PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Jan. 5, 2024) — It’s never too late to mark and quantify the impact of Ernie DiGregorio. Not in New England. Not when the subject is college basketball. Yet here’s the immediate news peg, the reason to contemplate Ernie D and his attendant rabbit hole early in 2024: It was 50 years ago this week that DiGregorio set the NBA rookie record for assists in a game: 25, for the old Buffalo Braves, during a 120-119 win over the hapless Trailblazers, in Portland on New Year’s Day 1974.
This particular moment in NBA history, in and of itself, packs enough meaningful hoops serendipity to justify an entire 30 for 30 documentary: • Ernie D led the Association in assists that 1973-74 season, his first. He led the league in free throw percentage, too. • The Trailblazers were indeed terrible enough to earn the no. 1 pick in the June 1974 draft. They took a guy named Bill Walton. • The Braves coach that record-setting January night? Dr. Jack Ramsey, who left for Portland the summer of 1976, whereupon he and Walton immediately led the Blazers to their only NBA championship. • After acquiring Nate Archibald in September 1977, Buffalo let DiGregorio go — to the Lakers, who waived him halfway through the season. Boston signed him but didn’t offer a new deal. Just like that, Ernie D’s NBA run was over. • That same summer of ’78, Buffalo owner John Y. Brown Jr. swapped franchises with Celtics owner Irv Levin, who promptly moved the Braves to San Diego. • A year later, the newly christened Clippers signed Walton, meaning Ernie D missed playing with The Big Redhead by only a couple Degrees of NBA Separation.
To sum up on Ernie D: Consensus NCAA Player of the Year in 1973, at Providence College. NBA Rookie of the Year in 1974. Out of the league by the summer of 1978.
Today, that sounds like an epic tale of crash and burn. Yet the mid-1970s did represent the most turbulent period in NBA history. The league had battled the ABA for talent and eyeballs the previous 10 years, before absorbing its competitor prior to the 1976-77 season. Free agency was instituted at roughly the same time. Upshot: Many on-court careers were cut short or otherwise doomed by the ensuing roster consolidations, by franchise-swapping owners, by drugs, by a decidedly incoherent league promotional strategy.
In the pre-cable age, television networks never convinced the NBA would ever prove marketable as a major sporting enterprise. Aside from not being football or baseball, the newly merged NBA was uncomfortably Black. (The pre-merger NBA was so lily white, there was meaningful playing time for not one but two Van Arsdales!) Would Middle America ever watch something so “urban”?
Ultimately, yes it would. But as late as June 1980, two full seasons after Magic and Larry showed up, CBS was still showing NBA Finals games at 11:30 p.m. EST, on tape delay.
It’s no coincidence that college basketball first planted its own flag during the Seventies, this period of such marked NBA chaos and weakness. In this sliver of broadcasting daylight, especially, college hoops created a viable toehold in the culture. And it was the college game where Ernie D would prove a far more influential figure.
AUBURN, Maine (Dec. 23, 2021) — Let’s get to know Charles Beard, whose intellectual connection to the “controversial” 1619Project may tar him in some quarters, but whose broader reputation has much to teach us. Born in 1874, Beard was perhaps the most influential American historian of the first half of the 20th century. We segment his heyday because scholarship of all kinds tends to move in and out of fashion. We recognize the study of U.S. history as an academic discipline unto itself. But so is historiography, the study and appraisal of historical writing.
Over the course of a century, U.S. historiographical consensus can change multiple times — according to contemporary political change, judicial findings, military struggle, or random cultural events. These popular dynamics affect what modern historians study and how they go about writing it. They influence how historians (and the general public) view previous scholarship. They shape what is taught in school, too, and what is tossed by the wayside.
Beard’s most notable work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, prompted much academic pearl-clutching upon its release in 1913, before becoming the bedrock of a consensus that lasted more than 40 years. By the 1960s, his views on colonial America were falling from grace.
This waning/waxing of historical reputations, among historical figures and the academics who study and write about them, is typical. Views are routinely raised up, then built upon or debunked as new scholarship amplifies or sidelines competing points of view. I’d have thought the ongoing 1619 controversies would, by now, have summoned more mention of Beard, whose work similarly challenged an existing consensus re. America’s colonial and revolutionary periods.
