A Caddy's Life

A CADDY’S LIFE

(Circa 1958)

Like much of childhood itself, this book is not intended for the young.

A Caddy’s Life

Published by Gatekeeper Press

2167 Stringtown Rd, Suite 109

Columbus, OH 43123-2989

www.GatekeeperPress.com

Copyright © 2019 by Sterling E. Rowe

All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

The cover design, interior formatting, typesetting, and editorial work for this book are entirely the product of the author. Gatekeeper Press did not participate in and is not responsible for any aspect of these elements.

ISBN (paperback): 9781642376753

eISBN: 9781642376760

Printed in the United States of America

PROLOGUE

This book came into being because one of our own, Tom Benoit, long a member of Wethersfield Country Club in Wethersfield, CT. and a former caddy, decided that we should have a caddy reunion. This was in 2001, at the fiftieth reunion of the PGA tournament that had started at WCC in 1952, THE INSURANCE CITY OPEN or ICO. I’m sure he felt a bit nostalgic about our adventures and thought that we should all get together and share some stories.

Tom went to a lot of trouble and expense but eventually he managed to contact a large number of us, men now in our fifties, sixties and seventies, and got us all together. He did it without fanfare and perhaps, even a bit of shyness. Guys came from all over the country so maybe it was just modesty but he kept his head down as if the whole thing was pretty serious. He might have been the only one of us who was serious about it, though. The first words uttered at our table, once we had taken our seats, were, Okay, how many of us are here courtesy of the Witness Protection Program? Photographs show hands covering faces, giggles and dissembling. It was a lovely evening.

We gabbled like school girls, relived many of our youthful adventures and thoroughly enjoyed Tom’s night. Probably nobody thanked him. We were too busy indulging ourselves. The result, though, was this book. As you will see, much of the book is devoted to coming of age within the four corners of the golf course but after so many years it took some head scratching and a few Oh my’s! to recall everything. I would like to thank the following guys in particular for assistance with these recollections. They helped immeasurably with facts that for many of us had become no more substantial than a wish.

Richard L. Barger

C. Michael Budlong

Barry R. Frazer

Richard Kuzmak

Martin D. Rowe

Joseph Rution

Anyway, after the glow of the evening had faded I filed all my notes in a dusty old box. Ten years later, Rich Barger spread the word that Mike Budlong was in the hospital. His altogether questionable diet of bear grease and gravel had combined to take him down. He was in for a quintuple bypass and who knew? There was always a chance he wouldn’t make it out on the course again. Ever. Would he stay at a four?

When Mike was able to speak over the clamor of percocets or whatever it is they give you after ripping out your chest, he asked, Hey! Whenya gonna finish that caddy book? That was the impetus to get it done. The thought that a very special period in golf’s history would pass without notice was impossible to accept. I returned to the book and this time made as sure as possible that my memory had not distorted the facts and that everything was true to the best of my knowledge and belief. Happy trails to you and blessings all around. A final word: This book belongs to all of us. We all lived the life. It also belongs to two guys who were less fortunate than we were and who didn’t make it into the nineties: Steve Rust from Rocky Hill, Ct. and Eddie Polaski from Wethersfield. They were both great guys. A tip of the hat to them both, be they in Heaven, Hoboken or half way in between. I’m also pained to say that over the last few years we’ve lost two of our nearest and dearest, guys who loved the game and were without doubt among the best friends a guy could have, Joe Rution from Santa Barbara and Barry Frazer from Wallingford, Ct. They were great friends but they were much, much more. Exceptionally witty, inventive and whimsical their lives were a blessing to us all. To know them was to love them, even if they would have been shocked at the thought of it.

Apologies, too, for guys who were omitted. Fifty and now sixty years is a long time. They should know though, that their lives have been just like ours. Superficially, we’ve traveled different paths but beneath the surface we’re all the same. The caddy life informed everything we did for the rest of our lives. It was the lens through which we witnessed life’s passing parade. It was the antenna we needed to read our peers. We learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys, quoth Budlong. Too true.

BACKGROUND

Golf began in Scotland a long time ago but only washed up in the U.S. in Yonkers in the 1880s where a club loyally called St. Andrew’s was chartered by a group of local fanatics. That is to say, baseball has a longer history on these shores than golf. There are now over 25,000 courses in America. It has enjoyed phenomenal growth, growing exponentially through world wars and the depression, doubling its venues about every 12 years.

