All posts by Joe Bissen

About Joe Bissen

Joe Bissen is a Caledonia, Minnesota, native and former golf letter-winner at Winona State University. He is a retired sports copy editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press and former sports editor of the Duluth News-Tribune. His writing has appeared in Minnesota Golfer and Mpls.St.Paul magazines. He lives in South St. Paul, MN. Joe's award-winning first book, "Fore! Gone. Minnesota's Lost Golf Courses 1897-1999," was released in December 2013, and a follow-up, "More! Gone. Minnesota's Lost Golf Courses, Part II" was released in July 2020. The books are most readily available online at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble (bn.com). He continues to write about lost courses on this website and has uncovered more than 245 of them.

St. Cloud and neighbors III: Wildwood, Hillside

Lost golf courses,

Hate to break it to you, Stearns County and neighbors, but you were late to the party.

Fashionably late, let’s say. Not excessively late. But still, late.

While golf boomed in Minnesota in the 1920s — more than 120 courses were built in that decade, more than any other — Stearns County and neighbors mostly idled their Model T’s when it came to puttering out to the golf course.

In 1928, as far as I can tell, there were only three golf courses within 30 miles of St. Cloud: St. Cloud Country Club, established 1919; Little Falls Country Club, 1921; and Clearwater CC at Annandale, 1925. The short-lived campus course at St. John’s in Collegeville (1925-33) hardly can be included, nor can the three- or six-hole concoction at Rockville (1926). (Correction, July 2018: There were at least four. I hadn’t included the fairgrounds course at Princeton, which I learned about after this post was published.) The year 1929 brought more courses — Koronis Hills in Paynesville and three others, which I’ll write about shortly. A 1930 state golf guide lists courses in Eden Valley and Kimball, but I couldn’t find mentions of those clubs in 1929 or ’30 issues of their local newspapers.

Maybe there were more courses around St. Cloud in the early years of Minnesota golf, and feel free to upbraid me if you know of one.  But in any event, the area would not have been your house-afire hotbed of the game in the 1920s.

As bereft of golf as the area was in that period, the final year of the ’20s and first three years of the ’30s brought something most unusual — a golf micro-boom around St. Cloud and Stearns County. By my count, 11 more courses came on board in those three years.

Hello goodbye. Ten of the 11 are now lost courses, Koronis Hills being the only exception.

What follows in this post and the next few are glances at St. Cloud-area lost courses. They are split fairly neatly between west of the Mississippi River and east of it, so that’ll be my dividing line, too. Side note: Because I’m within chip-and-putt range of having identified 200 lost courses in Minnesota, I’ll assign each course a number as I approach — and then reach — that milestone.

I’ll start with the western group. taken in order of their year (or estimated year) of establishment. One caveat: Despite dozens upon dozens of attempts to reach folks who might have had firsthand knowledge of these places, I came up almost universally empty.

Wildwood Golf Course, 1929 (lost course No. 192)

Eight miles west of downtown St. Cloud lies the city of St. Joseph, prominently known as the home of the College of St. Benedict. (Yes, there are more Saints in Stearns County than on the favored side of the pearly gates.) And somewhere near St. Joseph, there once was a golf course.

“A lot of interest is being shown in the St. Joseph golf course,” the St. Cloud Times reported on Aug. 2, 1929. “The nine hole course will be known as the Wildwood golf course. There are nine sporty holes with sand, green and fairways. This is something new for St. Joe and the outlook for a large membership is good.”

Membership fee was $5, and a nine-hole greens fee cost 50 cents. “It looks good to go past the course which is located on the very edge of the village and see it dotted with enthusiasts,” the Times article concluded.

But which edge? Judging by a map of St. Joseph and its spasmodic boundaries, the “edge of the village” could have meant any of about 350 different places.