The goal of U.S. History is not Consensus
It remains to be seen whether The 1619 Project — a multimedia series from The New York Times Magazine that re-examines and attempts to recast the legacy of slavery in the United States — will experience a similar evolution. The NYT published its 1619 package in book form in November 2023.
This much already seems clear: Few works of U.S. history have ever been so swiftly, widely and cynically politicized. Right-wingers especially have perceived electoral advantage in portraying this work of pop scholarship as a “radical left-wing” cousin to another all-purpose bogeyman, Critical Race Theory. The 1619 Project‘s principal author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has been vilified. Even the Trotskyites who manage the World Socialist Web Site have joined the fray, on the side of Trumpists, Republican state legislators, and Fox News. This potent propagandistic cocktail (whipped up by such strange bedfellows) has resulted in spitting-mad parents showing up at school committee meetings eager to wage cultural warfare. Just in time for the mid-term elections.
We should emphasize that otherwise reputable historians have also objected to aspects of The 1619 Project, while carefully praising the ambitious sweep of it. That such distinguished mainstream scholars as Sean Wilentz and Gordon Wood have seen fit to kick up such a public fuss illustrates still more politicization — from the normally left-leaning ivory tower.
But what exactly is everyone so angry about? The story of Beard’s rise and fall should help us understand what’s really going on here.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Aug. 12, 2020) — I’m starting to wonder whether Donald Trump’s subconcious is trying to tell us something important. To be specific, I’m worried he might have killed some young woman early in this century. Not sexually assaulted her. That’s something he’s apparently been doing, repeatedly, since the early 1980s. I mean killed a woman outright.
I worry about this, as an American, because he’s the president. And because he keeps accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of this exact crime, from this specific period in time. As has become custom, Trump makes this allegation publicly without a shred of evidence. But this particular accusation worries me in another way because, as we’re learning, it’s part of a transgressive pattern — the outrageous lie that falsely accuses or smears someone else, but actually projects the president’s own anxiety about his having already committed the same crime, or embodying the identical character flaw.
This habit of the president’s, what I have dubbed projection lying, is not to be confused with his reflexive, everyday, run-of-the-mill lying — what he himself calls, in his book Art of the Deal, “truthful hyperbole”. To be fair, this is the sort of thing one does when selling condos. As the nation has come to understand, this form of fabrication he unleashes almost continually.
Ethically, even psychiatrists aren’t supposed to diagnose the most obvious sociopaths from a distance. But I’m not a psychiatrist (!). And let’s face it: As American citizens in the here and now, we are more or less obliged to scrutinize the president’s lies, to sort them into various categories, subgroups and classifications. It’s almost our citizen-duty to collectively wonder what sort of psychiatric phenomenon leads to all this lying, all these different types of lies. He is our head of state, after all. Other than lies, we don’t get many other types of communication from the man.
Trump’s Subconcious is a Scary Place
In the main, Trump lies largely for the same reasons anyone else does — to deflect blame, to immunize himself from harm (when possible), to shirk responsibility, etc. However, when taking into account the president’s magisterial portfolio of lies and dissembling styles, I remain fascinated and troubled in particular by the president’s projection lying — his assertion of something clearly false that nevertheless and quite astutely reveals something manifestly true about Trump himself.
Here’s a banal but highly recognizable example: When he prefaces a statement with, Believe me when I tell you, he’s really saying, “I’m preparing to lie to you. In fact, I’m doing it right now.”
We are sadly conditioned to this phenomenon by now, like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled to death. As noted, the man sold condos when he wasn’t doing the impossible: bankrupting casinos (prior to starring in a “reality” series that celebrated his business acumen!). At this advanced stage, it’s as if we expect him to lie to us… And yet Trump has taken this projection lying to a new, dangerous and strangely fascinating place in 2020, because so many of his lies do reveal what the man’s id, his inner voice, what passes for his soul, is trying desperately to tell us. That’s why the Scarborough lie/smear is so arresting, almost macabre.
The president clearly reckons that if a nemesis like Scarborough were first framed up for murder, Trump could better argue that he was being framed up — or that maybe killing someone isn’t so terrible after all (so long as it was done, perhaps on 5th Avenue, by someone famous enough).
Detailing Dissembling Projection Theme
See here a brief catalogue of the variations on this dissembling projection theme. In most every case, it’s pretty obvious what Trump’s subconscious mind is trying to tell us — things we kind of knew to be true already:
A lot of people are saying = I’m making this up.
