic thirst. This massive, Depression-Era public works project, on whose ass the loss of Dugmar GC was but a pimple, created the Quabbin Reservoir, then the largest man-made, fresh-water reserve on earth.
The Lost Towns, as they’re known today, were literally erased by the Quabbin’s introduction; every tree, every man-made structure in the Swift River Valley was burned or bulldozed to make way for it. The river itself having been dammed — in Belchertown, to the south — some 412 billion gallons of water gradually rose behind the Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike. Not until 1946 did they first lap over the reservoir’s massive spillways.
By then Dugmar GC had been largely forgotten — but not erased, for memories are made of stronger stuff.
Dugmar Golf Club: The First Disposable Course
Other layouts have been lost to history, of course. Some have simply been abandoned; others were sold off to make way for post-war suburbia. But so far as we know, Dugmar GC — opened for play in 1928, hard by Curtis Hill — was the only golf course to meet its end in a purposeful deluge, sacrificed along with four 200-year-old communities to supply tens of millions of faucets in larger communities some 60 miles east.
Hundreds of golf clubs were built, as Dugmar had been, during the heroic age of Jones and Ruth, when the moneyed classes sought to bring the same sort of bravado to their own lives (not to mention a place to drink hooch in a country gone dry). More than a few of these establishments “went under” during the ensuing Depression, but none quite so purposely or literally as Dugmar Golf Club. You see, Dugmar’s developers KNEW the club’s fate before the course was ever built — before the bentgrass was imported from southern Germany, before the elegant stone patio was laid beside the farmhouse-turned-clubhouse, before the first crate of Canadian Club was hidden from view.
Dugmars creation was, in short, a set up: a crafty land deal with golf at its core; a trifle built to amuse its backers, for a time, before enriching them at the public’s expense. “Those guys knew what they were doing; they made out,” recalls a chuckling, 85-year-old Stanley Mega, who caddied at Dugmar GC and still lives close by Quabbin’s shores, in Bondsville. “Those guys knew the reservoir was going in and they made a killing.”
In essence, Dugmar GC was conceived and ultimately proved to be the world’s first and only disposable golf course.
This aerial of Dugmar GC was taken in 1931
Canny Chapman Valve Co. Executives
“Those guys,” the men behind Dugmar Golf Club, were a pair of canny executives from the Chapman Valve Co. in Springfield, then and still today the hub of Western Massachusetts. In 1924, Chapman President Thomas F. Mahar and Treasurer John J. Duggan together purchased a pleasant chunk of property some 30 miles northeast of their corporate offices — in the tiny hamlet of Greenwich (pronounced green-witch), conveniently located on the Athol branch of the Boston-Albany Railroad.
The towns of Greenwich, Dana, Enfield and Prescott were poor farming communities and had been for centuries, but their lakes and myriad points of river access were popular with holiday-makers from the big city. It was common for Springfielders to own summer camps and cottages up there.
Duggan and Mahar had far grander plans. After paying $6,850 for 147 acres of abandoned agricultural land, they immediately set to work refurbishing the property’s existing farmhouse. In 1925 its value was assessed at $2,000; two years later this homestead was valued at $7,000. Next, Duggan and Mahar built a striking fieldstone lodge on the south-facing slope of Curtis Hill. Completed in 1926, it was assessed a year later at $12,000.
Once an additional 15 acres had been purchased, they commissioned Orrin Smith to design and build Dugmar’s golf course. Opened in 1928, the nine-hole layout occupied ground southeast of Curtis Hill, in full and magnificent view of the lodge with its distinctive stone-pillared porch.
The layout at Dugmar — a moniker created by combining the surnames Duggan and Mahar — was not some bit of amateur course design. Smith had been a respected and quite prolific New England architect, one who had apprenticed with Willie Park Jr. and Donald Ross before starting his own Hartford, Conn.-based practice in 1925. Dugmar GC measured a stout 3,160 yards from the back tees, boasted state-of-the-art putting surfaces of South German bentgrass, and featured 8,000 feet of underground irrigation pipe, something only the better courses could afford in those days.
An unforgettable place
“It was an unbelievably beautiful place right there in the valley. I’ll never forget it,” says Mega. “It was a very nice golf course, but I was too young to play back then. We caddied. I used to travel up there with Dave Belisle and Jimmy Fitzgerald. We spent a lot of time up there. If I made 35 cents a round, well, that was great!”
Mega and his older brother Alec would often rise in Bondsville, their tiny home town just south and west of the Swift River Valley, and take the train up to Greenwich. Or they’d hitch a ride via Belchertown on Route 21, the only paved road that ran north/south through the watershed. “It was quite a place up there. A few of the holes I forget, but I remember everything else. Between the 1st and 2nd there was a big stand of pine, sort of squared off. There were more woodlands guarding the 3rd, on the right. That’s where I found all my golf balls, you know. Now that was a nice hole, a great dogleg par-5.
“The greens were what always impressed me,” Mega continues, gathering steam. “Tiny things. You had to be accurate! And boy were they in great shape. Beautiful. Imported! People were always bragging about how they were imported. In fact, before they flooded the place, someone came in, picked up those greens and took them away! … I just caddied up there but my brother, he was a good golfer. He played Dugmar quite a bit. So did another good player, Whitey Wisnewski, who was almost like a pro. He used to play with [Henry] Bontempo here in Springfield. He played the best around. Good golfers played up at Dugmar. I still remember.”
A Raucous Close to Phase I
The 1928 opening of Dugmar’s 9-hole course fulfilled the “Phase I” vision of its founders. This was now a fully fledged country club, complete with a golf course ana clubhouse. It featured several guest rooms and a lively social calendar — because, lest we forget, this was the decade of Prohibition.
“There were raucous parties up there; they certainly took advantage of the remoteness of the place,” explains J.R. Greene, an historian who’s been researching Quabbin and the Lost Towns since 1975.
“The Greenwich Village train stop was very close to the golf course, a short walk. So it was very convenient for these ‘bit city outlanders’ to travel there from Springfield. And I have it on very good authority that Dugmar members brought plenty of liquor up there — and women who weren’t necessarily their wives. This was a heavily Yankee, Protestant region; there were no bars or taverns there, even before Prohibition. So that sort of behavior was duly noted.”
“It was a wild place,” Mega concurs. “To be served drinks, well, you had to know the right people. There was a lot of drinking. Those guys were really something; they knew what they were doing.”
The fieldstone lodge serving Dugmar used to sit on Curtis Hill. Today, it’s Curtis Island.
