SLUG: Junior Golf in Seattle In The ‘50’s
WRITER: Dean G. Tonkin
2521 TENTH AVENUE WEST * SEATTLE, WA 98119 - (206) 300-1928
WORDS: 4,118 (copyright 2007)

The Real Q School
Junior Golf Before It Was Cool

The “real” Q School of amateur and professional golf, as I choose to believe, was when I was a kid in Seattle, Washington, back in the early 1950’s.

It was sorta like when in War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy hypothesized on the “three levels of truth” using an example of Prince Bolkonsky’s encounter with Napoleon’s artillery during the invasion of Mother Russia. The Prince had great visions of glory in war but was clueless about the nuts, bolts, screws, and champagne corks that were being shot from Napoleon’s big bertha cannons. Maybe he expected USGA regulation balls. Hmmm, not a bad name for a new Titleist brand: Cannon Warbirds (CW-V1).

Consequently, in the hail of stuff that must have seemed like incoming at the 150 yard sign at a six-tiered driving range, The Prince and his trusty horse, E-Z-GO, took refuge in a pot bunker beneath a bridge to wait out the maelstrom. Later, when the cannoneers finished their rounds and took a brandy break (Napoleon, of course), E-Z-GO and The Prince picked up and headed back to the Hussar club house in Moscow to tell of his heroics in “competition” in what might be called the French Open and Shut. (Where were Baron Butch Harmon or Prince Harvey Pennick when Bolkonsky and his Hussar comrades could have used some coaching on battlefield management?)

So what’s the point? Truth is simply: (1.) How you expect something to be, (2.) How it really happened, and (3.) How you re-tell it. The truth is like taffy....gets better when you stretch it and, therefore, it’s kinda like golf.

Now, with the truth clearly defined, the following is the truth about Junior Golf in Seattle back in the ‘50’s according to my recollections…and queries into recollections from some of the ancients who were there when Junior Golf Wasn’t Cool.

Yes, I do remember most of the other boys and girls, men and women in this story. However, I may have to take an X or a mulligan on some people, places, scores, and spelling.

My mom and I moved to Seattle, in 1953, when I was eleven. For a variety of reasons, we were on the lam from circumstances in Vancouver, Washington; and Seattle was a locale that afforded us room to breathe and a job for mom teaching English in the public school system.

We settled into a four-plex in West Seattle on 36th Avenue Southwest. The neighborhood was jock strap and fast food heaven. Within two blocks were a Gil’s 19-cent hamburger joint, a corner store where stealing Twinkies was okay as long as you paid later, a Boy’s (no girls) Club, an athletic field with a quarter mile track, pole vault and broad jump pits, field event turf, and a baseball diamond. In addition, butted up to the sweat venue was West Seattle Golf Course and Dick and Abe LaBelle’s driving range.

This was a neighborhood in which to do anything smacking of breaking any laws meant that you and your folks didn’t know that sports beat the crap out of juvenile court.

And so my discourse on Junior Golf Before It Was Cool begins at West Seattle Municipal Golf and not-so-Country Club.

In those days, the layout consisted of something akin to a Howard Johnson’s just a jog off the Jersey Turnpike south of Atlantic City. A nice big parking lot, a rambling one storey building that housed a restaurant, a trinket shop, both a men’s and women’s restroom, and a cashier’s counter. Of course the exceptions to a HOJAY’S were that, at West Seattle, there was a pro (golf trinket) shop, gender-specific locker rooms with lockers, somebody to take your greens fees, and 18 holes of damn good golf. And the weirdest driving range you’ve ever seen.

Shortly after we were ensconced in our digs on 36th, I shouldered my five iron and headed off to the local links. Hello! I couldn’t have been more out of place if I had been packing a butterfly net. People. Men, women and children had bags with shoulder straps and about 14 five irons in each bag. I wondered, how come so many five irons? Did I need 14 different swings to have so many five irons?