She can’t be trusted = You’d be a fool to trust ME.
How has he not been indicted by now? = I’m quite sure I’ve committed several high crimes or misdemeanors — just in the last 3 days.
The president cannot be indicted = I’ve committed several indictable acts in the last 48 hours (but I’m going to keep repeating this because Bob Barr says it’s so).
She can’t be trusted with state secrets = I cannot be trusted with state secrets.
He’s a security risk = I am a security risk (and so are my children)
Nobody knows [insert subject matter here] better than me = I know next to nothing about [insert identical subject matter here]
Who knew health care was so complicated? = I just thought about health care policy for the first time this morning.
I’ve been treated very badly = I’ve committed a crime and/or shattered a longstanding norm and now I’m dealing with the inevitable consequences.
I guarantee you that conversation never took place = That conversation is digitally recorded.
I don’t know the guy = We have, in fact, vacationed together.
I could go on. For days! The Washington Post recently tallied the president’s lies and purposely misleading statements, since January 2017, at more than 20,000. You get the point.
My 40something dad, his kilties well and truly shorn, in the 1980s
[August 12, 2019] — Recalling my father, one should know that he abided by few fashion trends and set even fewer. However, on the 8th anniversary of his pasing, l will claim on his behalf one initiative to which he proved an early and canny adopter: He depised kilties. His aversion to those oddly fringed, seemingly vestigial, lace-obscuring flaps — which, for decades, adorned all manner of golf shoes — would prove well ahead of his time. For us, it’s a portal down the Golf Shoe History rabbit hole.
My nephew’s boots, complete with kilties
I was reminded of my dad’s rare fashion-forward stance when my 20-something nephew recently visited at Christmas. Nathan graduated from college a few years back with a degree in fire-suppression engineering. The job he obtained in this field quickly bored him. Living in suburban D.C. further depleted his life force. So today he’s out West fighting forest fires with a crew of badass, axe-wielding Latinos. In any case, he arrived in Maine for the holidays wearing a pair of high-laced, black-leather firefighting boots that, to my surprise, featured small kilties down by their steel-tipped toes. If Dr. Martens made golf shoes, this is what they’d look like.
What’s with the kilties? I inquired of young Nathan.
“Is that what they’re called?” he replied. He went on to explain that when one is tramping about the forest floor, these fringed swatches of leather prevent sticks, leaves, pine needles, mud and other bits of underbrush from lodging between one’s tongue and boot laces.
In the mid-1970s, when I was first introduced to kilties (and to golf, for that matter), this description of their historical utility was never advanced, not to me anyway. I knew my dad didn’t care for them. Beyond that, they were more or less understood to be yet another whimsical affectation specific to golfing attire, along with Sansabelt slacks (from the French apparently: sans belt, get it?), bucket hats and polo shirts.
Golf Shoe History: A Field Little Explored
The evolution of golf shoe fashion is not a popular avenue of exploration. Though it must be said: Any research into the subject inevitably leads one down a rabbit hole of pleasingly arcane information.
For example, it’s possible (quite logical to assume even) that kilties predate golf spikes in that evolution. Spikes emerged only in the mid-19th century when Scots started hammering nails through their boot soles in order to gain better purchase on dewy fescues.
More recent history tells us that my dad and his cohort of 40-somethings spent much of the 1970s dispatching with all manner of societal expectations. They fled corporate America, experimented with drugs and divorcef in record numbers. This helps explain why my father looked so dimly upon kilties as an impractical, foppish tradition worth chucking. And so, from my earliest recollection, he would immediately remove them from new golf shoes.
Why did they become traditional? Mid-19th century links were hardly the manicured landscapes we know today. At best they were meadows, managed lightly (and largely) by herds of sheep. The centuries prior featured even more rugged/primitive golfing environments. In short, as Nathan pointed out, during these early, less formalized days, anything that kept the prominent undergrowth from mucking up your shoes and bootlaces made a world of sense for golfers — and their caddies. So kilties did in fact, at one time (for quite a long time actually), serve a purpose.
Roger Goettsch and his pride and joy, a ’49 Chevy pickup he restored.
