“Trailer Country Club” read the headline of a November 9, 1969, Quad City Times story recapping the Country Club’s rise from the ashes of that awful evening 10 months prior.

 

The designation was not a pejorative, but instead a tribute to the willing spirit and adaptive resilience of DCC membership.

 

It was a story of changing shoes in the parking lot and using car trunks for lockers; of young swimmers coming to and leaving the pool in their swimsuits; of a row of three trailers serving as the clubhouse, office and pro shop; of buffets served under tents in the rain and, on dry evenings, members eating at picnic tables set up on the tiles of what had been the dining room floor, consuming meals prepared, perhaps ironically, over the open flame of a large barbecue pit.

 

“We had to purchase quality meat because all we had to cut it with were plastic knives,” joked Edward Riley, the first-year club manager imported from Kewanee, Illinois, in February. “The membership has accepted a unique situation and has cooperated gracefully.”

 

The grace was extended by the youngest members, too.

 

“I think they sensed the crisis and wanted to help,” Riley said. “I can actually say they were the most well-behaved children of any club I have been in.”

 

Head pro Bobby Birch was the Pelcher replacement hired in December who briefly set up shop in a filter room by the swimming pool until those three trailers were procured. He repaired clubs at his home that summer of ’69, and said a spring and summer season heavy with rain actually served the locker-less members well.

 

“We didn’t worry about showers after a game,” he told the Times.

 

The new pro also said the lack of amenities “didn’t hurt anyone’s game. We had seven holes-in-one out here, with three of those by women.”

 

By November, construction already had begun on a new clubhouse with a lava stone exterior and interior walls covered in dark wood paneling. It was to have matched the old barn’s 12,000 square feet, but ultimately would come in a bit smaller. A lounge, dining room and bar and grill would encompass the northern half of a second story, with a narrow balcony surrounding the north, east and west sides of the structure. It also included one lessons-hard-learned feature: a fire-proof basement.

 

In advance of an introductory Dec. 29 cocktail party followed by a celebration on New Year’s Eve, outgoing club president C. Dana Waterman Jr. proudly noted the new facility was built for less than the budgeted $350,000.

 

“We did not want to overbuild, and wanted a club that our members could afford,” he said. “This clubhouse is well-designed. It is very efficient and attractive.”

 

For years to come, those latter claims would be cause for debate among a multitude of DCC members — C. Dana Waterman III among them. Yet, while the project was far-less ambitious than the $620,000 plan first proposed in February, it did include one forward-looking feature that enhanced the club’s most precious asset: an irrigation system to water the old-boned fairways.

 

The elder Waterman’s friendship with Bill Stafford was helpful in achieving the latter. Stafford was president of Tri-State Toro, an early seller of irrigation systems, and helped keep that piece of the project on budget. With the help of penurious Rock Island businessman and DCC member Mayer Martin, other expenses remained in check as well.

 

“They felt it was important that having sold this, it be delivered at a price the membership had approved,” Waterman III remembered. “At the time, one of the compelling arguments was that the membership was much smaller than it is today. I’m not sure it was even 200 members.”

 

The Next 30 Years

 

The membership challenges did not abate over the latter third of the 20th Century.

 

Although the Farm Implement Capitol of the World’s economy continued to hum through the 1970s, there were storm clouds on the far horizon — for the family farmer, the farm manufacturing industry and for country clubs across the United States.

 

In 1979, the QC area boasted 52,000 industrial jobs, with multiple Deere, International Harvester, Farmall and Case factories employing three shifts around the clock. That humming economy began to lose its tune in the early 1980s, though, when land prices fell dramatically and small farmers found themselves deep in debt. The impact rippled to the manufacturing sector when farmers were unable to pay for equipment they already had purchased, let alone buy new. Record farm foreclosures and an epic number of agricultural bank failures led to layoffs in local plants, followed by a devastating series of factory closures that continued into the early portion of the 21st Century.

 

Concurrently, mid-80s changes to state laws brought stiffer penalties for driving while intoxicated, making the Country Club’s still fairly rural location less conducive to festive afternoons and evenings out.

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All six local country clubs endured varying degrees of challenge.

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Fueled particularly by a Reagan era change to tax codes that eliminated the business entertainment deduction and by a steady growth in Illinois property taxes, Short Hills’ drop from its rank as the pre-eminent club in the area was the most precipitous through the 1980s.

 

The East Moline club’s unofficial role as the entertainment hub for nearby Deere & Company came to a rapid halt in that moment, as Deere brought banquets and dining home to the Glass Palace, and the corporate class began building new homes on the Iowa side and opting for memberships closer to those homes, most often at Crow Valley.

 

For the golf-minded, the Bettendorf club’s more modern amenities and layout better fit the profile of what younger members desired.

 

In the context of the times, DCC’s old bones were considered not classic, but tired.

 

“It’s hard for me to figure out,” Dana Waterman III said of that mindset. “Davenport has stood the test of time and is now recognized as one of the top classic courses in America. But I’m not sure people really appreciated then what people appreciate now about golf courses and their playability.