Phase II? Depends on Whom You Ask
Duggan and Mahar’s Phase II vision for Dugmar GC remains, to this day, the subject of some speculation. The idea of creating Quabbin Reservoir, you see, was put forward as early as 1919. The Legislature formally proposed the measure three years later. In 1927, the state legally impounded the mighty Swift River, thereby clearly declaring its intention to take the towns of Dana, Prescott, Enfield and Greenwich by eminent domain. That act that would eventually displace some 2,500 residents.
In other words, by 1929, when Dugmar Golf Club’s curious, boisterous run was just beginning, many residents of The Lost Towns had already sold their condemned properties to the state and moved their lives elsewhere. Others had sold out and rented their own homes, buying time to determine where and how exactly their lives might continue.
“This area was dying unless you raised livestock or fowl. For the younger generation it was an obvious opportunity to get out and start fresh,” says Greene, whose history, The Creation of Quabbin Reservoir, was reissued by Performance Press in 2001. “But for people in their 40s and up, their lives were torn apart – during the Depression no less! This was a tragedy. And of course, these folks didn’t want some peckerwood from the state telling them to move out. You have to remember, this was a very wrenching thing. There was no job-relocation assistance. Nothing like that. They had to find a new house, a new job, a new life — in the heart of the Depression.”
So why build a remote country club here, on land legally destined to sit under 40 feet of drinking water?
“It was an investment,” Greene says flatly, fighting a wry smile. “Just a part of the game Duggan and Mahar played. I believe they knew the reservoir was going to happen and this golf project was pure speculation on their part. I’ve had older residents say as much to me. It’s received wisdom, if you will.”
Claiming Qualified Ignorance
Of course, Duggan and Mahar claimed no such wisdom, not publicly anyway. They didn’t claim ignorance of the proposed reservoir project; when pressed in court, they claimed to have considered the Quabbin in the same way many Commonwealth residents still view certain state-funded, public works initiatives: I’ll believe it when I see it.
In any case, by the time the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had formally taken the Dugmar property — on Sept., 15, 1933, by eminent domain — Duggan and Mahar had naively or shrewdly (take your pick) drawn up an 800-lot subdivision plan for their property. A “gentlemen’s estate,” they called it — with “beach access.” They had secured access to Curtis Pond and harbored visions, on paper at least, of selling these lake-front lots to Springfield swells in search of a holiday home.
As the creation of Quabbin Reservoir was going to happen after all, Duggan and Mahar sought “fair” compensation from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — to the tune of $436,500, or some $11.2 million in 2026 dollars.
For the record, the town of Greenwich in its entirety had last been assessed, in 1932, at $640,000.
The state, which valued the golf property at no more than $56,000 — basically, a sum of the club’s biggest assets, plus maintenance equipment and whatnot — immediately balked at Duggan and Mahar’s asking price. The matter was referred to a Board of Referees, a body specially appointed by Quabbin’s administrative entity, the Metropolitan District Water Commission, to arbitrate disputes such as this. At first the Referees awarded Duggan and Mahar a split-the-difference sum of $221,000, pending approval by the state Supreme Court. The court would offer no such approval; it remanded the matter to the Referees.
Determining fair market value for Dugmar Golf Club — at the time of its “taking” in 1933 — would prove an arduous task. The legal process took nearly four years and produced some gloriously arcane golf course-related testimony. An endless parade of real estate experts took the stand, but so did an assembly of New England golf luminaries, all of whom offered their varying opinions on the quality (read: ultimate monetary value) of Dugmar.
Golfing Luminaries Take the Stand
Appearing for the state, among others, were Walter Hatch, longtime construction superintendent in the employ of Donald Ross. Fred Wright, a 1923 Walker Cupper and 7-time Massachusetts Amateur champion, took the stand. So did Dr. Lawrence S. Dickinson, distinguished agronomist and longtime member of the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in nearby Amherst. Produced by the Commonwealth to argue for Dugmar’s lower valuation, Dickinson was particularly critical of the property’s soil. As evidence, he toted several samples to the Springfield District Courthouse in masonry jars.
Appearing for Duggan and Mahar were Orrin Smith and fellow course architect Wayne Stiles, both of whom offered testimony well ahead of their times. For instance, while the nine holes themselves were built for $18,000, the architects testified that Dugmar’s golf course actually increased the value of the property around it, including these would-be housing units. Similar arguments would be trotted out for several decades to come.
Assistant Attorney General John S. Derham, a bombastic figure of the non-golfing variety, wasn’t buying any of this conjecture. At one stage, he pointedly asked Stiles whether it was “good architecture” to place larger greens on holes requiring a long approach and smaller greens where only a short carry is necessary. “Any fool knows that,” snapped Mr. Stiles — or so reported the Springfield Evening Republican, which doggedly covered the hearings from start to finish.
Long story short, the state’s witnesses agreed that Dugmar was worth anywhere between $52,000 and $56,000. Duggan and Mahar’s cadre of specialists all agreed the property was worth between $340,000 and $360,000, mainly on account of all the house lots they might have sold.
In the end, on June 11, 1937, the Board of Referees ruled that Duggan and Mahar be awarded $150,000 for their condemned property, plus 4 percent interest accrued from the land-taking in September 1933. That brought the total payout, including legal and court fees, to $179,042.
Not bad return for a disposable item.
Ultimately, Duggan and Mahar received more than $1,100 per acre for Dugmar GC. On average, Greene asserts, other landowners in the Swift River Valley towns of Dana, Prescott, Enfield and Greenwich were compensated at approximately $100 per acre. Contemporary press accounts in the Athol Transcript described Duggan and Mahar as “aggressive, up-to-date businessmen”, and so they were. It took a while, but eventually they beat the state at its own game — in its own eminent backyard.
One Step Ahead of the Flood
Once the June 1937 judgment was handed down, Dugmar GC beat a hasty retreat into the deeper recesses of public consciousness. Our Chapman Valve executives had up and left Greenwich in 1933, content to pursue their Dugmar concerns in court. The putting greens, if Stanley Mega is to be believed, were uprooted and sold, perhaps to some long-admiring greenkeeper at a nearby course. “When did the course close for good?” Greene asks rhetorically. “We have reports of people playing there well after it had been abandoned, in 1933. But other than that, we don’t really know.”
One thing’s for sure: the water started rising on Aug. 14, 1939. By that time Dugmar GC had been thoroughly disposed of.