[Ed. I once heard at an Associated Press seminar that anyone, in the right hands, could prove the subject of a prize-winning profile. This one may or may not qualify, but it’s pretty darned good and has been widely shared in golf circles of late. Mostly because the story of Roger Goettsch, even in my hands, is damned compelling. A published version appeared in a 2019 issue of Golf Course Management magazine. See below a slightly longer, more casually profane original draft. Note: The subject here has since moved on to Coto de Caza Golf & Racquet in Trabuco Canyon, California.]
By HAL PHILLIPS LONGGUN, Hainan PRC (April 9, 2019) — I received the following email from Roger Goettsch, CGCS, in the spring of 2018: I recently designed and built two different wetting forks for applying wetting agents to the soil in our LDS [localized dry-spot] areas. We have had issues getting wetting agents into the soil due to the thatch layer and this seems to have helped… He attached pictures of the wetting forks in action, along with shots of the “Plug Pushers” he also designed and built, to remove cores following aeration.
Goettsch
is the head superintendent at Shanqin Bay Golf Club in the small town of
Longgun, on the island of Hainan, in the People’s Republic of China. Like many
American-trained supers working overseas, Goettsch can’t get his hands on every
last piece of equipment his little heart desires. So he just builds what he can,
himself, putting to work his AutoCAD skills, his welding and fabrication
expertise, and a mechanical imagination born deep in the American heartland.
Goettsch has worked all over North America, and now Asia, leaving behind him a
trail of custom-designed and custom-built equipment — like breadcrumbs in the
woods.
“You have no idea all the shit that I’ve built,” he says, upon compiling for GCM a list of Top 10 Greatest Hits. “Literally, what you’re seeing there are just the big items from the last decade or so. There’s at least another 20 big-ticket items I’ve leaving out and several hundred more I’ve just sort of forgotten.”
Like
those sprig planters you built for all those contractors? Or the fairway
aerifier you whipped up that one night?
“Well, not
one night. We were growing in a Palmer course in Ft. Worth, Texas, working with
Arnold’s project architect, Bob Walker. He’ll confirm this story. The soil was
horrible there, dark heavy clay. We just had
to aerify it. So I decided to build an aerifying machine with my head mechanic,
Bill Hess. We had to get this done because I promised Bob Walker I’d have it
ready for his next site visit. So me and Bill had been working on it several
days, but we worked till 4 a.m. that last night and Bill — I had trained him
how to weld — all of a sudden hollers over at me: Roger we gotta quit… I fell asleep welding.”
When
pressed for why exactly he’s compelled to build so many things — while
simultaneously working full time, taking care of first-class courses from the
Gulf to the South China Sea — Goettsch chalks it up to self-reliance, a quality
his dad embodied and passed along to young Roger in the farmlands of western
Iowa.
“That’s the
through line for all this stuff, based on my upbringing — being
self-sufficient. You know what they say: The DNA precedes you.”
Roger Goettsch, Heartland Figure
Goettsch was born on a small farm in Holstein, Iowa, a burg of 500 souls, most of German descent, where his parents grew corn, soybean, alfalfa, oats, and clover. “The clover and alfalfa mainly served as feed for livestock,” Goettsch explains. “We sold the other crops locally. We raised cattle, pigs and chickens routinely and had a couple horses on the farmstead.”
Roger, his two
brothers and three sisters were involved in all the works. The girls
de-tasseled corn in the summer time.
“We grew
everything: all the garden vegetables; we had an orchard with peaches,
cherries, plums and apples. Our freezer was always full of meat and my mother
was always canning something. From the time I was a 5-year-old kid, I was also
working on the farm. But my father’s workshop was the most interesting part of
that operation. He built everything for us: wagons, cattle chutes, a bail
elevator. He also built a riding lawn mower! I have two older sisters who swear
that he was the first person to ever manufacturer a riding lawn mower. I have a
picture of that I need to dig up. He built so many things.
“In my
spare time I used to hang out in his shop. I was more of a pest to be honest.
Very curious, always wanting to tear something apart and see how it worked.
Typically, I didn’t put things back together, which sorta pissed my dad off.
Compared to modern shop, dad’s was so small. He made his own cut-off saw, to
saw metal. He didn’t have an acetylene torch like I do today.
“Not only
did he build a lawn mower, he took old bicycle frames and built motor scooters
for us. He took the bicycle wheels off, then modified the frames, welded a
plate on there to mount an engine, and new tires. I could draw you a detailed
picture of those things; I’ll never forget riding them around. You put your
foot down, it tightened up a belt and you just went down the road! My dad
bought my mother a Honda Dream 150cc motorcycle back in 1965. They knew it
meant a lot to me, so they willed it to me when they died. My dad also had an
Indian motorcycle that he totally refurbished — one of his pride and joys.
