You are often on the course when no one else is there - at dawn or in the middle of a storm. Describe the 'soul' of the golf course during those hours. What do you notice that the players never will?
I could answer this question with all the peaceful moments seeing nature and the universe at night, feeling closer to God, but honestly it was always having to do with work when going back at night. I did love it though, but golfers may not know that this dedication goes on even today.
I have stated before that “The Soul” of the golf course, is the work force.
Part of being allowed to live in the house on Stone Hill Road at Towson Golf was being a night waterer and security guard. As stated in past writings, this gave me many hours of my typical 60-to-90-hour work week. I was fortunate if I got more than four or five hours of sleep per night. It wasn’t so bad because I was young in the 1970’s and my girlfriend [soon to be wife] was a real trooper. She got to see firsthand the hard life of working golf course maintenance, understood it, and still has stayed with me for forty-nine years now. Married for 44 of those 49 years.
My girlfriend/wife would spend many summer nights in a chair, strapped in the bed of a Cushman wearing a full rainsuit while I night watered for hours. She would hold a flashlight while I drove from snap valve to snap valve on fairways and tees for hours plugging and unplugging manual impact sprinklers.
The pump station could only pressurize 11 impact sprinklers at a time, and we had approximately 150 to do. The only automatic electric irrigation was on greens with clocks and pins. What a date night!
Besides patrolling the golf course at night, I had to check in on Anna, the cleaning lady of the club, who worked at night. She and I would have a cup of coffee and chat a few times at night when I would stop in to check on her. She was a great person who came from Poland after the invasion of the Nazis. We became great friends, and she would tell me stories from her childhood during the occupation. She and her husband were hard workers and loved their freedom in the USA. They both became US citizens over the years. She worked nights and he was a farmhand nearby. They were given a small house on the farm as part of their compensation.
One night, after falling asleep, the landline started ringing and I heard Anna screaming when the answering machine picked it up. I jumped out of bed, picked-up and she wouldn’t stop screaming. I grabbed the axe I always kept by the door and drove up the hill to the clubhouse. I had a key to get in and as I went into the grill room, saw the glass all over the floor and tables. I started yelling for Anna and she popped up from behind the bar area with tears running down her face. It took me quite a while to calm her down that night and get her to understand what I believe caused the chaos.
After calling the police, I walked around and saw five holes in different plate glass windows. Glass was everywhere, but what clued me in on what happened was the five tee markers laying on the carpet near those holes. I assumed that kids grabbed our concrete tee markers and threw them through the windows. What made it so bad for Anna was that our tee markers looked like Nazi hand grenades, and she thought that they were going to explode.
We made our tee markers by pouring concrete into solo cups and pushing a large size nail into the middle for sticking them in the ground. They did resemble the grenades…
After the police checked everything outside – found no one and left, I helped Anna clean up the mess and finish her work for the night. Anna and I were even closer friends after that night. She cried and cried the day I left the house on Stone Hill Road to move on to The Elkridge Club. Those nine years at night were a wonderful part of my life.
We have many modern automatic irrigation tools and different manufactured tee marker supplies on the golf course now. There are handheld phones for quick communication and security cameras for nighttime antics. I will still bet you that if you asked this question of a modern Golf Course Superintendent today, they would have stories about why they went back to the course late at night and what they were working on…
-Mark S. Merrick, CGCS Retired
Introducing ‘Merrick Mondays’, a segment where we hear from Mark Merrick, our resident brand Ambassador, Chief ‘Cool” Officer, and general source of wisdom and secrets of the universe, to spotlight a dose of interview-style content, weekly.