Here’s a wild guess, and the connections are admittedly thin. But I can offer no more than unfettered speculation at this point, so here it is:

Two miles west of St. Joseph, Wildwood Park lies alongside Kraemer Lake. Two miles north of St. Joe, there is a street named Wildwood Drive. Pure coincidence, most likely, and so is this: The Watab River runs near each of the aforementioned Wildwood locations. In between, the river nudges the western edge of the city, near Millstream Park. Just south of that park, across Minnesota 75, is a triangular-shaped plot of open farmland. The Watab runs along the northwestern edge of that plot. And a 1938 aerial photo of that triangular plot shows faint, possible signs of what could have been a golf course, with distinctive white dots that could have been sand greens, albeit their edges having become “fuzzy.” Which follows, if a golf course there had closed a few years before. All of the Wildwood connections at least hint the course could have been nearby.

Threadbare enough? That’s my theory, and I’m going with it.

The city of St. Joseph and its western edge in 1938. The light, triangular area near the top includes white spots that might have been sand greens on the lost Wildwood golf course. (John Borchert Map Library photo, University of Minnesota)

The Wildwood course had a membership of 30 in 1931, according to the St. Cloud Times, but it probably closed shortly after that. It did not, however, go down without a turf fight. In 1930, as St. Cloud contemplated building a municipal course that would become known as Hillside, a letter writer to the St. Cloud Times advocated for the new muni by referencing “people who drive to St. Joseph and play golf in a pasture.”

One O.D. Jaren of St. Joseph was not amused.

“I do take exception to the word ‘pasture’ as terminology for our location,” Jaren wrote in a Feb. 15, 1930, rebuttal in the Times. “… Some of the greatest golfers in the country (not including myself) have learned the game on a cow pasture course, such as we have here.

“We are not so fortunate as St. Cloud to have donations made to improve our location but such parties who came up here were more than welcome and with the improvements we plan for next year (from our $5.00 yearly fee) we hope to have more of our St. Cloud friends in with us and can assure all that they can enjoy a sporty game even tho a cow or horse has added an occasional hazard.”

Hillside Golf Course, 1930-45

Mr. Jaren’s protest notwithstanding, St. Cloud won out. Hillside Golf Course, one mile west of the Mississippi River on the south side of the city, opened on July 26, 1930, and had a decent run, through the 1945 season and probably outlasting Wildwood by a decade.

Hillside was a nine-hole course redesigned in 1937 by Hugh Vincent Feehan, better known as the original architect of O’Shaughnessy Stadium on the University of St. Thomas campus in St. Paul and original planner of the International Peace Garden near Dunseith, N.D.

1938 aerial photo of Hillside Golf Course. The course was west of Minnesota 75, just east of North Star Cemetery, and partly on what is now Calvary Hill Park. (University of Minnesota John Borchert Map Library)

I won’t write much here about the Hillside course, mostly because I already did in “Fore! Gone.” But I was graced recently with a memory of the course from Ray Galarneault of St. Cloud, who caddied and played the course, including one day in Hillside’s final season.

“I was putting out on the eighth green at Hillside,” Galarneault said, “when sirens went off to say the Japanese had surrendered in August 1945.”

Club-and-ball photo by Peter Wong.

Next: West on 23.

 

St. Cloud and neighbors II: Short a few holes at Rockville

Lost golf courses,

Add “big rockpile” to the list of features occupying land that once was part of Minnesota golf, joining the likes of “elementary school,” “Target store parking lot” and “international airport runway.”

Rockville, Minn., is a city of 2,500 situated 10 miles southwest of St. Cloud on Minnesota Highway 23. It earned the Flintstonian name because of “granite rock formations on nearby streams,” Wikipedia notes, and the city of Rockville website chimes in with “granite is the heart of our city.”

John Clark was a prominent businessmen in Stearns County in the early 1900s. A Scottish immigrant who lived in St. Cloud, he and business partner J.B. McCormack opened a granite quarry at the southwestern edge of Rockville in 1907. That same year, he secured a contract to provide 250,000 pounds of stone for use in building the Cathedral of St. Paul.

Clark’s plot in Rockville consisted of 32 acres, according to a 1925 plat map, and on it he built a two-story house of pink granite from his quarry. Now known as the Clark and McCormack Quarry House, it is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Clark and McCormack House, Rockville, Minn.(Joe Bissen photo)

Not that I am overly interested in Clark’s house, despite its distinguished appearance from the corner of Broadway and Pine. I visited Rockville in early May to try to quarry more information from a clip from the Minneapolis Tribune of May 16, 1926.