Mahar didn’t long enjoy his share of the $179,042. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage just six weeks after the judgment came down. He was 52 years old. Duggan lived a while longer. He became a member of Longmeadow and Springfield country clubs. Duggan would succeed Mahar as president of Chapman Valve and make a name for himself as a philanthropist and Democratic Party bigwig, though he never stood for office. He too suffered a debilitating cerebral hemorrhage, in 1953, and died a year later at the age of 65.
The Quabbin Reservoir project was originally budgeted at $65 million. Amazing though it may seem to educated observers of Massachusetts’ infamous public works scene, the job was completed under budget. A mere $54 million was spent, thanks to depressed labor costs and federal grants.
“So, paying Duggan and Mahar was a drop in the bucket,” Greene notes. “Even so, that was taxpayer money. Their attitude was, ‘We’ll do this, have a good time and if things work out, we’ll make some money on it.’ ”
And so they did. Duggan and Mahar even managed to fashion a lasting, relatively dry testament to themselves and their anomalous, dually eponymous endeavor: The fieldstone lodge on Curtis Hill still stands — on the south-facing shore of what became Curtis Island. It remains the only man-made structure, the only above-water evidence of The Lost Towns in the entire 89-square-mile Quabbin reserve.
“I find that extremely ironic,” says Greene, “because here’s something that was built by outsiders — and it was one of the very last things ever built in the valley. It’s really quite a monument.”
To what exactly?
“To the cupidity of Duggan and Mahar.”
Chasing Pre-Pollution Fauna
Biologist and scuba enthusiast Dr. Ed Klekowski is way into pre-pollution fauna. This explains why, for years, he had tried to get a close, forensic look at the Quabbin’s floor — to study the organic legacies of lakes and streams long ago overwhelmed by 412 billion gallons of river water. Several years ago, he succeeded. Klekowski led a dive of the area during the 2001 filming of “Under Quabbin”, a Massachusetts public television documentary which chronicled the lives of humans (and pre-pollution fauna) in the Lost Towns.
Klekowski, his cameramen, and their guides in the Mass. State Police Underwater Recovery Team are the last people to see Dugmar up close.
“Diving the golf course was much more interesting to think about than actually do,” reports Klekowski, a professor of biology at UMass Amherst. “Flooded fairways are probably the planet’s most monotonous dive sites: endless vistas of algae-covered flatness! We spent most of our time searching for something, anything, to film. Golf will never be an underwater sport.”
Klekowski’s team did find several of Dugmar’s irrigation pipes protruding from what is now the reservoir floor. They found the stone patio Duggan and Mahar had built beside the old farmhouse where, six decades earlier, martinis had been served (despite federal law) and beknickered sportsmen (despite their marital status) had flirted with flappers.
“Our goal,” Klekowski says, “was to find and video the remains of the buildings associated with the course. When we finally found the old foundations, you couldn’t but feel a bit nostalgic. It was actually sort of creepy being down there, where there had been so much life at one time.”
Lunch on Curtis Island
It’s illegal to set foot on Curtis Island today, but Bradley Gage has done it. Twenty years ago, as a member of the state Fisheries and Wildlife Board, he and his fellow board members lunched there. The day trip was an odd homecoming for Gage who was born in nearby Enfield — some 40 feet below the reservoir’s surface and two miles north. He spent the first 8 years of his life there before his father, Roy, moved the family to Amherst in 1932.
“My dad played Dugmar,” Gage says. “He talked about it with pride and interest, that he and his friends had played it.” Gage had been too young to have experienced the course himself, to remember much of anything about the place. Fact is, the number of folks with first-hand memories of Dugmar is small and getting smaller.
Gage grew up to become a golfer and the state official wishes he had spoken more of Dugmar with his dad, while they had the chance. This memory is a false one. Still, it’s one he might have cultivated further — because some memories are worth having, even if they’re not your own.
They are complicated things, these memories. Stanley Mega retains many of his own, but they can prove a burden. It had been 30 years since Mega had spoken or thought of Dugmar Golf Club, he says, and one could see the act — exhilarating for a time — eventually led him back to the realities of an 85-year-old life. Mega doesn’t play much golf anymore. After 20 minutes of animated recollections, his voice trailed off in that way an older man’s sometimes does. His brother is gone now. So are Dave Belisle and Jimmy Fitzgerald. Whitey Wisniewski, too.
Dugmar GC may as well be gone. It exists only in the suspended, dreamy netherworld of algae, pre-pollution fauna and would-be tap water — utterly hidden from all those lacking scuba gear and a state police escort. The train doesn’t stop in Bondsville or Greenwich any longer. Route 21 survives, but only in part. The road terminates outside Belchertown, its asphalt ribbon slowly descending toward, then disappearing beneath the Quabbin with an eerie, incongruous finality.
The stone patio beside the converted farmhouse is the only underwater evidence that Dugmar GC was ever there…
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (Sept. 11, 2017) — I’ve got work to do, but here I am getting misty writing about Gene Michael — a New York Yankee no less! I support the Red Sox but here’s the thing: His passing last week jolted me back to a time when my baseball allegiances were new, and rather muddled, thanks to geography and the insistent, dulcet tones of Lindsay Nelson, Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy.
I was born in Stoughton, Massachusetts in 1964. Soon enough my father’s corporate work life moved our family to New Jersey, then to California, and then, in 1969, back to the northern Jersey suburb of Upper Montclair. It was there, in the mammoth penumbra cast by the Gotham sporting scene, that I first took a shine to baseball. Yeah, I played it in the streets on Waterbury Road, and I collected baseball cards, but this is when I first started watching games en masse. All through the early 1970s I absorbed this NYC baseball vibe via WPIX Channel 11 (Yankees) and WOR Channel 9, where Mets broadcasters Nelson, Kiner and Murphy plied their trade.
It was an intoxicating time to follow sports in New York. The Yankees were shit, but the Mets were a legit phenomonon. Joe Willie Namath and the Jets were literal world-beaters, and the Knicks had begun their most dominant era in team history.
My family would move to suburban Boston in 1973, and there my dad would chuck his corporate odyssey for some stability in a town my parents were loath to leave. That move meant I could, from that point forward, seamlessly pass myself off as a legitimately rabid Sox, Celtics, Bruin and Patriots fan with impeccable historic and geographic credentials.
But that would be a white lie.
Gene Michael, then Bud Harrelson
The first sports teams I truly learned and observed closely were the Yankees and Mets of the early 1970s, and that’s why I was moved by thoughts of Gene Michael, the Yanks’ light-hitting glove man at shortstop. Not every game was televised back then but many were and I watched the man called Stick play dozens and dozens of them beside Horace Clarke, behind pitchers Doc Medich, Fritz Peterson and Steve Kline, taking cut-offs from Bobby Murcer and Roy White. New York was a terrible team at this time. It confused my 7-year-old brain that the Yankees had, apparently, been so dominant once — but had nevertheless come to suck so bad.
