A QUARTER CENTURY ON THE BLUFF

Two men prominent in the second quarter of Davenport Country Club’s 100-year history were easily told apart.

Pete Pelcher would be the one in the shirt.

Well, Tommy Nobis did wear a shirt. Technically speaking, anyway.

“When I came out here as a kid, I remember this guy who’d never wear a shirt on the golf course,” Bern Hofmann remembered. “The original rule was you had to have a shirt on when you teed off at No. 1, and when you finished at 18 green. Tom had one of those beautiful round Buddha bellies, bronze and gorgeous all summer long. Then, they made a rule you had to have a shirt on across the entire course. So, Tom got mad, went to Craton's Sporting Goods, and got a football jersey with fishnet holes. Cut it off right at the nipples. A half shirt, and his big beautiful bronze belly stuck out all summer. But he had a shirt.”

An obituary in the Feb. 22, 2004, edition of the Quad-City Times showed Thomas Nobis lived an accomplished life over his 82 years

He graduated with distinction from prestigious Cornell University after earning varsity letters in crew, football and wrestling. In 1965, Nobis became president of the family business, Central Engineering Co., and kept an office there until 2002, long after the company merged with Valley Construction.

Nobis chaired the board of the Davenport Community School district in 1964; and at various junctures also presided over the boards of the Tri-City Symphony, St. Luke’s Hospital, the Associated General Contractors of Iowa and Illinois, the Davenport Chamber of Commerce and DCC. He served on the boards of the Davenport Levee Commission, the First Trust and Savings Bank, and the Outing Club.

Across the community, he was known for annually painting the bricks along the path of the Yellow Brick Road children’s race, and for never being seen in an overcoat or gloves, no matter how cold a Midwest winter might get.

However, it turns out Nobis did own a traditional golf shirt.

“On the ski slopes in Aspen (Colo.), others would be all bundled up,” Margaret Nobis told the Times shortly after her husband’s death. “But Tom would be skiing in a black golf shirt.”

The mid-riff, fishnet shirt Nobis forever kept in his DCC locker was his prized possession, however, something he wore with pride over countless rounds with Dana Waterman Sr., Binc Bawden and others. It still was hanging in that locker when John Panek, then an assistant pro, drew the assignment of cleaning that locker in 2004.

“To this day, it’s my great regret I didn’t keep the shirt,” Panek said.

Without a doubt, that shirt is woven into the fabric of the Country Club’s character. As was the character who wore it.

“The fishnet shirt was memorable, but what was really noticed was how well he could hold his liquor,” Bob Noth said of Nobis. “He never started without two martinis, one before he went out and one that he took with him. And then often at No. 9 shack, he’d get a couple more. Four pretty strong martinis by the time he was done.”

Yes, good times were had on the bluff. And Tommy Nobis typically was at the center of the action.

“My folks had two fish fries every summer for their social events,” recalled Cal Werner, who makes his home just up the hill from DCC’s 18th hole. “The Waterman-Nobis crew was part of one of them. Tom was there one year, and my wife was there, and he said to her, ‘Jill, when I get to 18 tee tomorrow, I want you to come down and bring me a martini.’ So she did. Which created quite a stir. Tom had struck again.”

The Pelcher Years

If Nobis and his fishnet shirt were symbolic of the fun on the bluff in the middle portion of the 20th Century, buttoned-down Pete Pelcher defined the Country Club’s game.

That was true from the time he arrived in 1945 until he retired due to poor health mere months before the famous old clubhouse went up in flames in January of 1969.

In a significant way, the old teacher defines golf at DCC to this day.

Joyce Bawden and her family joined the Country Club just after Pelcher retired in 1969. She recognized his influence then. And she sees it still today, while gazing out at the first tee from the clubhouse dining room.

“The people he taught to play always had a great swing,” she said.

Like countless juniors— and elders, as well — Pat Stopulos was an early adoptee of the Pete Pelcher swing.