“Golf Club Organized By Rockville Players,” read the headline.

“Plans are being executed here to construct a six-hole golf course on the Clark estate south of town and organization of the Rockville Golf club is being completed,” the story opened. “The club started last season with three holes. Extreme improvements of the course will be made this season, as the interest in golf develops. The members signed up include Alex Milne, Bob Davidson, Robert Theis, Joseph Rausch, Dominick Rausch, Albert Hansen, Donald Clark, Gordon Clark, Herbert Schneider, Charles Johnson, Arthur Weisman, Alex Clark, Albert Rorthstein and Edward Taufen.”

John Clark, the granite magnate, had died the year before. It isn’t known whether he was a golfer, but as a Scottish immigrant, that certainly is a possibility, plus a possibility that he passed on an affinity for the game to his sons Donald, Gordon and Alex of the Rockville Golf Club. Other members of the golf club were associated with the granite industry, I was told at the Stearns County History Museum.

I never did find any more information, in Rockville, in other newspaper stories or at the museum, as to whether Rockville Golf Club ever expanded to six holes, much less nine or (highly unlikely) 18. An aerial photograph from 1938, the earliest available, shows no sign of a golf course on or near the Clark estate, though there is open land south of the house.

And there’s a big rockpile. Sorry, that’s all I’ve got on Rockville’s lost almost-golf course. Honestly, I don’t even know if the rockpile I saw from Rauch Road, in back of the Clark house, was part of the former golf grounds. When I add it all up, I really can’t count this as an actual lost golf course.

The rockpile.

(Footnote: The three lost-course sites mentioned in the opening paragraph are in Mound, St. Paul and Bloomington.)

Next: Lost, west of the river.

 

 

 

 

St. Cloud and neighbors, Part I: An early, historic loss

Lost golf courses,

St. Cloud, Minnesota, can accurately be described by either of two monikers. Choose your favorite:

  1. “Granite City”
  2. “Central Minnesota’s Geographical Midpoint of Holy Cow That’s a Ton of Lost Golf Courses”

Picked the first one, didn’t you. Hard to argue. For one thing, “Granite City” does roll off the tongue easier than the abomination that is moniker No. 2. For another, the hard-and-durable construction rock — granite — has been harvested in and around St. Cloud since the 1880s, and, after all, golf in St. Cloud has been around only since 1899.

Yes, 1899. I’ll get to it.

Within 35 miles of the St. Cloud city limits, I know of  13 lost golf courses, not including two that never really qualified as full-fledged venues for whiffing and dubbing. This number dwarfs the mere two that I wrote about in “Fore! Gone.”:  the city-owned Hillside course in St. Cloud from 1930-45 and the nine-holer on the St. John’s University campus in Collegeville, circa 1926-33.

I’ll call this my St. Cloud lost-course mulligan. Allow me to cast light on a few more abandoned layouts. Just so you know, it’s going to take multiple posts. Also just so you know, by the time I’m done, I will have come up just shy of the 200 mark in identifying lost golf courses across Minnesota, so I’ll be designating with numbers as I go along.

THERE, AND NOT THERE

St. Cloud Country Club, which nestles up against the Mississippi River on the south side of the Granite City, is one of Minnesota’s classic old golf clubs. Established in 1919, it ranks among the first 35 or 40 clubs in state history. (A 2002 chronology of Minnesota golf courses ranks it among the first 26, but to be perfectly accurate, there are courses that the chronology missed.) St. Cloud CC has hosted one men’s State Amateur championship and two women’s State Ams. The course was, by all accounts that I know of, designed by the redoubtable Tom Vardon.

But it was not St. Cloud’s first golf course.

Take it from the May 10, 1899, edition of the St. Cloud Daily Times.

“NEW GOLF CLUB.” read the headline, with the story following.

“A meeting of those interested in the game of golf was held last evening in the council chambers and the St. Cloud Golf Club was duly organized with 27 charter members,” the newspaper reported. “… The membership fee was placed at $5. It is believed that a large number will become members of the new club as soon as the game is more thoroughly understood.”

To be clear: St. Cloud Golf Club (lost course No. 191), established 1899, and St. Cloud Country Club, established 1919, were, judging by every piece of information I have come across, separate organizations in separate places. There might have been coincidental carryover from GC to CC in the form of members or maybe bylaws, but they are/were not the same golf club.