Convenient to my eventual Sox fandom, I much preferred Bud Harrelson’s Mets to Michael’s Yankees. I don’t remember the Miracle Mets of 1969. But I did enjoy those NYM teams of the early 1970s, and any mention of Gene Michael, or Dave Schneck, or Thurman Munson or Tommy Agee summons the memory of just how hard and quickly a 7-year-old boy can fall for the game.
I watched those shitty Yankee teams because they were the only thing on.
But I developed a real attachment to those Amazin’ Mets.
Let me say right here that no Google has been deployed in the writing of this blog item. As such, here’s the whole Met team from 1973, the guys who nipped St. Louis and a great Pirates team (World Series champs in ‘71) to win the old Eastern Division (with just 82 wins!) before handling the 99-win Big Red Machine to capture the NL pennant: Jerry Grote and Duffy Dyer at catcher; the inimitable and original Met Ed Kranepool at first; Felix Milan and Ken Boswell platooning at second; feisty Bud Harrelson at short; Wayne Garrett at third; John Milner, Don Hanh and my favorite Met of all, Cleon Jones, patrolling the Shea Stadium outfield.
Pitching Made the Mets Magnificent
Everywhere but the mound, this was a pretty darned different team from the shock World Series champions of ’69. Only Harrelson, Kranepool and maybe Grote held over from Miracle Mets. But the pitching was a constant. It was Seaver, Matlack and Koosman who made the Mets of this entire era so very formidable. Just to shore things up, a young Tug McGraw closed. And who did the Mets pick up late in 1973 to give them a bit o’ pop? Only a 40-year-old Willie Mays and Le Grande Orange, Rusty Staub.
Still, come October, those Mets were not expected to trouble the Oakland A’s, a dynasty at its peak. But what a series I watched from my new home in Boston during the fall of 1973, surrounded by people who could not have cared less. The Mets went down valiantly, in 7 games, after having led the series 3-2. Lefthander Kenny Holtzman didn’t just win the finale; he got the big hit off opposing starter Jon Matlack to turn the tide. Bert Campaneris hit a home run to seal it. I was mighty disappointed.
The ’73 Series would prove the end of serious contention for this generation of Mets; the club would fall into disarray before regrouping in time to put a stake through my heart in October 1986. Gene Michael, for whom Baltimore’s Mark Belanger would be a pretty good comp, would retire in 1975 — right before the Yankees got good again. He managed the Cubs and eventually served in the thankless role of Yankees GM under George Steinbrenner. Stick would hold his nose long enough to build the great Yankee teams of the late 1990s.
And now he is gone, another withered petal on my fading flower of youth…
This August 2002 essay first appeared in the Portland Press-Herald, where I was an op-ed columnist from 2000-2003. The prognostication below should have made me famous: In 2004, the Sox came back from a 3-0 ALCS deficit to beat the Yankees. They defeated another cosmic nemesis, the St. Louis Cardinals\, to win the 2004 World Series.
By Hal Phillips PORTLAND, Maine (Aug. 17, 2002) — I never saw Ted Williams play. Not in person, not on television. We Red Sox fans born in the 1960s never had the chance. All we got were gilt-edged glimpses served up in black and white: the triumphant but out-of-context film clip, the seemingly staged on deck swings, the hyper-reverent musings of our elders. Yet the shadow Teddy Ballgame cast over New England was so large that it hardly mattered. Heroic figures like The Kid transcend generation gaps.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve coveted a Red Sox away jersey — not the ‘70s-era pajama tops of my youth, but the genuine flannel article from well before my time. From Ted’s time. When my darling wife delivered on this wish last Christmas, the number choice was a no-brainer: 9.
Ted Williams touched all of us New Englanders, regardless of age.
Yet perhaps my lack of first-hand exposure allows me to examine his recent passing with a more clear, spiritually acute eye. As his children fight over the fate of his remains, and Williams remains in corporeal limbo, I think it’s important that we ask ourselves this question: Are the Sox better off now that Ted Williams is gone?
You may find my premise obsequious in its optimism, or perversely macabre, perhaps a tad heretical. But hear me out.
Ted Williams as Psychic Burden
The numbers don’t lie. The seminal digits which should be flashing across the beleaguered eyes of Red Sox Nation this summer are “1918-2002”. Those are the years The Kid bestrode the Earth. However, these same dates also measure with excruciating accuracy the span of Boston’s World Series drought. Coincidence? If so, it’s a genuine doozie — even by the wacky standards of numerology.
Is it possible that Harry Frazee’s selling of Babe Ruth has been a mere front, a convenient explanation of Boston’s sad championship void thereafter? Shouldn’t we at least consider possible corollaries — namely, that until Ted Williams and his outsized, symbolically fraught persona joined the hereafter, his beloved Sox were cosmically doomed to underachieve?
In this, The Age of Irony, it’s worth exploring. If on some agnostic level we accept as valid The Curse of the Bambino — wherein The Sox endure pain and misfortune on account of Frazee’s notorious salary dump — we should also ponder the possibility that those same Sox will prosper now that the Splinter has been removed from our collective paw (or soon will be, if his offspring get with the program).
If nothing else has been established during our brief period of mourning, it’s now clear that Ted was right: He probably was the greatest hitter who ever lived. But look at the type of player we know Ted Williams to have been: all hit/marginal field… station-to-station… statistically obsessed… stubborn… probably took his own cab home on occasion… and lest we forget, he couldn’t pitch.
Quintessential but not Win-Enabling
It’s not just that Ted was The Greatest Player in Red Sox History. He was the proto-Sox, our heroic archetype (Joseph Campbell would have had a field day with this one). He was Jim Rice and Walt Dropo and Wade Boggs combined and writ large. The quintessential Fenway slugger, the Uber-Sox, the superannuated embodiment of all the fine Boston players (read: hitters) who, from 1918 up to now, have piled up batting achievements but never brought home that ultimate rash of bacon, a World Series title.
Honestly, I’m not trying to be morbidly clever or in any way disrespectful. I never wished Ted gone.
But now that he is gone, I can’t help but feel an enormous cosmic weight has been lifted from our shoulders.
The Curse of the Bambino is a fine theory; it may even contain a shred of supernatural relevance. But this is bigger than the Bambino. After all, Christianity was nothing until He was taken up. The Greeks didn’t take Troy until Achilles ritually bought the farm.