That was the question I begged of Abe and Dick LaBelle who owned and operated the “world’s worst range.” This range made the one in the movie, Tin Cup, look like the practice layout at Augusta National. I kid you not, the right-to-left slope of the hitting area was right around 45-degrees. The whole thing was about 100 yards wide and the trees at the far end were about a mile away. Even Dick couldn’t hit one of the US Nobby range balls out of the park and he had forearms on him like Popeye and hands the size of a catcher’s mitt.

Obviously, there was no need for a ball-picker to pick up balls because damn near every one of them rolled down to the base of the 10-storey fence on the left. Dick and Abe lemme hit all the balls I wanted because Dick handed me a cotton-pickin’ bag and a ball-plucker on the end of a golf shaft and said, “Anything that doesn’t roll down to the fence, let ‘em sit and the rain will wash ‘em down...eventually. ‘N don’t forget the brain bucket. It’s special; it’s the one Abe wore in WWI.”

So that was my LaBelle lesson on shagging balls. But the best lessons they gave me after I asked what to do with my five iron were these:
1. “Kid, you got small hands and for the size of you, yer gonna grow up to have the hands of a small dwarf. So, yer gonna hafta use the interlock grip. Whatsha do is take your left pointer finger and your right pinky and lace ‘em together. Hold the stick anyway you feel good about it. And the secret is to squeeze the *** out of your pinky with the left pointer. That way you’ll never come over the top.”
2. “Kid, the big shot that goes straight happens with the legs. So what I want you to do is keep pressure on the inside of your right foot. Just knock your right knee in a bit to deliver the pressure to the inside of the foot and all the way through the take-away and then hit the *** out of it...and wind up on the toe of your right foot. That way you anchor everything below the waist and build power in your guts and legs as you make the turn on your take-away. Oh, and make sure your belly button winds up at the target ‘cuz if your belly button ain’t at the target...guess what.”
3. “Kid, yer lookin’ too far to find the target for your belly button to get to. Instead of focusing on a point far away, pick an intermediary target that’s about 10 to 20 yards away and right in line with the place you want to put the ball. Y’ll be a whole lot more accurate, trust me...and trust yourself.”

Abe and Dick were two of the West Seattle Legends mentoring us kids. At the golf course we had some old-timers who really knew the game. Danny Ross, the head pro who also worked the grave yard shift at Boeing to make ends meet and for whom I worked in the pro shop repairing clubs and selling golf stuff. I learned the 4R’s -- re-grip, re-wind, re-finish, and re-shaft. Palmer Smith, the starter/greens fee guy, who also held the course record at 62. Ray Cook who was famous for his cigars and the fact that he had a one-through-four set of Stan Thompson Custom Made Woods. Irv Furakawa who was a mailman with a low handicap and paid his caddies based upon their ability to use a foot niblick or mashie (call it a nine to five job). Jabo Ward who was a legendary blues saxophone player with a swing that dripped of rhythm and the bogie blues. Marshall Dallas looked like a movie star and didn’t seem to know that not everybody consistently shot in the 60’s. Eddie Draper looked like Alan Ladd and was the one guy that Dallas was seriously serious about not losing to. And Kermit Zarley, Sr. who ran the restaurant at the course. He had a son of a similar name about whom we’ll get to.

Danny Ross, the pro by day and airplane machinist by night, also gave me another four tips in tactics to go along with the three I got from the LaBelles:
1. In the sand, just knock the sand into the hole and the ball be right there when the dust settles. Forget there’s even a ball!
2. In the fringe and frog hair around the green, pretend the grass is Bermuda and is going to grab the sole and cause a lot of chili dipping. Instead, get a seven or eight iron up on the to and use a putting stoke to brush through the grass and get the ball on the green rolling to the hole and not checking left, right, or dead.
3. Don’t focus on the pin or any of the turf in between when you’re pitching with a wedge or sand iron. What to do is to pick a hole in the sky where you want to hit the ball so that it will drop out of the hole like a feather right next to the cup...or in it. No more worm burners that have you yelling, “Hit a house!”
4. Lastly, every putt is a straight putt. No front door, back door or side doors. The tactic is to get behind the ball and imagine that you can flatten out the green to make the cup slide left or right as if it were gimbaled. Judge that slide to the point where you just hit it straight and on-pace and putt the damn thing in the hole

Back in the 1950’s, West Seattle Golf Course was, again, one helluva layout...in yardage, something around a good walk spoiled -- as Mark Twain once wrote. Fairway and greenside traps. Lateral water that came into play on about nine holes. Rough, that small people had trouble hacking their way out of. Greens with the Rockwell or MOH Scale hardness of ball bearings. And wet winter fairways that sucked golf balls to the core of the planet.