Two weeks before the formal inception of St. Cloud GC, the Daily Times had offered other details.

Headline, April 24: “GOLF LINKS LAID.”

Story: “For some time the admirers of golf have been aggitating (sic) the formation of a club in this city and it is expected that such an organization will be formed this week.

“The links have been laid by Robert Foulis, of St. Paul, and he pronounces them as the equal of any in the cities, barring the fact that two railroad tracks are crossed here.

“The tee is located at the ball park, and the total length of the links are two and a fifth miles. From the tee to the first hole is 552 yards; to the second from this, 468; to the third, 250; fourth, 480; fifth, 512; sixth, 460; seventh, 296; eighth, 616; ninth, 360, making a total of 3,984 yards.

“The St. Cloud Golf club should start out with a large membership, and it undoubtedly will. O.H. Havill, Warren Freeman and H.R. Welsh are the promoters of the new club.”

Digging into the details:

— The 1899 start date makes St. Cloud Golf Club one of Minnesota’s first nine golf courses, by my count, matched or preceded only by Town & Country Club and Roadside of St. Paul; Winona Golf Club and Meadow-Brook of Winona; Bryn Mawr, Minikahda and Camden Park of Minneapolis; and Northland of Duluth. (This list updates revisions since this was first posted.)

— The mention of Robert Foulis is historically significant. Foulis is a larger-than-life figure from the first decade of Minnesota golf. He was a native Scotsman who worked for the legendary Old Tom Morris at his shop in St. Andrews, then moved to the Chicago area in 1895 and to St. Paul in 1896 as the first professional at Minnesota’s first golf course, Town & Country Club. Foulis’ talents included swing instruction, club making and course architecture. His design and redesign credits (some contributions are disputed) include Town & CC, Minikahda and the lost Bryn Mawr course in Minneapolis, Lake Forest (now Onwentsia) in the Chicago area and Bellerive in suburban St. Louis.

Foulis is correctly credited in some online and printed circles with the design of St. Cloud Golf Club, albeit without noting the distinction between GC and CC, and he is mistakenly credited in other references with the design of St. Cloud Country Club. Foulis hardly could have been involved in the Country Club design, as he had moved to the St. Louis area by 1901 and did most of his subsequent design work in Missouri.

— The length of the course is stunning. A nine-holer covering 3,984 yards, especially before the turn of the 20th century, would have been remarkably long, and a course with a longest hole of 616 yards and nothing shorter than 250 would be daunting even by today’s standards.

— As with so many lost courses, determining the course’s location can be confusing, confounding and ultimately not 100 percent confirmable. Such is the case with St. Cloud GC, though with the help of three researchers at the Stearns County Museum and a few hours of sleuthing on the side, I am more than 95 percent certain of this:

St. Cloud Golf Club was situated near the western edge of the city, near its border with Waite Park and not far north of Division Street. Best guess here and from the researchers is that the course opened near the intersection of 3rd Street North and 37th Avenue, not far from what is now BBC Park, and worked northward, eventually crossing the railroad tracks and probably onto land that is now part of the Electrolux Home Products plant.

Supporting evidence: 1) The reference to “the ball park” in the Daily Times story most likely refers to a baseball stadium in that part of town that underwent improvements in 1911 and 1925. A 1938 aerial photo of the area confirms a baseball park in that area; I have not been able to confirm whether it was St. Cloud’s primary baseball park at the time, but indications are that it was. 2) The reference to “two railroad tracks are crossed here” makes sense because of the two sets of tracks in that area (not to mention an older, out-of-service split and set of tracks just south of the in-service tracks). Also, an entry on St. Cloud Golf Club in the Harper’s Official Golf Guide of 1901 reported that the course was “one half-mile from Great Northern Railroad station, and accessible by street cars.”