I’m hear to inform you that Ted’s passing, for Red Sox followers, is the same sort of watershed event. Witness the extraordinary outpouring of communal grief. Clearly, the breadth of this emotional expression speaks to the near-divine place Teddy long occupied in the New England psyche.
Now that Teddy Ballgame has left us, I submit that his actual divinity can be realized. I submit that he’s destined to occupy a far more emotionally positive place in the years to come. His earthly passing, while sad, trumps The Curse. It has freed us — once we’ve had a good, long cry — to get on with our baseball lives.
Back to Mr. Campbell
Campbell himself — the author of “A Hero with a Thousand Faces,” not overpriced/failed late-70s reliever Bill Campbell — would urge us not merely to consider the fable but to interpret it. The Lion (us) winced when the thorn (Ted) was removed from its paw. It was an agonizing, emotionally wrenching process. But now that The Splinter has been dislodged and the pain has subsided, we are spendidly released.
We’re talking the cathartic removal of spiritual baggage here, people.
You want corroborative evidence? Enos Slaughter joined the choir invisible on Monday [Aug. 12, 2002], officially throwing dirt on that ghost.
Which brings us back to the matter of Ted’s delayed departure from this earthly realm, for indeed he does not to appear to occupy that cosmically harmonic place. Not yet. As you know, certain factions within the Williams family wish to put Ted to rest in traditional fashion. Others, led by his son John Henry, want his body and brain cryogenically frozen.
Good god. A pox on his son for handling this process so shoddily — so damned slowly! My gray Sox jersey (which I have vowed to wear, and not wash, until such time that Ted’s passage to the spiritual plane has been successfully achieved) grows more rank by the day. What’s more, Ted’s place in limbo has dragged our boys down into second place, behind the Yankees and other Wild Card hopefuls.
So, let me here express my hope that Ted’s son does the right thing and drops this scandalous business of suspending (animatedly) his dad’s remains for DNA transactions to be named later. Please, John Henry, respectfully commit The Kid to the soil, or at least set him upon the modern equivalent of a funeral pyre. Put your heroic father in harmony with the cosmos so the stars might finally, at long last, begin their alignment.
Postscript
While it’s plenty clear the Sox were not destined to win a World Series while The Kid walked the earth, it’s not clear that Sox fortunes depended entirely on his physical remains being properly laid to rest, as is posited above. In fact, it’s not clear that Ted Williams has ever been afforded the opportunity to rest in peace. His son, John Henry, whose fault that limbo is, certainly got his. He died in March 2004, from leukemia.
The inimitable Bob Barker, flanked by “Price is Right” eye candy Janice Pennington (left) and Anita Ford.
As yours probably does, my alma mater hits me all too frequently with some manner of e-newsletter cum fund-raising communiqué. One can hardly escape the memories stirred/jarred by all this WesContact, which is surely the way they want it. In any case, a recent MailChimp morsel revealed, among other things, that three Wesleyan University faculty, among them Nat Greene, had received The Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. While this particular tidbit proved interesting enough to peruse, I’m only now addressing the nostalgia it prompted — immersed as I am, third party, in the college experience of both my kids.
The first thing to say is that my cohort and I attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., alongside an actual Binswanger — Benjamin Pennypacker Binswanger to be exact. Never knew him but my housemates and I made note of his titanically pretentious name the first week of school freshman year and never forgot it. Never tired of mocking it, either. Always wondered if he was related to Princeton’s Jay Binswanger, winner of the first Heisman Trophy…
Wesleyan Professor Nat Greene
More to the point, Nat Greene was one of these recent Binswanger honorees. I took a couple classes with him but the first was a survey of European history 1815-1945, and I remember it best because it was the only class I ever took with my housemate Dennis Carboni, an art history major whose course load never again overlapped with mine (classical history/modern American lit).
Greene didn’t necessarily tilt the material toward “social” history, an approach then sweeping uber-liberal bastions like Wesleyan. His hewed more to the traditional “Great Men, Great Events” approach. I remember the syllabus included a book of his own scholarship, “From Versailles to Vichy: The Third French Republic, 1919–1940”, which a) struck me at the time as being pretty awesome, that this guy was teaching from his own work; and b) still resides in a bookcase somewhere here in my house, for reasons completely bewildering to my wife. An entertaining lecturer and no-nonsense grader of essays (all testing was conducted via manic, long-hand scribbling in those little blue booklets), Greene was a fine professor, the sort I hope Silas and Clara will experience at some point in their academic careers.
Nat Green Class at 10, Price is Right at 11
But here’s what I remember most from my class with Nat Greene: It ran from 10 to 10:50 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings in the old PAC building — a few steps from the manhole where we often plunged down into Wesleyan’s famous tunnel system, the subject of another remembrance perhaps. If Dennis and I didn’t dawdle after class, we could race home to my off-campus apartment and catch The Price Is Rightat 11 a.m.
Yes, The Price Is Right. It became a sort of ironic obsession for me but something more than that for Dennis, as many things did. It gave me great pleasure to watch him obsessively game this once-seminal game show.
I’m not sure that college kids go in for this sort of thing today, awash as they are in video content and on-demand entertainment delivery choices. However, during the early 1980s, TV was a sort of novel diversion for college kids. We had grown up with it, of course, but had virtually no access to it at school. And so, great delight was taken in the ironic devotion to retrograde programming like soap operas in dorm lounges and late-night reruns of shows like the Rockford Files and Star Trek — things we would never bother watching when home with our families. My sophomore year, my housemate and I came by a tiny black-and-white TV that I’m pretty sure we carried with us the next three years, to three different houses, deploying along the way a staggering array of make-shift aerials including one that involved a pumpkin wrapped in aluminum foil.
The Price is Right fell right into this determinedly low-brow TV consumption, representing, as it did, all that was bourgeois and mass cultural — a great pleasure following high-blown, Nat Greene-led discussions of Marx, Captain Swing and Bismarck’s deft wrangling of German principalities. While Dennis’ note-taking habits at the knee of Professor Green were notoriously suspect, Bob Barker proved another matter entirely. While watching the show, Dennis kept copious notes on the price of every consumer item so that he might later blurt out a winning price before any of the three official contestants. When some dishwasher was revealed from behind the curtain, Dennis would browse his cheat sheet while everyone else in the studio cooed with consumerist abandon (take that, Karl!).
“Whirlpool, eh? That’s upmarket,” Dennis would muse strategically. “I’m going with $538.”
And invariably, it was so — or near enough that Dennis would have earned, in our demented fantasy world, the right to bound up on stage to mug with Barker at close quarters.
