Cover story

The boast on the old Whitewater Valley Golf Course scorecard amused me when I first read it:

“Minnesota’s Most Scenic.”

Yeah, right, I thought. And my front yard, with the patchy grass and half a maple tree, is Minnesota’s Most Stately.

I grew up 40 miles from Whitewater Valley State Park, which Whitewater Valley GC was part of. It’s Bluff Country, and it’s beautiful. Still, even though I had never been to the state park, I doubted a golf course in that area could seriously make a claim to be Minnesota’s most scenic. But others told me the place was special, and a February 2012 visit to the park, where I slip-slid around for an hour on the thawing cross country ski trails, told me this site had serious potential to become the cover shot for my book on lost golf courses.

Enter Peter Wong. Minnesota’s best golf photographer had agreed to lend images to the book I was writing, “Fore! Gone. Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses, 1897-1999.” After the longest winter since the waning days of the Ice Age, we finally had an opportunity in June 2013 to zip down U.S. 52 and over on I-90 and up Minnesota 74 to Whitewater Valley State Park. I figured our likely book cover shot would be a semi-aerial view looking down on the old golf course site from the 90-foot limestone bluffs above it.

Three days earlier, Peter and I had done a shoot from a lost course in Bayport, and we had procured a dusty old golf bag and clubs courtesy of Bloomington pro Joe Stansberry. We never used the clubs in the Bayport shoot; they weren’t a good fit. But at Whitewater, after Peter took his equipment out of the SUV and just before I shut the hatch, Peter said, “Hey, bring those old clubs along.”

I knew there was an old bench-and-shelter from the golf course still standing in the state park, and that was our planned first stop before we headed up the hills to take the “aerial” shots. This is where Peter’s vision came in. Among the many of Peter’s attributes, vision perhaps ranks at the top. The old shelter was intact, almost 40 years after the course had closed, the wooden bench aged and the roof grown over with dirt and moss. “Give me those clubs,” Peter said, and after taking shots of the shelter unadorned, he propped the clubs on a bench and started clicking again.

We hiked around the park for two more hours, mostly atop the bluffs, and Peter took photos from various vantage points. (Props here to Andy Bissen, who suffered the indignity of having to haul much of Peter’s equipment along hill and dale, like some southeastern Minnesota sherpa.)

A few days later, Peter emailed me the photos from his Whitewater shoot. Spectacular, every one. But I could not take my eyes off the half-dozen he took of the shelter, both with and without the old golf bag and clubs propped alongside. I couldn’t possibly do them justice by trying to describe them, but to me, they said “golf” and “old” with a quality that was almost haunting. (Speaking of haunting, check out the chapter on the old Chanhassen golf course if you get the book. But I digress into shameless self-promotion.)

From there, the handful of photos in the running to be part of the cover of the book were forwarded to my book designer, Tami Dever of TLC Graphics, Austin, Texas (more promotion there, even less shame). Equally as visionary as Mr. Wong, Ms. Dever arranged a half-dozen brilliant cover-design possibilities.

Long story longer even though I tried to make it short: No doubt some of you saw Tami’s cover designs and voted and opined on them. So many valid points, so many reasons to pick this cover or that one because of the photography or typography or or composition or combination thereof. In the end, though, as Tami and I talked one last time about cover designs, I was encouraged to “go with my heart.” And my heart was, and always will be, with the brilliant “Hey, grab those old clubs” photo that Peter Wong took of the shelter at the lost Whitewater Valley Golf Course.

Well done, Peter and Tami.

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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.