Golf stories seem to get better with age

Mark Twain is often cited as the source of the quote: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” 

He was a wise man; I couldn’t agree more.

My best round of golf in North Carolina was the time I got to drive the beverage cart at a Boone Area Chamber of Commerce benefit tournament played at Linville Ridge Country Club in Avery County.

 

My worst round of golf in North Carolina was the time I had to sub in for a player who didn’t show up at a Boone Area Chamber of Commerce benefit tournament played at Hound Ears Club in Watauga County. I ran out of balls by the 8th hole.

I felt better after reading about a golfing experience involving Fred Raphael, the entrepreneurial promoter who came up with the idea of televising a “Legends of Golf” competition in the late 1970s.

Raphael was a marketing guy and had never played golf. He decided he’d better take up the game, so there he was at Pine Valley Golf Club, a difficult, exclusive layout in New Jersey.

Counting whiffs, lost balls and every other penalty, I shot 154,” Raphael said. “It’s a good thing (golfer) Gene Sarazen had given me a lot of golf balls.”

 

What Raphael didn’t know was that the balls he had been given were British undersized balls that were not authorized for U.S. courses.

 

“A couple of weeks later, the member who got me on at Pine Valley called to say the club president sent out a letter saying 28 illegal British balls were found in the rough and that anyone caught playing the illegal balls would be kicked out of the club,” Raphael said.

“What should I tell him?” the member asked Raphael.

“Tell him to keep looking,” Raphael said. “There are four more out there.”

Then, there’s the poster displayed at a golf club in Liverpool, England, that summarizes the objective of the game: “Swat the ball as far as you can…and if you find it on the same day, you have won.”

An article in Golf Digest in 2009, authored by Bill Fields of Pinehurst, N.C., said today’s PGA Champions Tour began to form “on a soggy April Day in 1979 at Onion Creek Country Club in Austin, Texas.

 

The notion of a senior tour took flight, Fields said, during a dramatic, emotionally charged six-hole, nationally televised playoff between the doubles team of Julius Boros-Roberto De Vicenzo versus Tommy Bolt-Art Wall Jr. in Fred Raphael’s “Legends of Golf.”

Boros (above) and De Vincenzo

They competitors range in age from 55 to 63, and the action “overflowed with stellar shots and counterpunches,” Fields said, convincing people that “a second act for the sport’s aging champions was a good idea.” About 5,000 people came out to the course to watch and marvel at the old goats’ shot-making abilities.

Bolt (above) and Wall

 

One pro golfer who noticed in 1979 was Bob Goalby. He had amassed 11 PGA titles over the course of his career between 1958-71. (His first victory came at the 1958 Greater Greensboro (N.C.) Open, and his sole Major Tournament win came in 1968 at The Masters.)

Goalby was the ringleader who put together a small group of PGA players who were “past their prime” to formulate a plan for a “senior tour.” Key participants were Boros, Bolt, Sam Snead, Gardner Dickinson, Dan January and Dan Sikes.

“I was optimistic,” Goalby said. “I remember saying, ‘We’re going to have a senior tour someday. The public is going to find a place for Arnold (Palmer) to play.’” 

(Palmer was approaching his 50th birthday on Sept. 10, 1979.)

Route 66 saw boost in traffic volume after World War II

Post-World War II, traffic on Route 66 increased dramatically. Families with more income and leisure time began the tradition of the great American “road trip,” heading west on Route 66 to destinations such as the Grand Canyon, Disneyland and California beaches.

For one World War II veteran, however, the journey west on Route 66 was “a business trip.”

Bobby Troup had served a four-year hitch as an officer in the Marine Corps. He was the music director at Camp Montford Point in Jacksonville, N.C., where he was given leadership responsibility for the training of African-American troops.

 

Marine Capt. Bobby Troup with Pvt. Finis Henderson at Montford Point.

Bobby Troup and his wife, Cynthia, packed up their 1941 Buick and headed west. Bobby wanted to try his hand as a Hollywood songwriter. He had a talent for putting rhyming words and music together.

She suggested that he compose a song about their journey, titling it: “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.”

The lyrics mention several communities that they passed through on their 10-day trip: St. Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona, Kingman, Barstow and San Bernardino.

