Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
Naturally, most of the guys in our gang were flat broke most of the week during the summer months. Except for the quarter we each got on Saturdays to go downtown to the movies none of us was in danger of losing pocket change by accidentally being turned upside down.
'I know a way we can make some money,' Al announced one day.
'Is it legal?' I asked skeptically.
'As a matter of fact, it is. I've been talking to some guys down at Jimmie's and they say anybody who shows up can caddy at the Country Club.'
'What's the pay?' Kenny said cynically.
'I've heard of guys making as much as a buck for one round of golf!' Al said.
'Yeah, yeah, and I'll probably win the lottery next week!' I scoffed.
'Did you buy a lottery ticket?' Stewie asked naively.
'Don't be stupid!' I snapped.
Al's optimistic prediction subsequently turned out to be an exercise in hyperbole. Apparently there was one member, a millionaire by the name of Mayland, who had made his fortune in Turner Valley and was in the habit of asking for one particular caddy, signing his pay chit, then handing him a dollar bill as a tip. He became renowned as 'One Buck Mayland' amongst the caddy ranks.
When we rounded the last turn in the road before the portion that ran down the hill to the clubhouse we saw a large cluster of boys on bicycles at the top of the hill.
'What's the big hold-up?' I said.
'It's a rule,' Al said, 'everybody has to wait at the top of the hill 'til we get the signal from down below at eight o'clock! We have to line up five abreast.'
'Maybe they should just chain us all together and march us down single file,' I said.
'Very funny!' Al observed.
'It's not that funny,' I said, 'I'll bet they'd do it if they thought they could get away with it!'
There were between thirty and forty optimistic young lads in the 'cattle call' by the time eight o'clock arrived. Some boys in the front row obviously saw an arcane signal from below and shoved off to begin the steep descent to the level road at the bottom of the hill. Modified chaos reigned in the rows behind as bicyclers raced to get underway. We had arrived late, about a quarter to eight, so we were in the sixth or seventh row. I marvel to this day at the fact that no one was killed or seriously injured in the stampede.
Some boy with an indulgent mother had obviously been given a brown paper bag containing sandwiches and he had presumably tucked the bag 'safely' into the front of his jacket. After it fell out and landed on the road it was obviously suicidal to attempt to stop and retrieve it. It had become the size of home plate and about half an inch thick by the time we passed it. I recall getting a momentary glimpse of purple jelly and smashed hard-boiled yellow egg yolk interspersed with bicycle tire tread marks as I shot past. I can't believe he returned later in an attempt to salvage it. Some straight-faced would-be humorists later claimed to have seen crows and magpies carrying spatulas surrounding the site.
As soon as the first wave of volunteers arrived in the area of the caddy shack they leaped from their bikes and rushed to line up in front of the caddy shack door. When 'Pop' Shelton, the Caddy Master, got around to opening the door they were allowed to enter one at a time and give their name and get a number.
Following the line-up we were left pretty well on our own in the grubby unpaved area in front of the caddy shack. There were a few wooden tables and benches scattered about but no recreational equipment of any kind. Some boys wandered down to the side of the Elbow River which ran along the edge of the parking area and east beside the eighteenth fairway.
'Can we go swimming in there?' I enquired.
'If you can swim I guess you can!' said one of the boys chucking rocks into the slow-moving water. 'I've never seen anybody doing it though!'
-o-
One day "Pop" Shelton decided to make "experts" out of all the novices.
'Go over and wait for me just across the road on the eighteenth fairway,' he said. 'Pop' looked like a medical textbook illustration of a person with advanced T.B....and he had a chronic cough. I was leery of getting too close to him. There were about ten neophytes grouped together when 'Pop' arrived for his instructional session. The first five or ten minutes were devoted to 'do's', the next twenty minutes or so were dedicated to 'don't's'.
'Quiet over there!' said 'Pop' with a glare.
And then there were the 'don't's'--
Three quarters of an hour later we were 'fully qualified' caddies. We went back to playing 'pitch penny' and chucking rocks into the river. Very redemptive! Some time late that afernoon I was sent out to caddy for a middle-aged woman who could hit the ball only about seventy-five yards but at least managed to keep it on the fairway.