We look at the sport as being uniquely faithful to its history, lovingly adhering to tradition whenever possible and rightly so. We simply forget that its history is so short here in America. Local customs became adopted by succeeding clubs and these customs hardened into tradition. Nonetheless, these simple traditions are so important that they are second nature to us now. Character and honesty were given absolute primacy; sportsmanship and fair play are the sine qua non. Few now remember that in the early days, the winner bought drinks, not the loser. The winner consoled his opponent and in the spirit of good will, encouraged him to try again. There is a nobility about the game and a code of conduct that can be model for us all. If we learn this early, we’re lucky and it stays with us throughout our lives. The FIRST TEE is just the most recent manifestation, giving kids a compass by which they may guide their lives.

Golf has now grown into big stuff. Its influence on local communities may be seen across the land. Year in and year out, it has generated more income for charities than nearly all other sporting events combined. Tens of thousands of volunteers willingly give their time at annual events and they do it for the love of the game. Few other human endeavors are blessed with the sheer devotion we see in golf.

Again, though, its life span in America is relatively short. Shorter still is its history of professional tournaments. Until the forties, it was considered more admirable to be an amateur. Golf pros were treated like hucksters and many of them were. They toured the country, taking on the local hustlers, eking out a living the only way they knew how, by gambling. It was a hardscrabble life so when a professional tour came into being and there were purses available, it was enthusiastically embraced by a lot of pretty colorful characters: Walter Hagen, Titanic Thompson and Jimmy Demaret just to name a few.

We all know about the National Opens. We all know about Francis Ouimet and his triumph at THE COUNTRY CLUB in 1913 over James Braid and Harry Vardon. We don’t know much about the other tournaments that would go on to form the professional tour. Many were small town events, little more than barn dances with numbered flags. There were state Opens each year, too, but the money was short and the pickin’s were slim. It took a long time before there were enough events on a guy’s calendar to allow him a chance to make a decent living. Your parents advised against it as a career choice. Eventually, the tournaments grew up. There were events nearly every week. A guy could pick and choose, playing maybe 25 or 30 tournaments a year and making a pretty good buck. However, few tournaments were played during WWII and they were only added slowly after that. Little towns like Wethersfield, CT were delightful suburbs near cities like Hartford but they had little else going on. Oh, wait a minute: Let’s not forget the annual Corn Festival and the fact that Wethersfield is called something like Oniontown because women grew onions there in 1650 or so. An event like the INSURANCE CITY OPEN was unthinkable. It was like bringing La Cirque de Soleil to the local Junior High. Who the Hell would go?

Somebody, though, dreamt up the idea, got his buddies together and pulled it off. Towns and cities across the country were slowly adding tournaments and Wethersfield planted its flag. One week each summer it would hold a cash purse tournament. It all started in 1952 and continued until the course proved too short and the tournament was moved to a PGA golf course, RIVER HIGHLANDS in nearby Cromwell, CT. It has morphed through several stages—the Greater Hartford Open, the Sammy Davis Greater Harford Open, The Traveler’s Open and now, I think, simply the GHO—THE GREATER HARTFORD OPEN—but it’s the same tournament, just a little bigger. It’s hugely popular and is one of the biggest sporting events annually in the state.

In 1952 and the period shortly thereafter, the period covered in this book, the PGA tour was in its toddlerhood, if not its infancy. Kids caddied, not professionals. You didn’t get ten points on a player’s purse; you got paid nothing—or next to nothing. You couldn’t expect it: Players got nothing. They contended for minute purses and still had to gamble—most of them—to keep afloat. Practice rounds were often as contentious as the real thing as the green bucks flew and tempers flared. Players, even top players, simply did not have the wherewithal to pay a grown man to carry their bags. There wasn’t enough moolah to go around. They were forced to go from venue to venue picking up a new caddy at each location. One week a guy would have a big, hulking 16 year old who was already shooting in the 70’s himself. The next week he’d get a scrawny little twelve year old with braces who suffered from stumble foot.

Nobody has ever stepped forward to say what it was like from a player’s standpoint. It must have been murder, having your earning capacity so vulnerable, never knowing who or what might show up to carry your bag. Would they know anything or everything about the course? Would their parents interfere? It had to be a tough existence, real brinksmanship all of the time. We, all of us who have combined to present this book, hope that we’ve been faithful to the caddy’s side of the story. We might have felt our players were on the brink sometimes but to us it was genuinely frightening, oh yeah.

BACK IN THE DAY

Remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions; remember me according to your love and for the sake of your goodness, O LORD.