It was a snappy tune. Nat King Cole, with the King Cole Trio, first recorded “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” as a rhythm and blues song in 1946 at Radio Recorders in Los Angeles. Capitol Records released it as a single, and the song reached No. 11 on Billboard magazine’s singles chart.

 

A new television show, “Route 66,” premiered as an American adventure drama in 1960. It was created by Herbert B. Leonard and Stirling Silliphant.

Rather than pay royalties to Troup for the use of his song, Leonard and Silliphant commissioned Nelson Riddle in 1962 to write the “Route 66 Theme” as an instrumental. 

(In 1963, Stanley Styne wrote lyrics for jazz singer Teri Thorton. Her vocal version was retitled “Open Highway.”)

 

The “Route 66” TV series was an anthology that followed two young men traversing the western United States along Route 66 in a photogenic Chevrolet Corvette convertible. When the characters ran low on funds, they worked odd jobs to pad their wallets.

 

Martin Milner starred as Tod Stiles, and George Maharis played his friend Buz Murdock. 

During the third season, Maharis was diagnosed with infectious hepatitis, requiring him to take an extended leave of absence. 

He was replaced in the cast by Glenn Corbett, who played a recently discharged Vietnam veteran named Lincoln “Linc” Case. He continued through the final episode in 1964.

 

Despite the name of the series, most episodes did not take place on the historic road. A long list of well-known artists appeared as guest stars on the series, including Ed Asner, Peter Lorre, Barbara Eden, Jack Lord, Cloris Leachman, Tuesday Weld, William Shatner, Joan Crawford, Julie Newmar, Martin Sheen, James Caan, Lee Marvin…and dozens more.

Chevrolet supplied complimentary Corvettes, upgrading every season with the latest models.

 

The boom in traffic along Route 66 in the 1950s was temporary. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Aid Act in 1956, creating the Interstate Highway system. 

 

Over the next three decades, interstates replaced “almost all” of U.S. 66 with I-40. Route 66 was officially decommissioned in 1985.

Route 66 lived on, however, as people nostalgic for the old highway started campaigns to preserve the historic road. The U.S. Congress passed the Route 66 Study Act of 1990, recognizing that Route 66 was “a symbol of the American people’s heritage of travel and their legacy of seeking a better life.”

 

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Route 66, and communities all along the original route are staging all sorts of celebratory events. We’ll check it out.

Route 66 was America’s ‘Mother Road’ and ‘Main Street’

How Route 66 came to be known as America’s “Mother Road” is an interesting story.

American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-68) wrote about Route 66 and used the term “Mother Road” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” published in 1939.

 

The story describes the effects of the severe drought that struck the Midwest in the 1930s –the infamous “Dust Bowl.”

Travel writer Austin Whittall commented: “Strong winds provoked vast dust storms known as ‘black blizzards’…that blanketed the prairies of Canada and the United States.

 

“More than 100 million acres of once verdant farmland were ruined,” Whittall said. “Farmers lost their crops and cattle. Facing famine, and unable to pay back their bank loans, they defaulted on their mortgages. The farmers lost everything. Move on and find work, or starve.”

“An estimated 210,000 people took to the road and headed west, seeking jobs in California,” he said.

“However, the Great Depression that began with the ‘Black Tuesday’ stock market crash in October 1929 had shattered the economy,” Whittall said.

Still, the farm families from The Plains were determined to move west on a wing and a prayer.

 

Steinbeck wrote: “Highway 66 is the main migrant road…the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield – over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.”

“66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and…from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.”

“From all of these, the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”

Whittall said that for countless families, the journey was pure misery: “Thousands of cars, wrecks along the highway, lack of money, food, no spares, old jalopies, threadbare tires, strained engines, thirst, despair….”

 

(Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” was an instant literary success, and a movie directed by John Ford was shot in 1940, starring actor Henry Fonda.)

 

On the more positive side, one of the chief promoters of Route 66 was Cyrus Avery. He was instrumental in plotting and planning Route 66 from Chicago to dip south and run through St. Louis, Mo.

Avery rationalized: “Like the pioneer days, when they outfitted at St. Louis for all points in the West and Southwest, so today people traveling by auto find themselves coming to St. Louis over the various U.S. roads, and when arriving in St. Louis, by consulting their map, find U.S. 66 is the most direct road to the Pacific coast and likewise to all points in the great Southwest.”

