WATERVILLE, Minn. — Yes, indeed. Greetings from Waterville.
This is the scene the postcard paints: warm, sunny, friendly, inviting Waterville.
The postcard lies.
Don’t misinterpret. The lie doesn’t reflect poorly on Waterville. There are many pleasant truths about this small town in south-central Minnesota. Waterville is home to the Buccaneers of Waterville-Elysian-Morristown High School, the reigning Class A state volleyball champions. It is host of citywide garage sales in mid-May and Bullhead Days in early June, where festival offerings include fireworks, bingo, food and carnival rides and where Miss Waterville kisses the prize catch in the kids fishing contest. And it is adorned by two big, beautiful and usually peaceful lakes, Tetonka to the west and Sakatah to the east.
Beyond those truths, there is this opinion: Waterville, population 1,868, is among the more appealing under-2,000-population towns I have visited in more than five decades of tooling around Minnesota. “World class fishing, scenic beauty and a progressive atmosphere,” the city’s website boasts, and the municipal chest-thumping doesn’t come across as overblown.
Here is how I got to Waterville:
In early April, while rummaging through eBay in a search for trinkets on lost Minnesota golf courses, I came across this listing: “Waterville Minnesota-Greetings From A Golf Course-1950s PC.” (The “PC” stands for “postcard.” The 1950s notation seemed unlikely to me; the golfers’ attire looked like what I wore on the course in the mid-1970s, except that my shorts were, I’m horrified to say, shorter and whiter and tighter than those on the woman at the left of the postcard.) Nonetheless, I hacked into my wife’s bank account for the required $6.40, bought the card (shown at the top of this post) and began Googling golf in Waterville.
Oh — If you similarly Googled “Waterville” and “golf” and wound up here while trying to land a reservation at the renowned links in Ireland, all I can say is “tough Irish luck.”
After a handful of search variations, Google revealed Shor-Tee Golf Course in Waterville, Minn. Maybe I should have known about the place, but I always said when I started digging up Minnesota’s lost courses that there was no way I would find every one. A few more clicks and a half-dozen phone calls revealed only smidges of information about Shor-Tee, all of which added up to the inevitable conclusion:
Road trip. I gotta see me that lost course.
Waterville is in southeastern Le Sueur County, approximately halfway between Faribault and Mankato and an hour south of Minneapolis. I had been told I might find archived material on Shor-Tee at the newspaper office, so that’s where I was headed first.
The door to Lake Region Life was closed. It was after office hours on a Friday afternoon, but the door was unlocked, so I barged in, as any big-city reporter worth his ill-mannered salt would. Jay Schneider, the newspaper’s editor and manager, couldn’t have been more accommodating. He not only invited me to go through the newspaper’s back issues, he spent at least an hour helping me look and/or telephoning one local after another to dig up the history of Shor-Tee. There was an element of doggedly digging for the truth at play, even for a subject as trivial as a little old golf course, which perhaps helps explain why Schneider and his staff won awards for their coverage of the devastating Waterville floods of 2014.
At this point, a few more truths about Shor-Tee Golf Course can be revealed. The course was owned by Willis Sautbine, who operated it with his wife, June. The Sautbines were teachers at Waterville High School. (June died in 2001 and Willis in 2011, and they had no children, so firsthand information on Shor-Tee from direct family members was impossible to gather.) Shor-Tee was situated two miles west of downtown Waterville, on the southern shore of Lake Tetonka, near a finger of land known as Willow Point.
Shor-Tee was a short course — a veritable walk to the end of the block and back. It was a par-3 layout, nine holes. A handful of Waterville residents said almost all of the holes were less than 100 yards long, with one saying the longest was about 110 yards.
“It was a 9-iron course and putter. You could get through the whole course with that,” said Waterville resident Scott Pullen, and evidence in the Lake Region Life office bore him out.
Schneider reached to a top shelf and pulled down a makeshift “golf bag” that came from Shor-Tee — a set of three plastic golf-bag tubes, held together by two old Schell’s beer cans.
At this point, the lines between truth and half-truth, hyperbole and well-intentioned but fuzzy memory began to blur. It most certainly wasn’t a Waterville thing; it is part and parcel of researching lost golf courses. One person tells you Lost Course X was 18 holes, on the south side of the county highway and tantamount to a Donald Ross design; the other says it was nine holes, alongside a dusty dirt road and was a dog track.