Our College/Young Adult Families
I heard an interesting interview a few years ago with writer/director Noah Baumbach and his partner Greta Gerwig, star of his movie, Frances Ha. Gerwig, then 28, talked about how several characters she’s played on screen ]stumble through their mid-20s in an unhinged emotional state — not necessarily because of new adult demands being foisted upon them, but rather because the surrogate families all 20somethings create for themselves at college (and just afterward) invariably fall away, sometimes bit by bit, but always in ways that unmoor. I remember this dynamic: We gathered these people upon leaving our actual families, and Gerwig explained that she was completely taken aback when close college and post-collegiate friends moved away, took jobs that contravened all she had assumed they stood for, or married someone whose presence effectively severed or weakened these bonds — bonds that young, college-educated folk believe are strong and meaningful enough to last forever.
I find Gerwig’s observation to be spot on. I remain close to several friends from college and that immediate-post collegiate period, including Dennis, but many more did fall away over time for reasons that were surely legitimate but felt to me, at the time, like a sort of casual betrayal. I mean, these were people I lived with, for years — they contributed to the shaping of me and presumably I reciprocated in some way. It makes one value all the more those who’ve not fallen away, but it also makes one sad and wistful that all we have to show for these folks, now lost, are weirdly disconnected memories, the odd anecdote, and persistent wonder as to whom they turned out to be.
I stay in pretty good touch with Dennis but there are probably a dozen others I haven’t spoken to for many years now. I wonder how they’re doing, beyond the superficial info I might gather on Facebook (were they, or I, to indulge in such a thing). If we tripped over each other somewhere, would we trade grand truths? Would we trade Nat Greene recollections or their equivalents before falling into the banter we perfected and found so very absorbing all those years ago?
Neo-Hegelian idealist philosopher, educator and fascist Giovanni Gentile. It was he, not Mussolini, who explained, “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
Hey, Kids! Time to play a fun and revealing new game we’re calling, “You Might Be a Fascist!” Follow along and respond. If you’re not careful, you may learn something about yourself before we’re done (!).
Here we go. Complete this statement with candor: When Hillary Clinton conceded the election on Nov. 9, 2016, did you think her speech and the tone of that speech…
Displayed respect for our country’s centuries-old traditions re. the peaceful, orderly succession of power?
Stood in contrast to the concession speech her opponent would not commit to making had the tables been turned (“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win.”)?
Didn’t impress me one way or another?
Revealed her to be weak?
If you answered 4, you MIGHT be a fascist!
Here’s another one: When then president-elect Trump claimed on Twitter that, contrary to all demonstrable evidence, he actually won the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally for his opponent, your gut reaction was:
Authoritarians typically exaggerate their popular support to increase the perception of their legitimacy, for the deeper objective is to weaken democratic institutions that invariably limit their power.
Actively eroding confidence in voting and elections (to say nothing of representative bodies and establishment media) gives would-be authoritarians a freer hand to wield power.
Hell yeah! And that bitch was clearly behind all that voter fraud — and the child sex ring, plus all those murders. Lock her up before she kills again.
That’s right, if you answered 3, you’re almost certainly a fascist. (You’re getting really good at this! To think that only 15 months ago, you fancied yourself a mere Libertarian!)
Royal St. David’s Golf Club and its singular Welsh backdrop, Harlech Castle
HARLECH, Wales (July 13, 2017) — The British Open is nearly underway and, while there are myriad reasons to visit the U.K. with your golf clubs, none of them have much to do with British Open venues. Look at Wales, located right next door to this year’s host, Royal Birkdale — to all of England, if we’re honest.The R&A has never staged The Open over this border. Still, the golf up and down the northwestern Welsh coast is outstanding. Welsh golf along the south coast ((Royal Porthcawl, Southerndown, Pennard) is even better.
What’s more, when you venture into this section of the British Isles, you experience a region so remote, so removed from modern resort and tournament conventions, that a golf journey there feels almost Arthurian.
A hefty chunk of the King Arthur legend is Welsh, drawn from early poetic sources such as Y Gododdin. Like the Welsh language itself, theses texts pre-date Roman Britain, much less Christianity. The Druids, the UK’s pre-Christian priestly class, considered the Welsh island of Anglesey sacred. This ancient, mystical aura continues to pervade the country’s dark hollows, its untamed coastline, even its trees. The Celts thought them sacred, you know.
I’m a voracious fan of the historical novelist Bernard Cornwell, whose Arthurian trilogy, The Warlord Chronicles (comprising The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur) were all published about during mid-1990s. Taken together, they represent the best, most accurate and compelling take on the Arthurian tales — and much of the three-book saga takes place in Wales.
Indeed, they made a movie loosely based on Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles, in 2004 Alas, the film — titled “King Arthur” and starting Clive Owen and Keira Knightly — proved middling at best. But they filmed all the castle scenes in Harlech.
Welsh Golf: Where Worlds Collide
Here’s an example of how this ancient world and the modern golfing world can interact in the UK’s least heralded golf destination:
About 15 years ago my girlfriend, Sharon, who would later become my wife, and I went to visit friends in Market Drayton, Shropshire, just over the Welsh border, in England, and not far from Birmingham. I was there on assignment, writing a travel piece about “where to play in the Midlands” while attending the 1995 Ryder Cup.
We can see what sort of long-term promotional effect that story had: To this day, no one talks about Edgbaston, Beau Desert or Hawkstone Park.
Anyway, we decided to head west a couple hours, over the Welsh border to seaside Harlech, home to Royal St. David’s Golf Club. I had written a letter to the club secretary requesting courtesy of the club (remember written, posted letters?). He had kindly obliged. We three arrived in coat and tie, ready for an audience and perhaps a drink in the bar before teeing off.
Ahead of our game, however, we stashed our clubs in the boot and walked a few hundred meters up the hill from RSDGC to Harlech Castle, which overlooks the course, the town and the entire countryside. Built by King Edward I during his late-thirteenth century conquest of Wales, it served as de facto capital of an independent Wales between 1404 and 1409. That’s when was held by Owain Glyndwr, the last native Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales.
Try doing something like that within walking distance at Royal St. George’s.
Impressing the Club Secretary
Sharon was a pretty rank novice back then. She had her own clubs and arrived at the club looking pretty darned smart in a turtleneck and one of my vintage sport jackets with the sleeves rolled up (remember the ‘90s?). Still, the club secretary was dubious. I don’t know whether he suspected her inexperience (none of us were asked to present handicap cards), or he was merely a mild sexist when it came to lassie guests playing his course.