“You name
it, he could build it. Every time I tell my sister that I’ve built something,
she says, You are so much like your dad
it is not even funny.”
The young
Goettsch took every metal working class he could in high school. He became so
good at welding that he was chosen to help construct a metal school bus barn
for the local district. “That was the first project that got me thinking this
was something I could really do. A career maybe.”
The golf
business just sorta happened to Roger Goettsch, the way it does for kids
sometimes. In fact, if it weren’t for Dennis Wiebe, Goettsch might be somewhere
in America, welding and/or fabricating something right now.
As the
story goes, “My friend Dennis dragged me to go golfing one day, even though I didn’t
want to go. I might have been around 12 or 13. I fell completely in love with
the game. That was all it took. During my junior high school days, folks
started to build a 9-hole golf course in town. Cow pasture pool, that’s what my mother always called it.
“I could
not wait to be on the golf team when I became a high school freshman. Even
though we didn’t have a course in Holstein before that. My friend Dennis — his
family had built a house that backed up to this new golf course they were going
to build. By then I’m playing regularly with him and I’m not too bad. From then
on, I couldn’t play enough. My entire four years of high school, all I wanted
was to be a pro golfer.
“I gained
another friend, Steve Kofmehl, who lived just three houses away from Dennis. His
dad was the key guy who put the whole golf course construction deal together,
Charles Kofmehl… So my friend Steve and I would wander over there and walk the [course]
site when it was under construction. We were there often and began to volunteer,
helping to build the course when we had time. When the course opened for play, we
continued to hang around with the new greenkeeper there, a guy named Tim Hupke.”
Hupke was the next key player in this budding golf industry drama. He was one of the best young golfers around, too, and soon he was hired to run the shop and take care of all 9 holes — by himself. He was just out of high school when he landed this job. Goettsch recalls that while Charles Kofmehl and the Board of Directors had pulled together the money to buy Hupke the equipment he needed, “Tim didn’t take care of the golf course that well his first year…
“So the summer after my sophomore year, Tim decides to go off and get married. Because Steve and I were hanging out there all the time, and because his father was involved in building the club, they came to us and said, Would you boys like to take care of this place for 2 weeks while Tim is on his honeymoon?You can work as many hours as you want — and we’ll pay you. Well, we went crazy down there, working sun-up to sundown and they paid us what we considered a king’s ransome.
“That
winter, at school, Steve comes running down the hall: Dean Vollmer wanted to
talk to us. He was chairman of the green committee. He and his brother Don
owned the Chevy dealership in town. So we go down to the dealership after
school and Dean says, Boys, I want you to
know that the golf course was in so much better shape the 2 weeks you worked
there. We want you guys to take care of the golf course this coming season. You
want the job as a twosome? You can work all you want, we’ll pay you… and you
can play the course all you want.
“Believe it
or not, what was rolling through my mind: Would
we be able to golf for free? We didn’t wind up playing golf so much — but I
used that money to buy my first car, a 2-door hardtop Chevy Impala. Dean sold
it to me for $700 and I paid it off in two years. To this day, I have never had
so much fun working on a golf course in my entire life. That’s where I decided
I wanted this to be my career.”
First, the Oil Business
The
rest, as they say, is history. Goettsch went to Iowa State University and
studied turf management, interning all four years at Des Moines Golf &
Country Club under the legendary Bill Byers (though he also took as many
metal-working classes as he could). After graduating (1978) and serving time as
an assistant at several courses, he left the golf business altogether to pursue
a welding career in the oil fields of west Texas. “I made a
lot more money there than I ever made in the golf business,” he recalls. But
golf work is steady; the oil business is not. In fact, when it collapsed in
1983, Goettsch went back to growing grass, his welding equipment in tow.