'Pop' gave me a yellow slip with the woman's name written on it. When we finished, she signed the slip and I took it back in to 'Pop' and he gave me twenty-five cents. What bounty! I think the slip said thirty-five cents but 'Pop' kept ten cents. That was close to reality but not as close as I was going to get. One day I showed up early for 'top of the hill' line-up, lined up again after the 'bottom of the hill' scramble, then sat on my duff all day without getting a caddying assignment. There were no minimum wage rules in those days.
'Oh, well, at least I should be near the front of the list for tomorrow,' I said optimistically.
'Don't count on it,' said one of the veteran caddies.
'Whatta you mean?'
'I mean they start all over again tomorrow. First come, first served!'
'But that's just bullshit!' I exclaimed. 'I've been sitting here all day without getting a call!'
'Lots of things out here are bullshit, kid. You'll get used to it!'
'I sure as hell doubt it!' I grumbled.
I continued on at 'Alabama North' in spite of the medieval attitudes of the players, probably because I had found I had little else to do.
I must admit that I was favoured to a small extent. My father's duck shooting chum who was also our family dentist was a golfing member at the club. As a result, when he found out I was caddying, he would give me preference. I guess you could call it that! 'Doc' Maxwell used nothing but 'Autograph' golf balls, and I never knew him to lose one, mainly because he rarely hit the ball into the rough.
After fourteen or fifteen immaculate rounds the ball would still be unmarred by cuts or hacks but the paint would have started to wear off. Just about the time the little red dots had become barely visible the 'Doc' would produce a new ball. He would then ask me to put the worn ball in the pocket of the golf bag. The first time I did so I was astonished; there must have been twelve or fifteen similar exhausted balls in the pocket! What the hell was he planning to do with them?
I knew some of the stingy bastards at the club actually played with 'repainted' balls but I didn't think he was planning to do that. No, I just think he had the general 'dirty thirties' attitude of 'waste not--want not' and the thought of throwing them away was simply too repugnant for him to consider.
But I still think the best example of old-fashioned Scottish frugality was the one told to me by my old friend and golfing buddy Murray Mackintosh. His family lived in Mount Royal and one of their neighbors was an ancient member of the Country Club. A few weeks after he had passed on to 'the great seaside links up in the sky' his widow asked Murray's mother if her son was a golfer. When she replied in the affirmative, the old bird told her that her husband had left a box of wooden tees and wondered if Murray would like to have them. She said he would be delighted to have them so Murray went over to pick them up. He was handed a shoe box of considerable weight, but, being a well-raised and polite boy, did not lift the lid to examine the contents until he had returned home. When he opened the box at home he found it filled nearly to the top with broken wooden tees!
I have heard of people with obsessive compulsions to save string or to collect silver paper, in each case saving them in ever-growing balls for no apparent purpose. Murray was not quite sure what he should do with the useless cache of tees; he was not accustomed to playing with 'stubby' tees. The old lady would undoubtedly have felt wounded if she knew her well-meant act of kindness was the cause of levity, but it was impossible not to make jokes about Murray's ludicrous gift.
'No point wasting 'em',' observed one wit, 'you can always get down on your knees to tee off!'
'Maybe you could whittle them down and use them for toothpicks!' Not very funny. Not much laughter.
'How about a little bonfire--very little!' Raucous laughter. Murray was not highly amused; he began to think it would have been better if he hadn't mentioned it in the first place.
One day I caddied for a corpulent fellow who gave me the impression that he had never golfed before. It felt like it was 'Ladies' Day' at the brewery picnic. He spent more time in the trees than Dr. Livingstone.
That night I told Dad about the frustrating experience.
'How would you like to make all your own bad shots?' he asked.
'Whatta you mean?'
'I mean how would you like to have me buy you and your brother memberships at the Municipal Golf Course?
'Are you serious? That would be incredible! Thanks Dad!'
So the arrangements were made and I bade goodbye to the gentle mercies of the fossilized, penny-pinching members of the Calgary Golf & Country Club.