Whatever the case, he followed us to the first tee to witness our opening drives. I’m not sure who was made more nervous by this “gesture,” Sharon or myself — but she proceeded to drill one right down the middle, about 210 yards, and off we went. Come to think of it, that may have been the day I decided she was the one.
In any case, Royal St. David’s was and remains fairly sublime. The opening holes are a bit ordinary and flattish, hidden as they are behind (and not amid) the giant dunes at seaside. But the back nine rollicks through some truly extraordinary dunesland. Great stuff.
Welsh Golf doesn’t have to be — some would argue that it shouldn’t be — about resorts and tourism initiatives and tournament-enabled marketing synergies. It’s about watching your future wife stripe one, after mingling with the spirits of rebel kings and pre-Christian sorcerers in a real, live castle. Not to belabor the point, but they ain’t doing that at Birkdale.
The 11th at Royal St. David’s (photo courtesy of Brandon Tucker)
This piece appeared in the April 2004 issue of LINKS Magazine. Above, George von Elm (left) and Billy Burke, combatants in the longest U.S. Open every contested..
TOLEDO, Ohio (April 10, 2004) — The next time you play a round of golf in some modicum of heat and humidity, the next time you trudge up the 18th fairway and feel a bit of lactic acid building up in your thighs, spare a thought for Billy Burke and George Von Elm. These unflinching principals squared off golf’s longest week, the most extraordinary physical and competitive test the game has witnessed. The 1931 U.S. Open was held some 86 Julys ago here at The Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio. Grantland Rice called their duel there “the most sensational open ever played in the 500-year history of golf.” Burke and Von Elm required 144 holes of medal play to produce a winner: Burke, by a single stroke.
Take a moment to think about the parameters here: 72 holes contested over the first three days, followed by 36 playoff holes on Monday and 36 more on Tuesday. Waged in the midst of a stifling, July heat wave — in an era devoid of fitness trailers, cushioned in-soles, and air-conditioned clubhouses — this match proved golf’s precursor to the Bataan Death March, the games original Duel in the Sun. It was and remains, needless to say, the longest playoff in U.S Open history. Supreme Court cases have taken less time to adjudicate.
Or so it appeared during the morning round on Tuesday, July 6, 1931, as Burke and Von Elm — with 126 holes behind them and 18 still to negotiate — staggered off the 18th green toward the clubhouse for lunch. Even the most callow observer could see the quality of play eroding, under the enormous dual burdens of fatigue and Open-playoff pressure.
Yet Burke rallied to play his finest golf of the tournament over the final 18 holes. Von Elm, too, rose to the occasion and finished but a single shot in arrears.
“I looked for a rather ghastly finish to a grand struggle,” wrote O.B. Keeler in The American Golfer. “Instead it was, and ever shall remain in my mind, the most remarkable exhibition of recovered stamina and poise and of sheer staying power and determination I have ever witnessed.” Legend says that Von Elm, a lithe figure with little to lose, shed nine pounds during the championship, while the stocky Burke managed to gain two. “A circumstance,” Keeler mused, “which, if accurate, gives rise to wonder as to his diet.”
Golf’s Longest Week required No Jones
The first major of of 1931 was the first “Jones-less” U.S. Open since 1920. The Emperor had retired from competitive golf following his epic Grand Slam the year before, and while he was on hand at Inverness, the golfing public was anxious to see just who would fill the considerable void. Golf’s professional class was especially keen. Bobby Cruickshank admitted he and colleagues were delighted to see Jones in the gallery, as opposed to the field.
Nineteen thirty-one was also the year competitors were obliged to deploy the so-called “balloon ball” during Open play. This larger and lighter spheroid didn’t prove popular at Inverness, as competitors complained loudly that mis-hits were exacerbated by the new-fangled thing, which neither carried nor rolled as far. After just one year, the USGA would junk it — returning to the previous, heavier guideline of at least 1.62 ounces, but keeping the balloon’s larger size (1.68 inches in diameter).
Yet the weather soon quelled alltalk of balls and would-be kings The heat was oppressive by any discernible measure. Contemporary accounts of the championship are littered with modifiers like blistering, blazing and sweltering. Golf Illustrated‘s “special correspondent” noted that “The field was all on hand early for practice several days ahead of time, but so intense was the heat that on these practice days no one with any chances to jeopardize played more than nine holes of golf.”
The mercury registered 105 degrees on Friday, July 2, the first day of competition. It was no cooler on Saturday, when Von Elm served notice to the field with a 69, the tournament’s low round. His 36-hole total of 144 led 63 players who made the cut; Burke stood one stroke back. Thirty-four years would pass before before the USGA extended the Open format to 18-holes on four consecutive days, so Von Elm’s 73 on Sunday morning placed him two shots clear of Burke with the afternoon round still to play.
By lunch time, temperatures hovering between 97 and 99 degrees. Igniting one of his trademark cigars (he would go through 32 during the championship), Burke went off in the penultimate group with Johnny Farrell, while Von Elm and Al Espinosa formed the final pairing.
Espinosa and Farrell had fallen from contention with substandard third rounds; by Sunday’s final nine, it was essentially a two-man race, with Von Elm in the driver’s seat. Standing on the 12th tee, he led Burke by two strokes but Von Elm would stumble over the next six holes, playing them in four-over. Burke parred the 18th to post a 292, meaning Von Elm needed a birdie 3 to force a playoff. He did just that, calmly draining a 12-footer as the breathless, sweat-soaked multitudes gathered a green’s edge.
With its extraordinary fugue of physical demand and competitive drama, Sunday’s play (the presumptive 36-hole finale) might have gone down as one of the most thrilling days in Open history.As it turned out, the tournament was just half over.
Businessman Golfer vs. the Club Pro
A dapper, big-hitting Californian, Von Elm isone of those curiously recurring characterswho isn’t particularly well known but nevertheless continues to crop up as one leafs through the pages of golf history. He won the U.S. Amateur at Baltusrol in 1926, defeating the great Jones, who had claimed the two previous titles and went on to win the Amateur in 1927 and ’28. Only Von Elm kept him from winning five in a row.
A seasoned 30 years of age when he arrived at Inverness, Von Elm was hardly new to golf marathons. During the 1930 Amateur at Merion, he played the longest extra-hole playoff in U.S Amateur history, going 28 holes before succumbing to Maurice McCarthy. What are the odds the same man would participate in both the longest U.S. Amateur playoff and the longest U.S. Open playoff — and lose both?