He landed his first head superintendent’s job at Squaw Creek GC near
Ft. Worth. Eventually, he would come to specialize in the construction and
grow-in of new courses, something he did all over North Texas before landing
his first high-profile head super’s gig at the Arnold Palmer Golf Club
at Fossil Creek. He moved from there to a regional director’s position with the management company
RSL (now Arcis Golf) before going overseas (Thailand and Indonesia) in the
early ‘90s for two more construction/grow-ins. He returned home to do the same
at The Bandit in New Braunfels, Texas, Blackhorse GC down the road in Cypress, and
Redstone Golf Club (now the GC of Houston) in nearby Humble. He was Director of
Agronomy at Barton Creek’s 72 holes when he was lured back to Asia in 2014 —
first to India, then to China.
But that thumbnail sketch, diverse though it is, leaves out nearly all of his creative, metalworking history.
“Bill Byers had so much faith in my ability, he bought an entire pump station and I did all the fabrication and helped [pump engineer] John Tucker install it at Des Moines Golf & Country Club,” Goettsch recalls. “At some point, after I’d become a super, I went out and bought all my own welding and fabrication equipment — and I brought it all with me from job to job. I do think that was a consistent benefit to my employers. These skills have honestly never got in the way of my relationship with the mechanic. Quite the opposite. I always had a great relationship with the mechanic, because he could see that I could help him and my passion for his work was real.
“At Squaw
Creek we hired a mechanic who was a real machine shop guy —he could work a
metal-turning lathe. Between him and me, we made things like a mechanical edger
for the greens. Built the whole damned thing, because he could do all the
shafting. We built some unbelievable stuff at that time… I don’t believe
there’s single mechanic I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the golf
business who doesn’t absolutely love me. We would collaborate. I built things
they would never think of themselves: roll-around benches, shelving, custom
things for their shops. You can buy that stuff, sure. But if you got a shop
with small rooms, we made it all fit. I built a boat trailer out of aluminum
one time — for a pontoon boat. I repaired things out of steel, stainless steel,
cast iron. Back in the day cast iron was difficult to weld. You really had to
know how to do it. I had one Toro representative who used to yell at me: Goettsch, put that welder away so we can
sell you more iron!
“One more
thing mechanics loved me for: When you brake or sheer off a bolt flush with the
top, there’s a special welding rod that I could use to remove it 9.5 times out
of 10 times — saved the company a ton of money each time. Most of my mechanics
were pretty amazed at that.”
These
skills tend to get the attention of various engineering types, too, whom
Goettsch greatly admires. Squaw Creek was where he met P.C. Schedule, who ran a
pump station business. Goettsch would end up doing all manner of jobs with/for Schedule
and John Tucker, on the side, though he gathered as much as he contributed.
“They’re so
smart, those engineers; they’ve got the math. John Tucker has stood by me
forever and taught me so much, as did P.C, who has sadly passed away. Lee Niles
at Southern Irrigation Consultants was another extremely intelligent guy. Lee
hired me at one point and I went to work for him doing GPS and irrigation work.
I would help him draw as-builts — and that’s where I learned AutoCAD. After
that, I did all my own drawings for all my own stuff. That has really helped me
do things quicker, more efficiently. I used to do stuff from memory and just
wing it.”
Ignoring Work-Life Balance Came at a Cost
This sort of efficiency should have given a Goettsch a bit more time for himself, for his family. But only recently has he achieved that sort of balance in his life.
“I was a
workaholic. It’s probably why I’m single now,” he says. “A lot of golf course
supers send everyone home when it rains. I couldn’t wait for it to rain! I
would go into the shop and weld, train my guys. Early on Saturday mornings, I’d
be there in the shop… That was the old Roger. I was very career driven and it
did cost me some things, in my personal life. It did. I’ve always loved what I
do and still love it to this day. I just know how to balance it a bit better.”
The past
few years, Goettsch takes digital images of all his projects. Pre-digital, it
was all old-fashioned photography. Those snap shots — documenting his many,
many creations through the years — can today be found in a storage unit outside
Dripping Springs, Texas, near Austin. That’s also where you’ll find Goettsch’s enduring
pride and joy, a 1949 Chevy pick-up that he helped refurbish (a classic
restoration that took 16 years). In Goettsch’s absence, his car buddies still
display it at various shows around the American Southwest.
When one
looks closely at Goettsch’s lengthy resume and building history, it seems clear
this native Iowan’s admiration for self-reliance isn’t the only thing that
drives him. That turf roller he built for Daniel McCann at Oak Hill CC in San
Antonio… that pontoon boat trailer… those two special Hydro Cyclone
Water Separators he and Tucker installed at Lochinvar Country Club in Houston,
to clean the drinking water… a BBQ for his GM in China… 90 percent of the hand-made things he has
lavished on his mechanic, his maintenance staff, his various employers…
These acts
of creation are a form of friendship and intimacy — the same things his dad
provided to him, for the same reasons.