Psalm 25:6

When do we grow up? That is, at what age and at what time in our life do we turn from the world of children to the world of men? Certainly, it comes in stages but is there one stage that we always look back upon as the turning point? Is there a defining moment or does it start slowly and then after a period of apprenticeship become the unmistakable time when everything changed and true adulthood had arrived? As I look back over my life, I am humbled by the many, many times I asked myself this simple question: Am I a man yet? It certainly didn’t come as I expected or hoped or planned.

Fortunately, there were no earthquakes in Connecticut during my long, sleepy youth. There were no plagues or car crashes that forced me into adulthood and responsibility. It was a good time to be alive. Eisenhower was in charge, television and broadcasting were in their infancy and Little League baseball was the sine qua non. Important things happened to us during that time but WWII was behind us and high employment at the Aircraft—Pratt and Whitney—and insurance provided a comfortable if not lucrative life for us all. The royal blue dome of Colt’s firearms dominated the river and the highway south of our big city, Hartford.

Before there were birdies, before I knew the grandeur of the game of golf, there was baseball, Little League and the lots. In 1958 I was thirteen, a sprout who had grown up almost exclusively in a small town in Central Connecticut, Rocky Hill. Our family lived on a dead-end street of five or six houses next to a large dairy farm and apple orchard that completely surrounded the little Cape that had built for us in 1950 by my dad’s buddy, Wally Shikoski. The farmhouse and barns stood across a field about two hundred yards away and fields where the cows grazed just beyond a fence across the street. Chicken coops and the bottling plant itself made up the rest of the little farming complex. Wide open fields stood all around us.

I was old enough to have a paper route and rose early, at 5:30 six days Monday through Saturday and at 6:30 on Sundays when the old man took me around with the papers in the family station wagon, a company car he was given as part of his job in the circulation department of the paper. The Hartford Courant—Old as the Nation, New as the News—was my paper and I was as devoted to its increase as much as I was devoted to Mantle, Berra and the Yanks. My best friends were Bobby Alberico who lived three doors down and Eric Sampson who lived about half a mile away on Parsonage Street. They were cool guys, too. Bobby’s father worked as a polisher at Colt’s and I imagined him handling exotic implements of death from one end of the day to the other. Maybe revolver cylinders or the 45’s you’d see strapped onto a guy’s chest at the movies. Eric’s father was a concert violinist and I always wondered where he played. Hartford? New Britain? New York seemed as far away as Argentina back then. I still don’t know where he performed.

Our neighbors next door were Angelo and Sadie Dibattista and their three kids, Anna Marie—a high- school kid, Junior—three or four years my senior—and the stunningly dark and beautiful Jeannette who was just a year older than me. The stocky, indefatigable Angelo sang excerpts from La Traviata or The Marriage of Figaro as he cut the shrubs that bordered our two properties. Each weekend he and Sadie cheerfully hosted all of the relatives from the area—dozens of them—with endless plates of pasta, roast lamb, sausage and above all, the sweet mystery of homemade wine made by the barrel full from the grapes that hung in the arbors above their large outdoor picnic table. Red, sour, turgid stuff that smacked the tongue like a ping pong paddle. Angelo always had a pig, too, a gross, fat, beloved pig that was treated daily to great buckets of slop and then slaughtered unflinchingly and hung on a hook each fall. To drain.

We had moved from Franklin Avenue in Hartford when we bought the house in 1950 and I had spent each year at school, not counting Kindergarten, in Rocky Hill. There I had met every expectation then reasonably expressed to a kid: I was a diligent student, an obedient—within reason—child and good at sports, most notably the all-important game of baseball. And it was not all a sense of duty that drove me to these modest heights. I enjoyed school for the most part, even enjoying my first crush there, an unrequited passion for Miss Reluga, my fourth-grade teacher. But I was enthralled by baseball. When I was nine and big enough to play regularly in Little League games, I slept each night with my sweet- smelling fielder’s mitt under 8X10 photographs of Dimaggio, Mantle and Whitey Ford pinned to the wall above. I greased my glove with Neat’s Foot Oil and tightly laced a ball inside it to force it into the proper shape. As did my friends.

I had no idea that golf existed apart from the occasional picture I saw in the Sports pages or the passing reference by my Uncle Burt. He had caddied as a kid at Edgewood Country Club in Cromwell, once even caddying for Francis Ouimet (whoever that was) and still played occasionally. I had no idea that my friend of future years, Joe Rution, was struggling with his faith just a few short miles away in Wethersfield. Facing the first test of a religious nature that he would face in his long life, he decided