Willis Sautbine enjoyed various avocations. “Dabbler” might be an appropriate label. Besides opening a golf course, he performed karaoke at area bars. One Waterville resident doubted he was much good; another rebutted with “No, I think he was quite the crooner.”
Perhaps not all of his dabbling, however, was performed with precision. One person said Sautbine once set out to build an airplane, buying parts and assembling them in his garage. One little hang-up: The garage doors, the person said, weren’t wide enough to accommodate the exit of a fully assembled aircraft.
That anecdote aside, Sautbine’s golf course apparently was successful. At a minimum, it had staying power. At least two Waterville residents said the course was built in the 1950s, and two said it opened as a three-hole layout, although an entry penned by Minnesota State Mankato alum Sautbine on a university website purports that he built the course and strongly suggested its origin dated to the 1960s. (Sautbine called the course “Shor-TEE” in the piece, as opposed to the “Shor-Tee” in most other references.) He closed the course in 1994, with
Economy must have had something to do with Shor-Tee’s durability. Waterville resident Edgar Eggers, 99, recalled that annual membership cost $25. A 1990 roundup of golf courses that ran in the Rochester Post-Bulletin mentioned 58 courses in the region; the lowest greens fee of all was the $3.50 at Shor-Tee.
Criticism of Bill Sautbine’s operation could not be found in modern-day Waterville. At least a half-dozen people complimented Shor-Tee. “It used to be a cool place; it really was,” offered Pullen. Sautbine’s niece, Pat Hansen of Valley City, N.D., recalled spending summer weeks along the Sautbines’ Lake Tetonka shoreline, where houseboat and cottage rentals were available. A public beach was nearby, as well.
Thursdays were men’s nights at Shor-Tee, and the potlucks included hand-picked vegetables from June Sautbine’s garden. “June was the one that made that place go,” Eggers said of the high school phy ed teacher. “She taught all the kids how to play golf. … It was really a well-run golf course.”
With truth, fiction and opinion now reasonably sorted out, only The Big Lie remains , and it concerns the “Greetings From Waterville, Minn.” postcard.
My original intent in visiting Waterville included trying to ascertain the identity of the gentleman pictured at the center of the postcard. I was hoping to salute him, even if posthumously, for the high finish and excellent balance in his swing, and in the event he were still alive I would ask him if he had ever won a U.S. Open championship.
Not gonna happen.
Though it’s impossible to say for sure, it strongly appears the gentleman is swinging a wood, as are three others on the tee box. A mite too much club, I would say, by about eight clubs, for a likely low-handicap player negotiating a hole of 110 yards or less. And the golf course grounds appears relatively expansive, certainly not economy-sized like Shor-Tee was.
Schneider, a visitor to his newspaper office and Eggers all doubted that the postcard was from Shor-Tee. Waterville’s Jack Luther, 85, who played the course often and once had a hole in one there, unequivocally said the postcard absolutely did not depict Shor-Tee.
The back of the postcard is unmarked, so there are no hints as to the actual site of the picture on the front of the card. Maybe it was a photo from a nearby golf course — the nearest to Waterville are Prairie Ridge of Janesville, but that didn’t open until 1995, and Lakeside Club of Waseca.
Or maybe Tichnor Bros. Inc. of Boston 15, Mass., which issued the postcard, merely reached into its file of stock photos of golf courses and decided to imply to the unwashed masses that “Greetings From Waterville, Minn.” meant “Greetings From Waterville, Minn., Where The Golf Course That’s Really There Isn’t The One You’re Viewing On This Postcard.”
But that would have taken up a lot of real estate on the 3.5-by-5.5-inch field. Besides, a half-century later, this exercise in truth-finding was more fun anyway.
Postscript
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I played that course almost every day with my roommate and friends.
We had a blast.
Men’s night brought a wide range of ages and various walks of life together. My father in law and I shared some great nights out there.
When June was ready to call it a night she shut the lights off in the club house. Men’s Night was done for for that night. But we always went back.
Great memory. Thanks for reminding us of the gem we so enjoyed.