“I think
there’s some truth to that,” he says. “While I’m building things for the golf
course, I’m usually building other stuff for other people. It gives me a real
good feeling, building relationships in the process.
“When I did
spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing — projects outside the golf course
—I guess there might have been a perception that maybe the club wasn’t always
getting my full attention, their full money’s worth. But I don’t think the
owners ever felt that way. The mechanic definitely never felt that way. And
believe me, wherever I’ve been, we’ve had the best greens around.”
WELLESLEY, Mass. (Aug. 28, 2018) — So, I try to write each August about my father, the original Hal Phillips, who passed away seven years ago this month and all too soon. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of him in some way, shape or form. Many times, that moment comes when I open the refrigerator door and see my collection of hot sauces.
My father was an enthusiastic eater and devotee of exotic, spicy and otherwise full-flavored food. Growing up, we used to kid him that he had essentially deadened his taste buds, such was the relish with which he applied not just hot sauce but relish, salt, butter, condiments and dressings of any kind. He took this ribbing as he took most efforts to curb his foundational behaviors — with good-natured indifference — then went ahead and treated his pig knuckle with another dollop of blazing-hot mustard.
My paternal, Jersey-based grandmother was not an enthusiastic or particularly skilled cook. Whenever we went there to visit, she would serve us the same thing, in great quantities: steak, corn and a black forest cake from Sara Lee. I gather that American cuisine in the 1940s and ’50s — in private homes, in restaurants — was pretty bland. My dad’s reaction to this cultural upbringing was to find himself a wife who, among other things, appreciated and was equipped to prepare a wide variety of food.
For her part, my mom, Lucy Dickinson Phillips, was raised on the West Coast. Because it was still America in the ’40s and ’50s, her exposures were similarly staid on the food front. But Californians did have good Mexican, not to mention proper Chinese. What’s more, my maternal grandmother occasionally cooked things like (gasp!) curry. This proved foundational enough to foster food experimentation all through my parents’ marriage. In this and so many other ways, my mom proved the woman of my father’s dreams.
Perhaps on account of their relatively white-bread upbringings, older American couples today are often satirized for this single-mindedness. How was your trip to New York? “Oh, we found the most wonderful northern Italian restaurant near Washington Square.” My parents routinely answered travel questions in this fashion; mom still does. As a good cook, she grew annoyed when my father would salt or spice food before tasting it. But their 50 years together were a more or less an uninterrupted, gleeful quest for good eats. As such, it has fallen to their children to react in kind — to try and restore some level of sanity and moderation to the food-intake process.
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (April 4, 2011) — I’ve never subscribed to HBO. There may have been a month here and there when it was provided to my family, by mistake, or as part of some promotion. Invariably, when our cable monolith attempted to charge us, we balked. The movie-watching we missed as a result of this cultural diminishment we didn’t see as relevant. However, each time I told Spectrum to go fuck itself, I did think twice about acess to all those episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Larry Sanders Show.
Last year, from some Bangkok street vendor, I procured the first four seasons of Curb for a ridiculously small sum. The entertainment was good. I had seen the odd 30-minute installment here and there. But ultimately I had trouble watching them en masse. After 5-6 episodes, not even a full season, I found myself worn out by the sameness of each plot: No, Larry. No, don’t do that. Oh geez…
By contrast, IFC started rebroadcasting The Larry Sanders Show in January and, with a deft flick of my DVR settings, I have proceeded to record each and every episode, in order, from the very beginning of the show’s run in 1992. It’s hard to keep up. My family rolls its eyes when they glimpse the list of recorded shows and spy this vintage Sea of Larry.
I’ll temper my ultimate, unbridled enthusiasm by saying the first two seasons of Larry Sanders were only slightly better than average — and something of a letdown when contrasted with the glowing tributes this series routinely garners from television cognoscenti. These episodes didn’t suffer from a sameness, a la Curb, but I did find myself wondering why I am supposed to care about any of the main characters who are unfailingly funny, but rather shitty.