Presumed area of the defunct St. Cloud Golf Club, taken from a 1938 aerial photo through the University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. Near the bottom-right corner of the photo is a baseball stadium, at or close to the golf course’s presumed starting point, and near the top are the railroad tracks that golfers are presumed to have crossed. Minnesota Highway 15 and part of the city of Waite Park are on the left side of the photo.
BBC Park in St. Cloud, near the presumed starting point of St. Cloud Golf Club. (Joe Bissen photo)

More than a century after St. Cloud Golf Club’s demise, it is impossible to determine anything about its character by scanning what is now flat, urban land. But perhaps a hint can be found in a post on a Northwest Hickory Players blog. In a reprinted interview with golf historian and Foulis expert Jim Healey, Healey described his impression of a typical Foulis course (note that Robert Foulis’ brothers James and David also were course architects):

“Typical of the day, their courses featured the traditional style of that era; namely medium to small greens, teeing areas quite close to previous greens, bunkers that fell into two categories, greenside bunkers with flat bottoms and cross-bunkers featuring tall mounding facing the player and sand on the opposite side.”

The Foulis brothers, from left, Robert, James and David (Wikimedia.org photo)

I don’t know how long St. Cloud Golf Club operated, though I’m thinking 1905 is a number that makes sense. A 1901 Minneapolis Journal story notes that St. Cloud golfers would meet with those of Grand Forks, Fargo, Jamestown, Winnipeg and Duluth to organize the Northwestern Golf Association. Newspaper reports show that St. Cloud competed against Bryn Mawr in inter-club competitions in 1902. In July 1903, a Minneapolis Journal story reported that St. Cloud would be among the new clubs with competitors in the state tournament — but a story in August 1903 from the same newspaper said that St. Cloud was not a Minnesota Golf Association member. An MGA all-time membership roll from 1920 does not list St. Cloud Golf Club as ever holding membership.

A 1904-05 St. Cloud city directory lists St. Cloud Golf Club, with E.H. Hill as president and H.C. Ervin as secretary-treasurer. (Harry Ervin also was secretary-treasurer of the Tileston Milling Company.) But I could not find St. Cloud Golf Club in any newspaper mentions after 1903, and it was not mentioned in a 1910 city directory. The presumption is that the Country Club took up the torch for St. Cloud golf nine years later.

Next: One of the St. Cloud area’s lost almost-courses.

 

Midland Hills: More from the drop ceiling

Golf history,

When I interviewed Midland Hills Country Club course superintendent Mike Manthey in mid-March for my St. Paul Pioneer Press story about the historic find in the drop ceiling, I quickly realized I was not only onto a singular tale but was talking with someone keenly familiar with the history and workings of classic golf architecture.

Inside page from St. Paul Pioneer Press sports section of April 29, 2018, showing photos from the current Midland Hills Country Club and photos from the recently discovered original blueprint of Seth Raynor’s planned layout for the course. (Photos for Pioneer Press courtesy of Midland Hills)

That made the conversation all the more compelling to me. Classic golf design is a particular interest of mine — it isn’t No. 1 on my list but is sort of a 1AAAAAA golf interest next to my admittedly peculiar fascination with Minnesota’s lost golf courses — and it was clear Manthey knew his stuff.

I follow on Twitter a handful of sharp knives, local and national, who tweet about golf architecture and course maintenance, both classic and modern. A few of my favorites are Bill Larson at Town & Country Club, Chris Tritabaugh at Hazeltine, Gary Deters at St. Cloud Country Club and, nationally, Anthony Pioppi, whose prolific pen has covered subjects including the history of Minikahda Golf Club.

And now, Manthey. The Faribault, Minn., native and former course superintendent at the A.W. Tillinghast-designed Golden Valley Golf Club, Manthey is not only a good Twitter follow, his Midland Hills Turf Blog is revelatory for both its coverage of the renovation/restoration that’s in store for Seth Raynor-designed Midland Hills and for its insight on classic golf course architecture.

I saved a few outtakes from my conversation with Manthey. Didn’t work them into my Pioneer Press story because I was already treading on thin newsprint ice over the length of what did make it into the paper. My questions, paraphrased or conversely put into long form, are in bold.

Meh. Capital M, capital E, capital H. (Me being facetious.) Why should anyone who isn’t a paid Midland Hills member care about the discovery — a blueprint of original plans for Raynor’s MH layout and its irrigation system?

