Class Story 104 Where I am From

I am from the golf course at Lochmoor where the sweaty green grass smells of fetid mosquito water and the men swish golf balls in a machine that reeks.

As with all things pre-Californian, I have no complete memories of events, just snippets of imagery and with the Lochmoor Golf & Country Club, a smell associated with it.  This is probably not uncommon; in my case, it is that standing water smell.  That heavy sweet smell of rotting lawn clippings from the golf course, dumped in the little streamlets along most fairways.  In the summer, there is not enough water to keep a flow going, but the daily watering of the lush grass delivers its waters down to the edges and into these marshy areas.  Mosquitoes abound.  It's worst on the back nine because it's a straight run along 11, 12, and 13, all slightly down hill and so the runoff accumulates and feeds little pools along the way

I was only eight and nine years old, too young to be carrying a golf bag around the course.  I guess my dad figured it was good exercise just to walk four or five miles and he also had me go fetch him the proper club for his next shot.  I learned terms like, "approach shot,"  "the lie of the green."  I also learned words like "shit!" and "fuck!" because he always was playing in a foursome with three customers.  I learned that customers were evil men who gambled, swore, drank too much, and cheated on their wives.  But I also understood that customers were our bread and butter and we had to be nice to them at all times, let them win at cards and golf, provide them with liquor and, at times women.  When I was around golf people, I had to keep quiet, unlike being with the bowling people. 

Playing a round of 18 holes with customers took about four hours for the golf and another two at the 19^th hole.  There was liquor available along the course as well.  There was a little shack at the 6^th and the 11^th tees where a black man would sell you beer or soft drinks.  I always ordered a Vernor's ginger ale at the 11^th.  Californians think of Pebble Beach when the subject of golf is raised.  It has those panoramic vistas.  Lochmoor was a more classic wooded, hilly course with long fairways.  Teeing off at number one, you were enveloped into a forest.

We don't have mosquitoes in California, but every now and then I get a whiff of fetid air from some standing pool and I am reminded of those days walking the hills of Lochmoor.  I'm sure my mother was happy to get me out of the house and doing something healthy.  I was a classic nerd, thinking about math and science most of the time.  My Dad's friend Rod Mindling posed a classic question to me then at age eight.  "Is it better, to get $100 every day for a month or one cent the first day, then two cents the second, four cents the third, doubling each day for thirty days?"  When I went to bed at night, I would try to compute this number in my head.  After a week, I got it

I got headaches and nightmares from this sort of cerebral nighttime activity, "How many miles could light travel in one year?"  186,000 X 365 X 24 X 60 X 60.  My parents were worried about the nightmares and I started in on wearing glasses at age five; they started out as coke bottles.  But I think they were proud that I was a budding little genius.  This showed up in troublesome ways in Detroit.  I have always been, even at that young age, a ringleader, the guy who devised plots that would lead to fun and fireworks.  I was sent home on a three-day suspension in the third grade for organizing a group of boys to attack, at recess, a group of girls and pull their pants down in the snowy depths of a Michigan winter.  I organized a doctor's office in the basement of our house, where the neighbor girls would have to report for examination.

Just before we left Detroit in the spring of 1948, my sister and I were taken to the Lochmoor Easter Egg Hunt, an annual event for member’s kids.  I was nine at the time and my sister seven.  It was a formal event with elaborate baskets provided and wonderful chocolates scattered all around the clubhouse grounds.  It was a clear blue-sky day.

I am from the land of snow a foot taller than I, where we sled all day and build forts for snowball wars all afternoon.  This is a time when I am so bundled up I can only waddle.

To be truthful, it was rare that the winters brought snowdrifts that were over my head.  But I do remember one school day when someone had plowed the sidewalks so the kids could go to school.  I had my sister in tow, must have been ’47 or ’48 and it was certainly over her head.  It was up to my eye level.  One of the places I remember sledding was a new construction zone.  There was a lot of building after the War and several streets had been created but there were no houses on them yet.  There was a slope, which I remember as 30° downhill for two blocks.  My father was with my sister and I and we all three went down the hill at first, and then I did it once on my own.  I think that time with my father was with a borrowed toboggan, but we had a sled as well.  My sister was scared of doing the run on the sled and actually so was I, machismo made me do it solo.

The snowball wars were something I could really get into, sort of a precursor to playing football where “feel no pain” is the watchword.  My sister couldn’t throw, so I had her hide below and have her make snowballs for me to throw.  The forts became elaborate even though they were very transitory.

How we stood the severe cold, I don’t know.  Kids just generate their own heat.