Lloyd and I set out with a mixed 'bag' each of golfing gear, each fitted out with wooden-shafted clubs. Each bag was made of light khaki-coloured cloth with intermittent metal ribs to hold them upright. The standard set of clubs was comprised of a driver or No.1 wood, a 'brassie' or fairway wood, a 'spoon' or No. 4 wood, a mid-iron (about a three iron), a 'mashie' (five iron), 'mashie niblick' (eight iron), 'niblick' (nine iron) and a putter. There was no question of having a sand wedge since the few 'traps' had no sand in them.
There were sand 'greens' at the Shaganappi Golf Course; we called it either 'The Muni' or 'The Rock Pile' depending on how well we were golfing at the time. The tee boxes were just that, raised wooden platforms with raffia mats on top or mats similar to rubber door mats. Each hole had a name in the old Scottish tradition; 'The Babe', 'First Twin', 'Second Twin', and so on. The only water on the course was that in the cans in the built-up wooden cupboards beside each tee. They looked like apple boxes on stilts and were painted white with the hole name and number and the yardage,(N.B. Yards, not metres!). We tended to use wooden tees wedged down between the rubber strips forming the tee mats, but, but believe it or not. the water and sand were put there for the benefit of the old-timers who still built tees of various shapes and sizes on which to set their golf ball before attempting to hit it. We were always circumspect about using the water in the tins for moistening the sand, since we knew that naughty boys from Killarney passing through the golf course on their way home at night tended to pollute the water on occasion, if it's possible to state it delicately. Oh, what the hell!--they were pissing in it!
Since we had now been liberated from servitude at the Calgary Golf & Country Club, our summer days were spent happily between the golf course and the tennis courts. When I found out it cost $3.50 to store my golf clubs in a locker at the golf course for the season I decided that was an outrageous amount and carried my bag over my shoulder both to and from the course. It was about a mile and a half uphill to the course but, obviously, the return trip was mostly downhill and relatively easy.
None of us got particularly good at either game but we could have. Dad offered to pay for lessons if we wanted to take them from Jack Hutton, the club profesional. We scoffed.
'Lessons?' we said. 'Just a waste of time! We want to play golf, not take lessons.' A residual attitude from public school, no doubt! Meanwhile, two of his previous students, Kemp and Johnny Richardson, were winning most of the amateur golf tournaments in and around Calgary. Johnny was also a star hockey player who, along with my brother Bob, a goaltender, won a hockey scholarship for the University of Southern California. Bob had three scholarships, in fact, first at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, then at the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks and finally at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
On one occasion Kemp was working at a bank in Central Alberta when the last qualification day for the Calgary Amateur Golf Tournament came due. Kemp arranged for three caddies; one to carry his bag, of course, and two to run ahead and mat the sand greens for him. That way there was minimum delay as he ran from hole to hole. He started at 6:00 p.m. and was finished by 7:30. He shot 72!
The mats used for the greens were made of heavy brown sisal or hemp, about two feet wide and a foot across, bolted to a cross-board which was itself attached to a quarter-inch steel rod about four feet long. There were two popular ways to mat the greens; some players preferred simply to drag the mat between their ball and the cup, others, the perfectionists, would scoop the accumulated sand from the cup and sprinkle it around the lip of the cup to prevent their ball from striking the metal lip. Returning with the mat to their ball they would then sweep the mat back and forth across the imaginary line between their ball and the cup.
The sand on the greens was a mixture of fine sand and oil, so the air around the greens was redolent of petroleum, but the greens were true and it was not unusual for us to chip into the hole from off the green once or twice in a round.
Since most of us never finished our driving swings we had a tendency to hit long looping slices from the tee. This was particularly vexing on the fifteenth hole which sloped from left to right into heavy brush on the right hand side, i.e. north side of the fairway. Sometimes I felt as though we were spending a disproportionate amount of time down in the bush. There were compensations, however. We usually found one or two previously lost golf balls, so came out ahead of the game in that respect. Then there were the berries! There were both chokecherries and Saskatoon berries. There was naturally a limit to how many of the former we could stand, they puckered you up pretty good, but there was no limit to the latter.