Well, I can report that by Season 4, the show officially hit its stride. It’s not just easy for me to sit down and watch 2-3 episodes in a sitting; I make time for it. I recently watched the fictitious talk show’s 8th anniversary special. It struck me that a number of things have come together, revealing the show’s genius and explaining all the accolades I’d read and listened to over the years.
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (Sept. 27, 2017) — Can we please stop talking about Bernie Sanders’ policy suggestions as if he were by some kind of unhinged fantasist? Sanders recently introduced to the Senate a bill that would expand Medicare to include citizens under 65 years of age — and you’d have thought he proposed the changing of water into wine. Hey, obstinate right-wingers: What Bernie said, what he has proposed, is more or less the working model for the existing healthcare systems now operating in every industrialized nation on earth — that is, every one but the United States. And if believe we have innovated our way out of that obligation, or will, YOU are thje fantasist.
What’s more, as the facts relay — in spite of reflexive carping from actual fantasists, those of the Randian variety — nearly every one of those socialized systems delivers health care for less cost per citizen than the system we Americans currently deploy (the ACA) and the largely private one it has partially replaced.
Sanders’ call for “free public college tuition for all” during the 2016 campaign also elicited no small amount of tittering from observers on both the right and left. Hey, morons: As recently as the late 1970s, the U.S. itself offered public higher education for close to nothing.
What Bernie Said: Free PUBLIC college tuition
Let’s first examine what Bernie actually said: free PUBLIC college tuition. No one, including Sanders, is suggesting we subsidize anyone’s matriculation at private institutions. Second, we already offer free primary and secondary education as a matter of course; in terms of prepping workers and citizens for lifelong utility (to the culture, to the economy) why should college be any different?
Last, check the stats: The average annual in-state public university room, board and tuition in 1977 — $2,067. That’s not “free”, but even when inflation is accounted for, that is highly affordable. The average price of a new car in 1977 was $5,813. More to the point, that was a four-year education debt load of some $8,200, a sum any college-educated student could expect to chip away at quite substantially — over their summers! It’s certainly nothing like the crushing debt load graduates encounter today.
When it comes to higher education, it’s fair to ask, “Why the discrepancy?” Answer: Because we subsidized (read: socialized the cost of) public colleges to a far greater extent, not just in the 1970s but throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. This was not some government decision, mind you; we THE PEOPLE decided it was worthwhile to make higher education attainable and affordable.
Starting with the Reagan administration, fewer and fewer people saw the value in socializing the cost of higher education. Bit by bit over the ensuing four decades, that socialization was dismantled and/or reduced, to the point where today the average annual room, board and tuition cost for the public, in-state college student is $20,090.
Bernie’s Not Some Oracle
I’ll be honest: I have never felt the Bern to any great extent. At 76, he remains too old to have been a viable two-term president. He fixates on certain issues to the exclusion of others — which is what senators do, a role that suits him. I’m not sure he plays particularly well with others, a presidential trait we can see the value of today.
He looks and sounds way too much like Larry David.
What’s more, his carping at the Democratic National Committee seemed to me churlish and misplaced. Of course the DNC favored Hilary Clinton; she maintains membership in the Democratic Party, after all, and Bernie does not. Lest we forget, political parties in this country are private organizations. I don’t see why the DNC is obliged allow anyone who isn’t registered with the party to seek that party’s nomination. If an independent candidate like Bernie is allowed to compete for delegates, he should not be surprised when establishment Dems bend the rules to favor one of their own.
Demystifying Socialist Principles
But I’ll say this: God bless the man. For the entirety of my life — for the entire post-WWII era — the mere mention of anything nominally socialist here in America produced howls of derision and irrational fear-mongering (thanks, Russia). The mere existence of Bernie and his sensible policy proposals have gone a long way toward demystifying the term and curing our nation of this impractical, hypocritical phobia.
Hysteria helps no one, but let’s be honest with ourselves. We already socialize all sorts of costs and risks in this country: schools, highway construction/upkeep, libraries, congressional and veterans’ health care, Social Security, all branches of the military, police and fire departments, the court system, the Centers for Disease Control, public transportation and yes, even PBS. Socialized medicine and low-cost, subsidized public higher education are not fantasies. Variations on these specific themes are functioning to great effect in the real world, all around the world, even here in America once upon a time.
Which is more than we can say for trickle-down economics and its fanciful enabler, The Laffer Curve.
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…
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.