Golf was so unpopular back then that us kids could play 54 holes a day and when it got dark, we’d play numbers ten and eighteen, which were parallel, until it really got dark. (I learned that this same routine was taking place in the surrounding towns of Tacoma, Everett, Bellevue, and Bremerton from kids such as Bruce Richards, Ron Hoetmer (today, he’s Head Pro at Overlake Golf & Country Club and a teacher “par excellence”, Bob Carlson, Don Grosz, and Denny Strickland when we met at the occasional Junior Tourney and they’d show us that us big city kids weren’t as hot as we thought.)

One of the reasons Strickland had such great touch around the greens was that he also was an all-State basketball star. He went on to the University of Oregon to play both basketball and golf. He was named to the all-Coast basketball team and still holds the NCAA free-throw record he set in 1962. Grosz was good because he was sandwiched between an older and younger brother who gave him plenty of competition. Don learned how to use a controlled slice in his game from his dad who was a butcher. Maybe that’s why Don followed in dad’s footsteps and wound up being a master meat-cutter slicing more than just a dog-leg par five.

But this is a story about us and not them.

The gaggle of junior golfers at West Seattle and what they did with their games were:
1. Kermit Zarley, Jr. -- An absolute golf dork. Didn’t get a lot of dates with cheer leaders at West Seattle High School. However, he did win the all-city high school tournament a bunch of times. Won the USGA Juniors, the Hearst Juniors, went to Houston on a scholarship. Played on the PGA Tour (Bob Hope asked him if Zarley was a space alien name), and is still competing on the Senior Tour with one of his kids as his caddie. He always was frugal.
2. Don Dinkla -- He was really good at the game but shoulda been a contenda ‘cuz he had attitude. Coulda been a cowboy as well ‘cuz I recall him being a little bow legged.
3. Eddie and Larry Richter -- These guys could clean you out of your lunch money on a 25-cent Nassau. Trouble was that Eddie knew he was better than Larry and Larry knew he was better than Eddie and they spent a lot of practice time kicking the snot out of each other instead of the course. I ran into Eddie’s wife, recently, at a local range and she said the brothers are still being brothers.
4. Elwin Fanning -- Elwin was the baby of the group. He started out thinking a five iron was something his mother used on clothes. That misconception was ameliorated when he went on to win all the stuff that Kermit did and also go on to Houston. Elwin did the Tour thing, too, and then came home to be head pro at Kayak Point north of Seattle.
5. Art Jacobson -- Houston got him and ruined his game. Art was a cross-hander. Hit the snot out of the ball with a draw from heaven. Putt as if the hole were a peach basket. He won all the Junior Stuff in Seattle and environs...but when he went to Houston - Adios Game!
6. Pat Lesser -- I include Pat as one of the Juniors because she was the only girl I knew who could put all of us pre-pubescent pretenders to shame. She was on the Seattle University Golf Team on which Dale Lingenbrink was the only guy who could beat her. A good lookin’ toots who had a game to match. She used to match the mettle of girls such as Ann Quast-Decker-Welts-Sander and Joanne Gunderson who were, also, pretty good for girls. In 1950-something, Pat was named the first female Sportsman of the Year by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Later, she married Dr. John Harbottle. He likes to remind people that he is not just Pat’s husband but a damn fine doctor and a perennial contender for the Senior Amateur qualifying spot from the Pacific Northwest Golf Association.

So much for West Seattle Muni during the days when Junior Golf Wasn’t Cool.