“I challenge anyone to show a road of equal length that traverses more scenery, more agricultural wealth and more mineral wealth than does U.S. 66,” he said.

Avery labeled Route 66 as “America’s Main Street,” and the highway has been memorialized in popular songs and with a television drama series.

 

Two popular movies are also associated closely with Route 66. One is “Easy Rider” (1969), a “landmark counterculture film” featuring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern and Jack Nicholson. 

The other is “Thelma & Louise” (1991), starring Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon. Their “girls’ road trip” into the American Southwest goes from bad to worse.

Route 66 launches centennial celebration in Springfield, Mo.

Dateline: Springfield, Mo. With a ton of fanfare, NBC’s “TODAY” show recently kicked off the 100-year anniversary observance associated with America’s “Mother Road” – Route 66.

Broadcasting live for a one-hour segment on April 30 were “TODAY” regulars Al Roker, Dylan Dreyer and Laura Jarrett. We learned that Springfield, Mo., with a population of about 171,325, is regarded as the “Birthplace of Route 66.”

 

That’s a bold claim, considering that the route begins and ends in Chicago and Los Angeles. While Springfield is not the start of the physical highway, it is where the name was finalized in 1926. Here’s how that came to be:

As initially planned, the 2,448-mile federal highway connecting Chicago and Los Angeles was going to be assigned the number “Route 60.”

Kentucky Gov. William J. Fields objected, however. He asserted that a transcontinental highway that was also on the books, intended to connect Virginia Beach, Va., and Los Angeles (a few hundred miles longer), should receive the Route 60 designation instead.

(In those days, the ending numeral “0” was identified with major “east-west highways” in the system, while the primary “north-south routes” ended in “1” or “5.”)

The Bureau of Public Roads essentially agreed with Gov. Fields, and the Chicago-Los Angeles highway was changed to “Route 62.”

That didn’t sit well with John Woodruff (shown above), a Springfield attorney, and Cyrus Avery (shown below), Oklahoma’s highway czar. 

They convened a meeting of a group of state highway planners in April 1926 in Springfield to discuss the matter.

Intent on making “lemonade” out of a bad situation, Woodruff and Avery, opted for a more catchy name, and “Route 66” was available. They telegraphed Bureau officials on April 30, 1926, requesting that number.

They got their confirmation on Nov. 11, 1926, when U.S. Secretary of Agriculture William Marion Jardine, serving under President Calvin Coolidge, approved the Route 66 designation. 

Hence, Nov. 11, 1926, is observed as the official birth date of “U.S. Highway 66.”

The U.S. Highway 66 Association was founded in 1927 to promote the highway. Woodruff was named the first president. The association advertised that Route 66 was “the shortest, best and most scenic route from Chicago through St. Louis to Los Angeles.” The road became popular with interstate travelers.

 

Route 66 was completely paved in Missouri in 1931, and the entire route was hard surfaced by 1938. As the highway improved, it began attracting businesses to formerly isolated communities. The need for fuel, lodging and food along the highway gave birth to many small businesses.

 

Red’s Giant Hamburg was established in 1947 by Sheldon “Red” Chaney on Route 66 in Springfield. It was America’s first “drive-thru, fast food restaurant.”

A red and white 1955 Buick Special with shiny chrome bumpers and spinner hubcaps, is parked outside as a nostalgic tribute to Route 66. (The vehicle was strategically placed in front of the restaurant’s sign to prevent motorists from accidently backing into the structure.)

 

The “TODAY” show crew also wanted viewers to know that Springfield is the “Queen City of the Ozarks,” but the city has also been tagged as the “Buckle of the Bible Belt,” due to its association with “evangelical Christianity.”

Springfield also is home to Missouri State University; the main campus has an enrollment of about 25,250 students.

MO State’s athletic teams are nicknamed the Bears, and the “TODAY” show cameras zoomed in to film the antics of the mascot, “Boomer the Bear,” and the moves exhibited by the “Sugar Bears” dance team.

It’s an exciting time for Bears’ football fans, as MO State has just recently “toughened up its schedule” as a new member of Conference USA.