The history of golf, and particularly the history of golf clubs in America, never could be described as an “open” book.

 

Private clubs are, of course, not open, and, while the adjective “exclusive” has marketable appeal, it is a word rooted in the practice of exclusion.

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As the 20th Century neared its end, two untenable phrases compelled country clubs across the world to take a hard look in the mirror. They were: “just not done in Birmingham” and “… not at the point of a bayonet.” The first was in defense of the exclusion of Blacks at Shoal Creek Country Club in Alabama. The second was Augusta National’s response to external pressure to admit women as members.

 

For many country clubs, Augusta included, those two cases led to long-overdue change in discriminatory admissions practices.

 

Yet, while diversity remains a challenge in an industry where economics drive demographics, Davenport Country Club did not have to change its policies or practices. That is because DCC's history reflects a significant strain of acceptance that existed in 1924 and continues today.

 

On the gender front, DCC didn’t necessarily rewrite the old-boy-network rule book in 1924, nor for years beyond. The men who made the rules retained the lion’s share of golf-course access for the lion’s share of the past century. Yet, from the outset, women were active in the club and on the course, and a remarkably common theme in the stories generations of DCC members tell is a passion for the game passed down by family matriarchs.

 

Alice Waterman was inspired to take up golf by her mother in the earliest days of Arsenal Country Club, and then took inspiration to an entirely different level.

 

She won the first of 40 golf trophies in 1909 at the age of 17, and ultimately turned all of those trophies over to the Arsenal GC in 1978, when she was declared “The Grand Old Gal of Golf” by the Quad-City Times.

 

Alice won 16 women’s club championships at Arsenal, and was a three-time Iowa Golf Association state champion. The prize that best speaks to her love of the links, however, is the Waterman Cup. That is the traveling trophy that remains a centerpiece of women’s golf in the Quad Cities, with generations of female players having teamed in pursuit of the Cup in an annual inter-club team competition.

 

Three Waterman sons — Robert, Larned and C.D. Jr. —followed their father into the legal profession, but not before following their mother onto the links. And while Alice’s heart forever belonged to Arsenal Golf Club, her sons did eventually bring their passion for the game to the club on the bluff.

 

Dana Waterman III saw The Grand Old Gal of Golf’s intense devotion to the game reflected in his father several years after Alice had passed, as her youngest son took to DCC’s first tee even with his health failing prior to his death in 1989.

 

“He was playing out here with a morphine pump attached to his belt. He had a little button he would push and it would give him a shot of morphine so he could get around,” Dana remembered.

 

Alice Waterman’s fierce competitiveness on the golf course also carried through to her great granddaughter, Ann, who was a member of an active DCC junior golf program in the 1980s. At age 7, Ann encouraged her mother, Faye, who rarely golfed, to join her in the club’s annual Mother-Daughter competition.

 

“My wife insisted on counting every stroke, including every whiff,” Dana Waterman remembered. “They finished with a score of 212 for nine holes. And obviously finished dead last.”

 

A year later, Ann recruited a different “mother.” And won her age group.

 

Dana has been a DCC member for almost precisely half of its century of existence. He first bought in as a junior equity member along with his close friend and childhood golf partner Cal Werner, whose interest in the game also was sparked by a family matriarch.

 

“My mom was a club champ here a couple of times. She was a golfer,” Cal said. “My Dad didn’t play much golf but took it up and then I’ve got two siblings. All three of us play. I played in high school and in college.”

 

It would be a stretch to say Jane Werner’s love of golf was inspired by Alice Waterman, but certainly the Cup named in the Grand Old Gal’s honor drove Jane’s competitiveness on the links.

 

“My mom was a member of the Waterman Cup team for 40 years,” Cal recalled. “She won club championships from her teens into her 70s. What I can’t figure out is why the hell didn’t I inherit that. I’ve gotten worse every year. I used to be good in high school and college, but …”

 

“You worked for a living,” Dana interjected.

 

Point being, before women moved into the workplace in force through the latter third of the 20th Century, the wives of DCC and clubs across the land had ample idle time to work on their games. By modern standards, such a suggestion might be deemed politically incorrect, but it also is rooted in historical reality.

 

And, while DCC’s rich history runs counter to that of other clubs in terms of gender diversity, it is a history rooted in a bygone era when golf was called the “gentlemen’s game” and the concept of “Ladies Day” was a common and not entirely flattering reflection of the history of country club golf in America.

 

“It used to be Tuesdays were 18-hole women’s days, Thursdays 9-hole women,” Cal Werner remembered. “There were a lot of exclusionary rules. I remember growing up and my older sister was visiting from out East. We were out to tee off at 10:30 on a Saturday, and that was before women were allowed to play golf on weekends. She had a fit and was very embarrassed. So that’s evolved. How many years ago did we allow women to become equity members?”

 

Answered Dana: “Over 30.”

 

Which also is to say, quite a bit less than 100.