Let’s make a short stop at Jefferson Park on Seattle’s Beacon Hill. This is the same Jefferson Park at which Masters Champion, Freddie Couples, is a legend. Bigger news to me is that the National Pub-Links Champion came out of the same spread...his first name is Bill. Jefferson Park has a front side that’s about as flat as a mallard’s instep. It’s very easy to fall asleep walking. The back side is sneaky because by the time you wake up after the doldrums of the first nine, you find yourself more over par than possible. I think the course was the reason why the Jefferson Juniors, in my time, didn’t get really good until they had careers and could join country clubs. These kids came from both multi-cultural neighborhoods and from residential enclaves of WASP-wealth.

These were the Jefferson Juniors and the limited number lies I can tell about them:
1. Fred Jue...He had a great passion for practicing. Didn’t always translate to the course.
2. Pat Caso...Mr. personality who could spot most you a few a side and make you feel good about handing over your bus money to get home. Pat became a PGA Professional and eventually was the Head Pro at Seattle Golf & Country Club where Hootie Johnson would fit right in.
3. Steve Sander...You could tell he was going to be an entrepreneur one day. He probably had thoughts about buying Jefferson Park by putting together a consortium of moneyed neighbors who lived in his WASP-nest. Steve wound up marrying Ann Quast-Decker-Welts of Amateur fame. He, like Dr. Harbottle, places well in the Senior Amateur Qualifying. I think Ann can beat him at their home course of Broadmoor or any other layout, however.
4. Eddie Piersal...He was the exception to how good you could get at Jefferson. He was the complete package from tee to green. I think he had the world’s first jumbo-head persimmon driver. He would never let any of us try it. That was okay by me because Eddie was older and bigger and I didn’t need a club that was bigger in circumference than my cranium.
5. Ron McDougal...He was sort of a mystery kid. Long, lanky and could somehow do really well in high school matches and junior tournaments even though no one ever saw him at the practice range or set foot out on the course. He was like a genie who popped out of the lantern and only gave out wishes to play well to himself. In fact, the last time I saw Ron was at a Seattle Seafair Hole-In-One Contest. He bought one ball and knocked it in for the prize.
6. The Friedman Brothers...Jay and Elliot...who were both built like Gary Player. They were a couple years different in age but younger Elliot was the maven of the game of the two. In fact, Elliot went on to play for Washington State University and joined Zeta Tau Alpha fraternity where he could stay on his diet of borscht and lox. Jay focused on getting into law school at the University of Washington instead of cross-examining his swing.
7. Moe Moscatel...One of the most fun guys to take your lunch money or the last quarter in your pocket you were saving for the bus fare home. Moe progressed to get a degree in country club manners and social graces which he used to maintain a low handicap in insurance sales and parking garage construction.
Who says golf isn’t part of Business 101?

The last stop on this Junior Golf Odyssey is actually two stops. 1. The Jane Addams Junior High Schoolers who were so good that nobody in Seattle would compete against us. And, 2. The courses of Jackson Park and Meadowbrook, both located in the northend of Seattle. (An area a little west of Lake Washington, south of Lake City, and east of Northgate Mall -- the first shopping mall in America...no taffy on that fact, folks!)

Jackson Park was were we played our not-so-intimidating 18-hole rounds. One of our team, was Billy Tindal. His dad, Bob, was the pro at Jackson Park. Billy knew this layout so well that when he was 14 years old he simply won the Seattle Amateur Championship. More about Billy and the gang to come.

Meadowbrook was across the street from our junior high school, Jane Addams....and that’s where we went to skip classes instead of doing drugs, alcohol, girls, and cigarettes. Heck, I’m not sure drugs and the other stuff were invented then.

That reads like too much taffy, doesn’t it?

Anyway, Meadowbrook was a 9-holer with about two flat holes and the other seven stuck on a billy goat hillside. Play it twice and that’s four flat holes and 14 short-legged cow holes. So what do you do if you’re six boys who crave the game and have a layout across the street from junior high? You play, play, play, and play. And get pretty darn good.

How good? Well, as I mentioned above, we were so good that only Pat Lesser and her team at Seattle University would play us. The high school teams pretended that we didn’t exist...or so I recollect. Maybe some of the other kids on the team might refute me. It’s my story!

You’ve already read about the art and skills of the kids at West Seattle Golf Course. True, they were special, too, but they were never all together at the same time as a team.