 

“Obviously, there were some in the cognoscenti who are students of the game who had that appreciation. For most people, including some really darned good golfers like a Whitey Barnard, the thought of the quality of a golf course was viewed through a different lens.”

 

Too, in many ways, the DCC of the latter 20th Century was not the classic layout Charles Hugh Alison created in 1920’s, nor the restored classic it is today.

 

Through the years, the golf course had become an altered version of what Alison left behind in 1924. For one thing, the greens had grown smaller, first due to older mowing equipment and later due to the functionality of newer riding mowers.

 

“That’s pretty common of every course of that vintage,” said golf architecture expert Ron Whitten. “It was a combination of during World War II having to save money, so you start cutting down on what you mow because it was hand labor in those days. And then there was the advent of riding mowers in the 60s. I’m old enough to have seen it first hand to where you couldn’t do sharp turns on a riding mower, so you just did everything in ovals. And so green pads changed, and a lot of of these squarish greens or greens with neat little thumbs of pin placements were lost.”

 

In addition, the tee-to-green lines that Alison saw in his mind’s eye and delivered across the old-boned terrain increasingly were obscured by trees un-strategically planted on the whims of a succession of grounds committees. “They always felt they were going to make the course a little more challenging and the way to do that was to plant more trees,” said Dana Waterman III.

 

This included a concerted effort by boards in the 1970s to replace once majestic stands of planted trees lost to the scourge of Dutch Elm disease with hundreds of stately, but of equally ill-fated Ash.

 

“They were and are beautiful trees,” Waterman III said of the replacement trees that ultimately made a wonderful feeding ground for the Japanese beetles — aka emerald ash borers — that invaded the United States in the 1990s. “Who knew they would become endangered species? You can’t second guess those judgements 40 years later.”

 

Second-guessed from its inception was the clubhouse that replaced the old barn. While Dana Waterman II and sharp-eyed accountant Mayer Martin brought the new facility in under budget, there was a hidden cost to their cost-effectiveness.

 

The plan helped the club retain old-guard members disinterested in digging deeper to pay for something larger. The resulting clubhouse, though, did not help attract new membership at a time when doing so already was difficult and about to become moreso.

 

Looking back, future club presidents Waterman III and Cal Werner see the sense — and the cents — in building smaller.

 

“Back in 1970, we could not have afforded what would have probably been three-quarters of a million dollar clubhouse,” said Dana III. “We didn’t have the membership who could support that from a capital perspective or from an operating dues perspective. We were coming into a period of really high inflation in the early 70s, so it was better at that time to start small and then expand as we needed to in order to accommodate the needs of membership as it gradually grew.”

 

Yet, growth was uncertain.

 

“I remember my father telling me from his own experience to expect at least a 10 percent membership churn every year,” the son said.  “And with a combination of the Reagan tax cuts and the farm crisis, we were seeing much bigger turnover numbers and real challenges in terms of retaining and adding members from the mid-to-late 80s.”

 

So, Crow ascended while the club on the bluff plateaued.

 

Holding Steady

 

In the immediate aftermath of the clubhouse fire, Al Arkin was neither an old-guard Country Club member nor a new one.

 

Born and raised on the western side of Iowa, he moved to Davenport in 1955 to manage the Dividend Bonded Gas station on River Drive and Pershing that was part of a family chain of service stations. Along the way, he developed a passion for golf, and in 1967 took up a long-standing invitation from some DCC member friends and bought an equity stake in the club for $600.

 

Arkin did not have a long experience with the old barn clubhouse but his last memory of the joint is a fair indication of why replacing it was on the table before it went ablaze.

 

“I remember the last time I was there was on New Years Eve and it was one of those miserable, terrible, windy cold nights,” he said of ringing in 1969. “And it was damned near as cold in the building as it was outside.”

 

Arkin enjoyed the social aspects of his Country Club membership, and almost a decade after setting his clubs aside due to a rotator cuff injury, he still does as an honorary social member.

 

“We have a group of younger guys who play poker on Wednesday nights and I have been playing with them for years,” he said. “At my age, they treat me nice. They take my money but they let me play. Other than that, I don’t get out here much.”

 

He has fond memories of his nearly 50 years at DCC, particularly of the golf he played on a layout that, to his tastes, was then and remains today, the best test of golf around.

 

“I’ve played it thousands of times. Never got tired of it,” he said. “You can come out here and play it every day. You never have the same lie twice and you never get tired of it.”

 

Like Dick Schmidt, Dana Waterman III, Cal Werner, B.J. Weigle and the countless other DCC members past and present, Arkin served on numerous committees, the board of directors and, ultimately, as board president in the dedicated manner that helps any member-driven organization thrive and/or survive.

 

Over the past half century, Arkin certainly saw the character and vitality of DCC change, evolve, ebb, flow, and then change and evolve again.

 

“We lost members. They kind of come and go,” he said. “But our equity membership has held reasonably stable. We just kept on going, kept on moving.”