Manthey: “It is a significant find not just for Midland Hills but for architecture and for Seth Raynor (historians). … It directly ties the Seth Raynor heritage to Midland Hills forever. We knew we had that connection to Seth Raynor, which is significant in the architectural world, but we never had anything physical. We always thought … everything was just lost over time. A lot of clubs have a lot of historical photos and documentation, but not many have the original drawings, or a copy of them.”

How closely will the Raynor blueprint be followed in the impending renovation/restoration of Midland Hills led by Raynor expert Jim Urbina?

Manthey: “How much of that map will be restored, that’s hard to say. Golf courses evolve way more than people realize, because when you play a golf course daily, year after year, you don’t see that change because it happens so gradually. It’s a living, breatihng thing, and it moves. So some of these (course features) have changed so much that I don’t know if we’re really capable of getting them all back, but for us to be able to give (Urbina) that original drawing, it expands his creativity corridor exponentially. It’s quite rare.”

Most notable, in my mind, were Manthey’s ruminations on the evolution of golf and golf courses since famed architects like Raynor plied their craft in the 1920s and ’30s.

What’s to be gained from a restoration of a classically designed golf course?

Manthey: “We do know that classic architecture, whether It was Raynor or (Alister) MacKenzie or (Donald) Ross, their strategy was created off of angles, angles of play, so they gave you a lot of width off the tee, and that width created playability, but then the angles created the strategy.

“If the fairways were almost twice as wide as they are now, the balls would roll and create an angle that was extremely difficult into the green.  Over time, with the planting of trees in the ’50s and the corridors shrinking and fairways shrinking, now the ball doesn’t go that far off line. So those angles are reduced. So the golf course almost becomes more one-dimensional. You can only play it down the middle. Well, we don’t really understand that game of angles anymore because it’s not very common in golf.

“If you look at the top golf courses in the country, a lot of them have been restored. A lot of what’s been restored is widening out those corridors and re-creating those angles into the greens, which was the original architecture.

“People are learning more about the history of their golf courses and wanting that original strategy back.”

 

 

 

Golf in Luverne: Three courses, two golfers, one good sport

Lost golf courses,

Before golf in Luverne, Minn., had Jerilyn Britz, it had Luverne Country Club, two other golf courses and Don Spease.

Connecting the dots, over 93 years’ worth of golf in Luverne:

Jerilyn Britz’s golf tale is well-known and oft-documented. As a teenager in Luverne, a city of 4,000 in the southwestern corner of Minnesota, she showed an aptitude for many sports but had not played golf until, while working as a lifeguard at the municipal pool in 1960, she received a push — not into the water — from the pool manager, Charles Weinman.

“He would come down every day and start talking about golf and tell stories about things that happened” on the course, Britz said by phone in January. Weinman persuaded Britz to pick up a club and take a few whacks at dandelions, and she soon began backswinging and downswinging with golf balls in the way. She was hooked.

“I hit one good shot and have tried to have that feeling ever since,” she said. “It was such a different feeling.”

Britz (pictured above, photo courtesy of Legends Tour) joined Luverne Country Club, won four club championships in the 1960s and turned professional at age 30. In July 1979, she participated in a little four-day soiree’ at Brooklawn Country Club in Fairfield, Conn., known as the U.S. Women’s Open, where she shot rounds of 70, 70, 75 and 69 to earn the title of national champion golfer of the year. It was the first of her two tournament championships in more than 20 years on the LPGA Tour, and she was named to the Minnesota Golf Hall of Fame in 2007. She continues to play events with famed fellow competitors on the Legends Tour.

Which brings us, quite indirectly, to Don Spease and another memorable round of golf, almost exactly 30 years before Britz’s.

But a round of a decidedly different ilk.

“Records were broken in more than one department Friday when Minnehaha Country Club held its annual invitational golf tournament,” the Argus-Leader of Sioux Falls, S.D., reported on Aug. 27, 1949.

This event wasn’t so much a golf tournament as it was a dawn-to-darkness marathon that featured a colossal field of 301 golfers and 150 door prizes.

“… there were some 1600 dollars of prizes awarded,” the newspaper continued, “more than in any previous tournament …

“… and possibly the 187 total score Don Spease of Luverne turned in is the highest round yet to be admitted to.”