 

Of course, a lack of gender equality was not just a country club issue in the first half of the 20th Century. It was a societal problem. A newspaper clipping from a bygone era is sadly indicative of this. When Jane Werner defeated Susan Von Maur 2 & 1 to win the first of her multiple women’s club championships in 1948, it was the lead story in that day’s sports section of the Davenport Democrat and Leader. That’s good. Not good was that neither woman was identified by their first name anywhere in that story. They were Mrs. Clem Werner and Mrs. Richard Von Maur.

 

But, as the son of Clem and Jane Werner noted, that has evolved.

 

As Davenport Country Club readied to launch a new century of history in 2023, Laura “Divot” Ekizian was completing a two-year term as the club’s first female president.

 

Divot — to call her anything else risks her wrath — first visited DCC in the early 1990s while a junior on the St. Ambrose University women’s golf team. She’d learned the game at a couple of high-end clubs on Chicago’s North Shore.

 

“I fell in love with the course immediately,” she said. “And when I got done that day I remember thinking ‘Divot, how could you ever get to a point in your life where you could be a member here?’ Because that would be like the supreme supreme.”

 

She got there a few years later. When she informed her father, a past president at both high-end Chicago area clubs, of her intention to join DCC, Ekizian said “I remember the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘You’re allowed to?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Wow, that’s weird.”’

 

So, yes, that foundational strain of acceptance in DCC’s early DNA still sets the club apart a century on, when Divot and other women find equal access to the course, often playing alongside male members.

 

Acceptance: An Article of Faith

 

Like so many other multi-generational DCC members, Joan McGee and brothers Dave and B.J. Weigle learned to love the Country Club and the game of golf through their mother.

 

Nancy Bloch Weigle was no less devoted to the game than Alice Waterman and Jane Werner, and her commitment to the country club her parents joined just a couple years beyond its founding created memories her own children hold dear to this day.

 

“When we were little, my mother would play golf almost every day and she’d take us out to the pool,” Joan said. “But first we had to stop at the foot of the Twin Bridges to pick up her caddie because that’s how they got to the club.”

 

With a quarter in their pocket for lunch, Joan, B.J. and Dave came of age at the pool, while Nancy, a big-hitter and strong putter, attacked the golf course.

 

“My mother played on the Waterman Cup team for years and years and years,” Joan said. “And the first year that DCC won it, my mother and Jean Priester dove off the high board fully clothed.”

 

Nancy formed childhood memories of her own while DCC itself came of age.

 

Harry and Fannie Bloch were wed in 1911, a few years after Harry had moved west from New York to take a job in the engineering department of the Rock Island Arsenal.

 

In 1920, he was founding president of Midwest Machine Tool and Supply Co., in Davenport. In 1941, Henry became owner of the Swan Engineering & Machine Co. in Bettendorf, which his grandson B.J. continues to lead today.

 

Harry Bloch was active in civic affairs, a member of the St. Luke’s Hospital board of directors, a charter member of Davenport Kiwanis and, for a time, president of the Buffalo Boy Scouts.

 

He also was a past president of Temple Emanuel, and that is an important distinction when discussing acceptance and Davenport Country Club.

 

The record is unclear because restrictive admissions policies were unspoken, but in 1924 —and for years beyond — DCC is believed to have been alone among Quad Cities country clubs in accepting Jewish people as members.

 

“I always got the impression that early on, it was a country club for Catholics and Jewish people and Germans who were not necessarily welcome in the other places,” said DCC historian Mike Rock. “There were an awful lot of Catholic, Jewish and German people around here.”

 

Neither their grandparents nor their mother talked openly about the anti-semitism they experienced in their lifetimes, the Weigle children say. Dave, the eldest, witnessed exclusion first hand, however.

 

Unlike many other DCC members of the time, the Blochs and Nancy and Julian Weigle, as well as others of their heritage, were not members of The Outing Club.

 

“Nor the Davenport Club which was downtown and was primarily a lunch club,” Dave recalled. “It was quite active. Lawyers, bankers and other professionals.”

 

Yet, while he was as successful and established as any member of that club, “My grandfather would take his lunch at the Blackhawk Hotel,” Dave said.

 

In the 50s, Dave further remembered, there were two sets of social circles in the city. “There wasn’t much socializing between the Jews and the non-Jews,” he said.

 

In time, thankfully, that changed, due in some part to the efforts of Hugo Schmidt. “Dad was instrumental in getting Jews allowed at The Outing Club,” Dick Schmidt proudly remembered near the end of his life.

 

Joan Weigle became Mrs. Bob McGee at The Outing Club in 1971, yet, anti-semitic exclusion there and at social clubs across the community is a real and sad piece of Quad Cities history.

 

It is not, however, part of the history of Davenport Country Club.

 

“Certainly not at the club,” Dave Weigle said. “It was very open. If you were a member, then you were a member, and it wasn’t like there were two classes, or two groups or anything of that sort.”

 

A proud family artifact, Dave said, is a reel of 16 millimeter film. “It was taken in the 1920s at the Country Club, with my mother toddling around with our grandmother and great-grandparents seated around the old clubhouse,” he said.

 

That reel provides proof of 100 years of acceptance, something Davenport Country Club members can and should take special pride in today.