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I was talking with Ed LeBlanc this past week, and he was telling me how he had rediscovered the game of golf. “I’ve been playing now for two years,” he noted, “and I can’t stress strongly enough how it’s added to the quality of my life!”

If you know Ed, you will not be surprised to learn that he attacked playing golf like some of the other passions in his life. Whether it was his teaching career, his ice-fishing exploits, his famous pike burgers, or his equally famous canoe carts based on a Chet Johnson design that he modified and improved and is now part of the Adirondack Museum collection, Ed has had one rule: “Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.” To Ed, age is just a number. He is a person of tremendous verve and energy.

This winter, for example, while wintering in Florida, he would hit more than 300 golf balls every day at the driving range near his complex at Plaid Pants Village. Ed plays the Tupper course every day and when he is not part of a foursome, he told me he practices using three different golf balls, hitting each in turn as he negotiates the eighteen-hole course.

That disclosure made me laugh, and I had to tell him that when I was a caddy, there was a certain physical education teacher from Saranac Lake who was a fitness fanatic and he would appear at the Tupper course and play twenty-seven holes using only a putter and run between each shot. He was actually a good golfer and I often saw him “tater” out 200-yard drives with his hickory-shafted putter. It was only when he would sprint down the fairway to his next approach shot that the other golfers would wonder if “that fellow wasn’t a bubble off true.”
Strangely enough, I recently read about a “new sport” called speed golf, a.k.a extreme golf. It may sound like the funniest athletic oxymoron since Utah Jazz, but it is catching on.

All USGA rules apply with one exception: flagsticks need not be removed for putting. To calculate your score, add total number of strokes to the minutes you spent running around the course.

The record is 75 in thirty-nine minutes (a phenomenal 114). The day before that same golfer shot a round of 76 in four and a half hours.

Fast play actually helped his game. (It seems that the more problems your swing has, the more they are exacerbated by just standing there thinking about them.)

Imagine the look on your spouse’s face when you say: “Bye, Honey. I’m going out to play golf. Be back in forty-five minutes.”

Our physical education teacher may have been ahead of his time!
Ed graduated from Holy Ghost Academy in 1938 and is part of the age group (sixty-five plus) the New York Times recently referred to as the elderly (thanks a lot), and he remembers when he was growing up, there was only one golf course in the community and that was a private nine-hole course owned by the Big Wolf Club.

It was located on what had been the Wilson and Robillard farms along the present Haymeadow development. In fact, the Jeannel Lizotte home sits very near a former fairway of that course.

As the late Louis Simmons noted in his book, Mostly Spruce and Hemlock, “Golf in those days was about as foreign to the area as boomerang throwing.” That was to change, however, when in 1932, W.C. Hull, president of the Oval Wood Dish company, proposed building an eighteen-hole course, impressing on local businessmen that they needed to emphasize tourism as the era of big lumbering was about to decline.

Paul Martin, Lou Quinn and Ellen Shaw’s father, was mayor at the time and he agreed with Mr. Hull and, together with four other trustees, set out to raise the necessary funds. As Louis further notes, “Times were hard and money scarce,” but in less than a month $15,000 had been pledged toward the $18,000 needed for the first nine holes. That same amount probably wouldn’t cover one hole today.

Jack and Laura Nepton owned the old landmark resort, The Prince Albert Hotel, and they donated fifty acres of land on the slopes above the hotel, most of it already cleared from past farm operations. The Oval Wood Dish corporation offered fifty to seventy-five acres as needed and on September 12, 1932 the late Tom Creighton, woods superintendent for O.W.D., had more than fifty men on the site. They used ten teams of O.W.D. horses that pulled scrapers and hauled away stumps and rocks. The job involved cutting twenty acres of timber, and more than $2,200 of the slender golf course “kitty” went into removal of stone, including about $1,000 for dynamite.

Before the onset of winter halted operations, the first nine holes had been almost completed, and the location for the clubhouse cleared of trees and the site staked out. Logs for the building were cut that winter from the slopes of nearby Sugarbush Mountain.

On August, 15, 1933, the following summer, the course was open for play. The clubhouse and the second nine hole development were several more years in coming. They were finally made possible by federal financial aid, the property having been turned over to the town to make such aid possible.

Under the direction of foreman James King (who also happens to be restaurant owner Bill King’s grandfather), workmen erected the log clubhouse, which was completed in 1937. A macadam road linking the highway at Moody with the clubhouse, a parking area, and the second nine holes were all built with WPA aid. With the addition, the new section became the first nine holes for play purposes. The new addition opened in August 1941.

I should mention that alongside and part of what is now the Pro Shop was what was known as The Caddy Shack.

This resembled a baseball dugout, and caddies assembled here awaiting assignment by the caddy master according to their status.

The caddies worked under a merit system in which you had to work your way up based on the old-fashioned way — you had to earn it. You did this by: 1) showing up each day, 2) being on time, 3) staying late and carrying double if requested, 4) knowing your craft and your player’s abilities, and 5) being the best you could be and KEEPING YOUR EYES ON THE BALL.
Space precludes telling more about the redeeming values of being a caddy (monetary and otherwise), but I must tell about the annual caddy tournaments.

Originally, the contest was between the Tupper Lake Golf Course caddies and the Big Wolf caddies. With the closing of the Big Wolf course in the early 1940s, the tournament became one between the Tupper caddies and was a very serious, hotly contested event.

Incidentally, the Big Wolf caddies, most of whom were from the junction, won most of the tournaments, powered by the Keelers, the Fullers, the Bashants, the Forkeys, and the Rae brothers. Indeed, caddy Patsy Rae often beat the course pro, and Puffer Fuller would go on to become the club champion.

Floyd Bashant, who caddied on both courses, modestly told me that the junction boys held two advantages. First, they had more experience having been playing before the Tupper course came into being and, second, as Floyd puts it, “The Big Wolf course had exceptionally small greens and you had to be very accurate to make them, and that refined our strokes and improved our abilities.”

There were actually two other golf courses near this community prior to the building of the Tupper course. Like the Big Wolf course, they were also private, built for their owners and guests.

Route 30 bisects what was once a fairway, and if you look closely, you will discover the remnants of a golf house in the pines located between that route and the road that leads to Coreys. This course was built just prior to 1920 after the venerable Rustic Lodge was razed to provide room.

The second course was located just off the road to Sabattis on property called Sabattis Park, owned by Charles M. Daniels and his wife, Florence Goodyear Daniels. Here they built a fabulous camp they named Tarnedge from the Scottish words meaning “beside the lake.” The golf course was built with wheelbarrows and had equipment alone. It was small (2,600 yards) but it entertained some notable players.

There is a story about that course concerning an achievement by the owner, a noted athlete and Olympic swimmer, that deserves telling. Louis Simmons records it as follows:

“On the morning of June 29, 1916, after a 3 a.m. rising and light breakfast, Mr. Daniels teed off at 4 a.m. and played continuously until after 9 that night. He had carded a total of 228 holes — said to be a world record for a day’s play. His total score of 970 figured out to be just over 38 for each nine-hole round — near par figures. By straight away yardage figures, he had covered about 41 miles, and it was estimated ‘as the golfer goes,’ he actually covered more than 50.”

In the end, you see, golf is about tradition: the Green Jacket, the Tupper Open, St. Andrews, Nan and Gordon Peters, the Ryder Cup. They serve as reminders of those before us who helped shape and give history to the game.

Copyright William C. Frenette Collection