If the Huttons had any children they never talked about them and I never saw anyone else behind the counter. The Huttons ran the place by themselves, which means Mrs. H. had to be general dogsbody about the place which obviously included being janitor for the locker rooms. She was not a big woman, quiet, spare, in fact, and seemed usually to be busy, wearing an apron and lacking any cosmetic make-up.
A Coffee Crisp chocolate bar and a 'Pepsi' were the usual limit of our spending capability but occasionally she would get an order for something more substantial from some older lad who was flush that day, i.e. he had a job! Seeing her come from the kitchen with a bacon and tomato sandwich for some toff in the enclosed verandah was an unusual experience for us. I should think that the customer would have thought twice in future about ordering food with a bunch of hungry-looking juveniles sitting around sucking on Pepsi's and staring at every mouthful.
The Huttons had living quarters at the back of the clubhouse and I assume that Jack's wage from the city was minimal, but he obviously saved every penny he earned and sometime in the 60's managed to get control of the old Inglewood, a pretty golf course in East Calgary, neatly sandwiched between the irrigation canal to the north and the Bow River to the south.
There were some very interesting old boys using the course in those days. I remember one in particular who literally hurled himself off the tee after driving, landing with his left foot down on the ground beside the tee box. I never knew where he drove his ball or how far, since I had always turned my back so that I could giggle unobserved. I grant that some of us didn't have the best of form but at least we remained in the general area of the tee box.
In all of my golfing days I never managed to break par for eighteen holes. But I came close! One day when I was in High School I was playing with Murray Mackintosh and John Maybin. I reached the eighteenth hole at even par. I had a putt of about ten feet for my birdie and a 69, one under! Just in the middle of my backstroke a ball rolled across the green between me and the hole. Naturally I choked up and missed the crucial putt. I was furious and looked back up the fairway. Standing there expectantly was none other than Rex North, renowned ski jump artiste! I don't know what he was expecting but it certainly wasn't what he was looking for. After I had finished waving my arms about, shaking my fists and screaming at him I felt sure he had got the message.
When he came into the clubhouse later and I told him he had driven into us just as I was about to putt for a sub-par round he was sufficiently apologetic to gain a small degree of forgiveness. As time went on and I thought more about it I rationalized that he may have done me a favour. What if I had missed the putt anyway? After all, it wasn't exactly a 'gimme'! and whom could I have blamed it on? This was much better; it was Rex's fault! Perfect! A 69 would have been nice, though!
Our standard procedure following a game was to enter the clubhouse and make a routine purchase of a Coffee Crisp chocolate bar, (five cents) and a bottle of PepsiCola, (five cents). The 'Pepsi' of the 30's was quite unlike the beverage of the same name sold today. It was sold in an opaque green bottle and was sweet, almost syrupy, The standard warning from the 'wise boys' in those days was 'be careful not to spill any on your car, it will remove the paint faster than sulphuric acid!'. So who had a car to spill it on, anyway? Incidentally, it was astonishing to watch a couple of the lads play a fast-paced game of ping-pong with empty coke bottles used for bats. Our hand eye co-ordination was remarkable!
The grass was watered whenever the heavens deigned to rain on it. In point of fact, it was really only cropped 'prairie wool'. For some reason there was a cupped-out area of black dust about a foot wide running along the front of each green. These were the depression years and the idea of anything being done (like installing a watering system) that would cost money was absolutely out of the question.
The same was true of our little golfing troop. In later years it would be customary to wager money on the outcome of the game. Since no one had any money, it was not difficult to eliminate that option. But we needed motivation, so we devised an alternative. It could have been called 'Winner Kicks All' or, less delicately, 'A Clear Winner Gets to Kick Everybody Else in the Ass!' Al, Dawse, Ian and I were regulars but there were often as many as three extra players in the group. To avoid protests about our size and slowness the group usually teed off about 5:00 p.m. when most of the regulars had left. If a player won a hole cleanly, and that wasn't easy, the rest of the group would line up at the edge of the green and bend over at the waist, The winner would then saunter over and casually kick each player in the bum. Direct toe-kicking was a 'no,no!'; only the side of the shoe was allowed.