The defeat at Merion effectively ended Von Elm’s auspicious amateur career. From that point forward he would compete as a “businessman golfer”, meaning he would accept whatever prize money his finishes might earn. This proved a prudent if slightly unorthodox vocational step. According to Herbert Warren Wind’s Story of American Golf, Von Elm’s earned him some $8,000 in January and February of 1931 alone, a veritable king’s ransom in Depression-era America.
Burke, on the other hand, was a 29-year-old, bonified professional of the club variety, playing out of swanky Round Hill in Greenwich, Conn. Born Billy Burkauskas, the Nutmegger spent a portion of his young adulthood puddling iron in a Naugatuck, steel mill. His swing was a tad awkward, and Von Elm outdrove him on nearly every hole. That said, “Temperamentally,” Keeler observed of Burke, “it is difficult to suggest an improvement.”
Some have painted Burke’s showing at Inverness as something of a shock result, but contemporary accounts tell a different story. It’s true that 1931 marked the club pro’s first real foray into national, tournament competition. Yet Captain Walter Hagen shrewdly named Burke to his 1931 Ryder Cup team. Tthe matches took place a week prior to the Open, at nearby Scioto, where Burke won each of his foursomes encounters and his singles match — the latter by 7&6.
Indeed, his cracking Ryder Cup form made him something of a fashionable dark horse entering the U.S. Open at Inverness.
Timeless Terrain in Toledo
The 15th at The Inverness Club.
The championship layout at Inverness, like many of its early-20th century counterparts, has undergone considerable change over the course of a century. The course we know today was created by Donald Ross, who renovated an existing nine and added a companion loop prior to the 1920 U.S. Open. A.W. Tillinghast prepped the course for the 1931 event, and half a dozen different architects have tinkered with it since. Inverness held the Open again in 1957 and 1979, enduring pre-tournament preps each time. [Architect Andrew Green would renovate yet again in 2017, then revisit once more in 2024.]
Despite all this, the ground itself at Inverness has remained essentially unchanged since the last ice age, when a pair of rivers carved two distinct valleys from the sandy soil just south of Lake Erie. “The course has always been laid out across these two gorges,” explains Tom Walker, course superintendent at Inverness since 1980. “The elevation change is about 30 feet, which isn’t a whole lot. But you’re continually playing across these valleys, walking down and coming up the other side. I would not classify this as an easy walking course, not by any means.”
The U.S. Senior Open was held at Inverness in 2003. Sort of ironic, as it’s the only Senior PGA Tour event where the competitors are obliged to walk.As Burke and Von Elm learned — as Bob Tway learned, before he hold out on the 72nd green to beat Greg Norman at the 1986 PGA Championship; as modern seniors learned a decade later — holes 1, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17 all span at least one of these gorges. The other ravine requires similar hikes on holes 4 and 5. As the layout was configured back in 1931, no. 7 required yet another valley crossing.
Walker caddied at Inverness during the 1960s: “I didn’t necessarily enjoy it, especially in July. It’s no walk in the park. To think that these guys — and their caddies — walked 144 holes in five days, in that heat… I think that’s an incredible feat. Just the mental aspect, let alone the physical aspect.”
According to Walker, whose livelihood depends on an accurate meteorological understanding, a typical July day in Toledo is “muggy”, meaning 85-92 degrees with relative humidity of 50-60 percent. During the Open of 1931, these conditions would have qualified as refreshing cold snaps, as temperatures consistently soared into the upper 90s and beyond.
It was, in short, extraordinarily hot.
How hot was it? Nine players who made the cut at Inverness chose instead to withdraw, including two — Albert Alcroft and J.M. Hunter — who reportedly tore up their scorecards after the third round and went fishing. By comparison, at Interlachen the year before, just three Open competitors who made the cut chose to withdraw.
Either it was quite a bit hotter at Inverness, or the fishing just isn’t that good in suburban Minneapolis.
But seriously, folks: How hot was it? Here’s all you need to know: The USGA would never again stage its Open Championship during the month of July.
Monday, Monday: Head to Head
Burke watches Von Elm’s bunker shot come to rest during Tuesday’s final 36 holes at Inverness.
Following Von Elm’s 18th green heroics on Sunday, he and Burke rejoined their Open battle Monday morning. For the first time, the two combatants played alongside one another. The results proved predictably dramatic.“This playoff changed complexion at least 15 times,” Rice wrote in The American Golfer. Indeed, Monday’s remarkable give and take left the normally verbose Keeler at something of a loss: “I saw altogether too much… to make any sensible selection of features from such a wealth of them.”
Von Elm fell four strokes back at one stage, only to birdie four on the trot and reclaim a two-stroke lead. Burke was steadier, and by the time he reached the 36th tee — the 108th, all told — he held a one stroke cushion.
Then, as now, the 18th at Inverness is a short par-4 of just 330 yards. This is where Tway’s birdie from a greenside bunker defeated Norman during the 1986 PGA playoff. This is where Von Elm’s birdie at Sunday’s 72nd hole forced the 1931 Open playoff. Once again, on Monday, Von Elm needed a birdie 3 at the last to fend off defeat. And once again, he delivered — holing a 10-footer and forcing another 36 holes the following day.
Burke and Von Elm trudged on, playing the Tuesday morning 18 amid unrelenting temperatures — into the high 90s by 10 a.m. They played like the exhausted, punch-drunk combatants they had every right to be. Each shot their worst rounds of the tournament, though Von Elm’s 76 nevertheless afforded him a one-stroke advantage at the break.It looked for all the world as though the 1931 Open winner would be meted out by attrition.
And yet, as Keeler noted above, after lunch both players rose magnificently to the occasion. Burke went out in one-under 34, building a two-stroke advantage. Von Elm fought back and drew level with a par on 13. But Californian’s putter deserted him on 14 and 16, where three-putt bogeys essentially sealed his fate. The man whose putter had saved him Sunday and Monday betrayed him on Tuesday afternoon. He shot 73, with 35 putts.
When Von Elm’s long birdie attempt on 18 didn’t find the hole, Burke had the cushion he’d long lacked. Before addressing his own 25-foot birdie attempt, Burke was regaled by a green-side photographer: “Say, Burke, how about a shot?” With 143 holes behind him and poised to claim golf’s greatest prize, the unflappable Burke obliged the press corps by producing a winning smile. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ve got three putts to make it.”
He would use all three.
Despite this cautious lags on 18, Burke’s exquisite, even-par 71 was his lowest round of the championship. “There is no need to gild a par round at this stage,” the sage Keeler remarked. “It speaks for itself.”