Here’s the Jane Addams Team...what they did and what became of them:
1. Billy Tindal -- As I noted, his dad was the pro at Jackson Park and Billy won the Seattle Amateur at the ripe old age of 14...at Jackson Park. Later he went on to Lincoln High School, kept winning everything in sight, moved on to the University of Washington golf team, hovered around The Tour, became a PGA Club Pro at Broadmoor G&CC in the WASP-nest of Seattle, played in the Senior Open Championship, and is now the Head Pro at the Members Club at Aldarra. This is a layout east of Seattle financed by Chuck Ainslie, Jack Sikma (Seattle Sonics NBA Champion), and Tom Foley (he has a plane and a pilot on standby-by--I’m impressed). The course was designed by a guy named Tom Fasio who has done this before and is sorta famous for it.
2. Mike Reasor...Mike had the intensity of a badger. You could stick an M-80 firecracker up his keester while he was putting and there wouldn’t be a flinch in a carload. Mike went to Roosevelt High and then on to Brigham Young on a golf ride. Sure, he went on The Tour, too. Later he became a club pro and his last position was as Assistant Pro to Billy Tindal at Aldarra. Then, Mike got some bum information about his heart and died.
3. Chuck Ainslie...He was, perhaps the best of the bunch. But he only practiced on occasion and always played hard enough to beat most. He liked money and worked for his dad at Time Oil Company through junior, high and college. He played at Lincoln High and then at the University of Washington. He went on to become the Chairman, CEO and majority stockholder of Golf Savings Bank. And as I pointed out, Chuck was one of the founders/developers of Aldarra Members Club where he ensconced Billy and Mike. I think Chazz belongs to Inglewood, Shahalee, Big Horn and, maybe, Pine Valley along with Tom Foley. He shoulda gone on The Tour but he woulda hadda take a cut in pay. The other day Chazz made the newspapers by selling Golf Savings Bank to a bigger bank and his “ace” of a sale made for a significant 19th hole celebration for his whole team at GSB. His philanthropy runs deep, too. In fact, Chazz is one of the “ace” sponsors of the University of Washington Women’s Golf Team.
4. Tom Storey...Tom had a pedigree. His dad, Ken Senior, belonged to Rainier Golf and Country Club where he owned the club championship. Tom’s brother, Ken Junior, was the ace of high school golf since he was a couple of years older. They lived a tap-in from Jane Addams and a lob wedge from Meadowbrook (except there were no lob wedges in those days). Tom went to Roosevelt High and then on to Seattle University. Then, on The Tour. He wasn’t so good that he didn’t need a side job. His side job was as a duo with another kid from Seattle U. His name was John Aiken. They made extra dough with their song and dance routine in Vegas in the off-season. One of their routines was singing, dancing and doing tricks with Yo-Yo’s.
5. Eddie Peppin...Eddie lived across the street from WASP heaven...Seattle Golf & Country Club. Kids might as well have been from Mars in terms of getting on the course except to caddie. Eddie’s golf career ended in his senior year in high school at Lincoln. He didn’t lose interest in golf but, instead, got hooked on business pursuits. The last I heard of Eddie was that he owned an athletic wear company.
6. The Author...I was there throughout all of the above. I was pretty good at golf and played a bunch of other sports. In fact, my best Titleist round was a 65 at West Seattle when I was 17 years old. Currently, I am working on my game to get my handicap up from pretty good (2.3) to a point where I don’t continue to lose my lunch money.
I am also a certified ski instructor and coach in the US, Canada, and Europe and have been for nearly 50 years. My claim to reflected glory in ski racing is that I was the developmental coach of Debbie Armstrong, Olympic Gold Medalist in the Giant Slalom at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo. Wintertime, I head up the Race & Events Department at the four, Summit at Snoqualmie Areas. Summertime, I coach a bunch of geriatric golfers on tactical skills for improving their scoring. I do my un-sanctioned coaching at a local driving range or at my athlete’s country club. Year-round, I wrestle plumbing and heating supplies or drive flatbed truck at my Consolidated Supply Company warehouse job.

Thanks for holing out.

NO END (To this life-long game)