It was a good, fun-filled game, actually. Since it was 'two tie, all tie' there were infrequent winners. Dawse broke up everyone one day when he showed up wearing a pair of heavy army boots. I don't remember him getting a chance to use them but it was good for a laugh. Everyone was silent during tee-off but the rules changed perceptibly at the green. Anything but actually touching the player who was putting was allowed. 'Lookouts!' were commonplace, of course, and lying down beyond the cup and making faces at the player were typical. Most of this activity took place when all of the other players had finished putting and were at par or over and the final player, usually not far from the hole, was putting for a birdie. It was good practice for 'the old concentration'.
The fourteenth hole, 'The Gully' was a short par three but as its name suggests it was played across the deep gully that begins as a slight depression and runs all the way from the north side of the tenth hole down as far the railroad tracks. There's a fancy bridge there now, carrying the golfers comfortably across the ravine but we had to do it the hard way. It was almost worthwhile topping your tee shot down into the gully; at least you would have more to do when you got to the bottom. The path was too well-travelled to expect there to be any lost balls in sight. So we ran down the down side and toiled up the up side; in retrospect I think we never gave it a second thought as far as exertion was concerned; we might even have run up the second side. Gadzooks! we took being in great shape for granted!
I've already referred to some of the peculiarities of the fifteenth hole. After negotiating 'The Gully' we would try to hit our drives on the fifteenth hole far enough up toward the top of the slope to compensate for the inevitable roll toward the bushes.
There was a large granite boulder sitting near the middle of the fifteenth fairway about thirty yards from the tee, a relic, presumably, of the last ice age. It was easy to hit over it so we tended to ignore it. One day I mishit my tee shot however and hit what is referred to in baseball as 'a frozen rope' straight into the face of the rock.
'Where did it go?' I asked no one in particular.
'I never saw it!'
'Buggered if I know!' said another. We had given it up for lost when it suddenly dropped with a plop just beside me on the tee box. Incredible! Total hang time for the ball must have been at least three and a half seconds.
'You got good distance on that,' Al said, 'I'd say about a hundred and twenty yards straight up and a hundred and twenty yards straight down!' Then we all roared with laughter and wonderment.
During the summer of 1943, after I had learned to drink too much and have hangovers, I was in the habit of playing a round of golf with some of the 'older boys', Brian Stubbs, Freddie McKay and Jimmie Fowler. Sometimes Jack Hutton, the club pro, would fill in. One Saturday morning I woke early with a throbbing headache and a delicate stomach. Hangover!--and I'm supposed to golf this morning! I lurched over to the window and looked out. Thank God, it's pisssing down rain! With a sigh of relief I went over and crawled back into bed. Shortly thereafter my mother came to the botttom of the stairs and called up to me.
'One of your friends is on the phone and wants to talk to you,' she yelled.
'Tell him I'm sick, besides, it's raining like hell out there!' She was gone for a minute or two and I thought I had solved the problem, but she returned.
'He insists on talking to you personally!'
'Christ sake!' I grumbled. 'Tell him I'll be right there!' I yelled. I meant 'right there' to the telephone.
'Hello!'
'Helmer? said a grouchy voice I assumed was Stubbs. 'We're all here waiting--where the hell are you?'
'I was in bed if you want to know the truth!'
'We've got a golf game, remember?'
'What are you, nuts? It's pissing down rain! Have you looked outside?'
'Hang on a minute!' he said. I waited on the line while I heard a murmur of conversation at the other end of the line, then Stubby came back on the phone.
'The boys said "You're a golfer, aren't ya?' That did it! He couldn't have said anything more wounding. I felt like an Oriental about to lose face.
'Wait for me, I'll be there in fifteen minutes,' I said, now fully awake.
Actually, I think I was there in about twenty minutes, and I had the use of Dad's car; but it was still an all-time record.
In fairness, I have to say that the rain had let up to a drizzle by the time we teed off and stopped completely before we finished the first nine. I even won a couple of holes which minimized the misery of my hangover.
It must be more than fifty years since I last played at the 'Muni'. Hard to believe! Stubby and Hutton are gone and we've lost track of McKay. I should go by there again some day, though, I'm told they even have grass greens!
— The End —