Yes, that would be 187 strokes for 18 holes — pushing 100 per nine.

Nobody ever said golf was easy. (If they did, I can find a lie detector to hook them up to. And I’ll make sure it’s calibrated to maximum voltage, perhaps with a short circuit in a sensor.)

Spease could not master either the art of clearing water hazards or getting the ball in the hole. “It’s almost certain,” the Argus-Leader added, “that Spease’ 78 putts are pretty much of a mark. For his prodigious efforts the Luverne man won an auto spotlight and (really) a putter.”

Boyd Barrett was the skilled Luverne outlier in that tournament, shooting a 77 that landed him in second place. But others from across the border were hot on Spease’s tail.

“Luverne had the monopoly on high scores,” the Argus-Leader reported, “with Bob Lundberg joining Spease in that department by virtue of 19 strokes on one hole. Golf shoes are now his as a result.

“Harm Snook of Luverne dropped 24 balls into the river and won seven new balls and a fishing net to get back his old ones. Jim Sherman, also of Luverne, sank 14 and received a cap and four balls.”

Luverne didn’t have the market cornered on deposits into the Big Sioux River that day. “Cliff Chamley of Flandreau (S.D.) and E.P. Fortner of Mitchell dropped 11 and 10” balls into the river, the newspaper continued.

If you’re counting, and there’s no reason you should be, that’s 59 balls in the water from one set of four hapless fellows.

None of this would be rehashed here if not for a deep dive into the history of golf in Luverne and especially if not for Spease’s good humor and equanimity.

More than 68 years after his fateful foray into Sioux Falls, I dialed Spease’s phone number to see if he remembered his Minnehaha round or had any objections to a retelling.

On the other end of the line, Spease laughed.

“Yes, I remember,” he said — then offered an entirely reasonable caveat.

He had never golfed before that day.

Spease said he had traveled the 15 miles from Luverne to Minnehaha with his cousin and a couple of friends mostly so that the others could meet the tournament requirement of having a foursome to play. He was 16 years old.

“I played basketball and football,” said Spease, now 85. “They had to have a foursome, so they asked if I would go along. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about golf,’ but I went along.”

Once on the course, it quickly became evident that he was no match for Minnehaha CC and the Big Sioux.

“They gave me four balls to play with,” Spease said. “After the first two holes, I had lost two of the four balls in the river. So after that, when I got close to the river, they let me throw my ball across the river.”

Spease confirmed the report of his prize winnings. The auto spotlight went on his 1935 Ford. The putter was sold to a friend’s mother for $10. “That was a lot of money back then,” he said.

Finding competitive golf to not be in his athletic wheelhouse, Spease did not play again for many years. He worked in his family’s tire business in Luverne and at other jobs, has retired four times, he says, and boasts an ample record of volunteer and community service.

None of this has the first thing to do with lost golf courses, does it? But it is one of the best back stories I’ve run across.

On to business. Britz mailed me a copy of Luverne Country Club’s eight-page 50th anniversary pamphlet, published in 1989. One entry is a recounting titled “History of the golf course.”

“There were two golf courses in Luverne before the present course was developed,” the tale begins. “The first course was west of town on the site of the Gordon Gabrielson farm. It was a 9-hole layout, even with a water hole, on which some members used floater balls. … The second course was located three miles south and a half mile east of Luverne along the Rock River. It also was nine holes. This course lasted only a few seasons. It crossed the river several times and each spring it seemed the swinging bridges would wash away, and the mosquitos were so fierce they decided to abandon it. It was then in 1939 the course was moved east of Luverne on what was called the old Fogg Estate. Here is where the course has been for the last 50 years.”

Officially, golf in Luverne dates to April 23, 1925, when “permanent organization of the Luverne Golf club was completed,” the Rock County Star reported the next day. J.M. Rustad was the first president. Membership was to be limited to 100, with an impressive inaugural class of more than 80 signed up. The course would be established through a one-year lease on the 80-acre Charles Preston farm, 3.5 miles almost directly east west of downtown Luverne and immediately south of County Highway 5. (A Gabrielson family, referenced in the previous paragraph, owned the 240 acres to the south of the Preston farm, according to plat maps of the day.)

1936 aerial map of Gabrielson and Preston farms west of Luverne. The first version of Luverne Golf Club was on the Preston farm, in the top portion of the photo. The course had moved to its Rock River site by 1936, but at least two remaining sand-green sites appear to be visible in this photo, shown as small, dark circles on either side of the stream near the western edge of Preston’s property. Preston owned large lots of land to the south of here, along railroad tracks, but I see no indications of a golf course having been there, so I believe this was the golf course site. (Photo from University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library.)

Luverne golfers played in tournaments at places like Worthington, 30 miles to the east, and staged competitions at their own club. Carl Schmuck won with a 71 in May 1929, and Perry A. Arnette, “Harmonica King and farmer,” according to the newspaper, was runner-up with a 75.

Arnette was a central figure in early Luverne golf. He served as Luverne GC president during the late 1920s, and in August 1931, plans were announced for Luverne Golf Club to move to the Rock River site, on land owned by Arnette.

This was thought to be a site of great potential. The course was to be laid out by Frank Brokl, the 1929 Minnesota State Amateur champion from Minneapolis who specialized in designing small-town courses across Minnesota, South Dakota and Iowa, including the now-lost courses at Lake Benton and Ivanhoe. The sand greens were to be 50 feet in diameter, the Rock County Herald reported, and the parcel was highly touted by the newspaper.

“Among the numerous advantages of the new grounds are scattered clusters of trees which shade some of the holes, the substantial grass growth and heavy sod; the natural hazard of the Rock River, which must be crossed twice while following the course, and the fact that a player must face the sun only on the first hole.”

Also, the newspaper reported, groves of trees skirting the river would “provide an ideal picnic ground, and a long stretch of sandy beach has possibilities of being developed into a swimming resort.”

The Herald story said the new grounds would not be put into play until spring of 1932 and that, in order to keep the grass closely cropped, “a flock of sheep will be pastured on the links.”

1935 plat map of Luverne Golf Club’s second site, established in 1932 or 1933 south of the city and straddling the Rock River. (Courtesy of Rock County Historical Society.)

Whether the Rock River site was put into play by 1932 is unknown. On Sept. 9, 1932, the Rock County Star reported that W.R. Brooks of Luverne won a shortstop at the “Old Golf Course,” presumably a reference to the Preston farm site and possibly hinting of problems in setting up the Rock River site.

Once the Rock River site opened, it lasted through 1938. In July 1934, Luverne hosted a “Tri-State tournament,” the Minneapolis Tribune reported. “The Luverne course is 2,881 yards long and supplied with many natural beauty spots and hazards,” the story read.

It’s almost certain that the club underestimated the Rock River’s ability to breach its banks and make golfing a muddy mess. Beyond the Luverne CC pamphlet, two others I talked with confirmed that flooding can be a problem in that area.

There certainly are few remaining bridges between the Rock River site and the current Luverne Country Club site east of town. One of them, coincidentally, is named Don Spease.

Spease remembered the Rock River site. “My dad used to go out and play golf there. I’d go along,” he said. “The course had sand greens. My job was to drag a piece of rope with heavy carpet so they could putt.”

Luverne GC abandoned the Rock River site and relocated two miles east of downtown for the 1939 season, eventually taking the name Luverne Country Club. An Argus-Leader story noted that the new course would open on May 14 with all greens ready and one day of free play for all. P.M. Conner was club president.

Britz, who now lives in Florida, loves the tree-lined layout at the current Luverne Country Club. She appreciates sunsets from the eighth tee, where, she says, one can see all the way to Iowa and South Dakota. “I’ve played golf all over the world,” she said. “I don’t think I have ever played a course as fun as Luverne.”

It’s tough to say whether Don Spease would say the same. He began golfing again in his 50s at Luverne CC and was a far more respectable player than during his Minnehaha day, with scores in the 50s for nine holes. Then fate intervened again.

“The last year I played golf out there, the first round of season, I was riding in a three-wheel cart,” Spease recalled, again summoning his sense of humor. The driver of the cart swerved to avoid a tree root, and Spease stuck his leg out of the cart to keep his balance.

“I broke my ankle,” he said.

Spease has not played the game again. Golf in Luverne lives on.