“I can remember to this day things he told me when I was 14, 15 years old,” said Stopulos. “One of his staples was ‘Belly toward the target.’ The other thing he would just insist on was when you hit a golf ball, you should hold your finish until the ball stopped rolling. The other thing was when you finish a shot, especially with an iron, your hands were wide.

“The beauty of Pete is he could have said all these things in a much more complicated way. All these fundamentals. But he made them so simple and he conveyed them in such a way they were easy to understand. If you look at each of one of those things I just described, today’s pros do them. But they make it much more complicated.

“Pete wanted to keep you in balance, and the only way you can hold your finish for that long is if you're balanced. So he had just a wonderful, wonderful way of teaching the game that people understood. But it was all the proper fundamentals.”

One thing few modern-day Pelcher disciples can remember is actually seeing their head pro play the game.

“Pete always wore a coat and tie and winged tips and he played golf maybe twice a year,” Mike Rock said.

Yet, when Pelcher came to DCC at the relatively ripe age of 45, there was plenty of good golf in his past. A story that announced his arrival in the Daily Times noted Pelcher held course records at four of his previous stops as head professional.

“Toward the end of his stay here, Pat Stopolos and I were quite chummy with Pete and we would go over to his house on Bell Avenue,” Rock remembered. “We’d go in the basement and look at all the golf memorabilia, and it became very apparent that this character — and he was a character — had a lot more to do with the Golden Age of Golf than anybody around here ever really knew. He was friends with Walter Hagen, and he went to Mexico to play the winter tour. He had scrapbooks with pictures of he and Hagen and Gene Sarazen.”

Pelcher first joined the professional ranks as an assistant to his brother at their hometown Springfield Country Club in Massachusetts, and stepped up to head pro there when his brother was called to war. He did stints at clubs in Kentucky, Chicago and Indiana, and, although he occasionally tested his game against the touring pros, he found the paychecks too small to offset the expense of chasing the tour full time.

“In those days, $400 was a big prize,” he told O’Donnell months after his retirement. “It would have cost me money to make the Tour.”

Instead, Pelcher found his reward in building swings on the DCC practice tee.

The Mentor Makes his Mark

The hours Pelcher invested in his youngest students produced a good number of outstanding golfers on the bluff.

Stopulos was among them. He joined on a $125 junior membership at age 14, and his family soon followed.

“It was almost an idyllic way to grow up,” he said. “Great place for a family with the swimming pool and the golf course. It was really a family-oriented membership. There were just a lot of young people. Our parents would drop us off at 9 a.m. and pick us up at dark. We were literally here all day. We’d play golf and then go to the pool and then go play another round of golf. So there were just a ton of young people.”

Werner was among five members of a hugely successful Davenport Central High School golf team whose games were built on the bluff.

“We had five guys on the Central team who basically grew up here in the summers and we had an incredibly strong three years at Davenport Central,” he said. “We never lost a dual match.”

Tom and Dick Hosford, Bob West and Gary Hosford were the other DCC contributors to that Central High squad. Stopulos, Rock, and future Notre Dame golfers Mike McCarthy and Joe Kehoe also were part of Pelcher’s strong and talented junior program of that era.

Junior players had ample access to the golf course.

“Virtually every day,” Kehoe recalled. “There was a practice tee over to the north of the pool. There was a green about 90 to 100 yards away.  So we would start out hitting 7-irons and then 8 and 9, wedge, sand wedge, whatever.

“Then, there was another practice green just short of the 10th tee. And we would stand on a practice tee on the far side of the 18th green and hit down to that green, being pretty mindful of the people coming up the 18th fairway. As we got more confident, we never stopped hitting balls, even when there were people coming up 18. We’d just fire them over the top. I do remember one time Elsie Von Maur didn’t really like that very much and she came stomping up the hill and scolded me. Anyway, it wasn’t traumatic.”

For years to come, those DCC junior golfers won countless events at the club, across the Quad Cities, and throughout the state of Iowa.

All, though, were chasing the legend of Dick Smith.

An Athlete Dying Young

Jim Jamieson helped Oklahoma State claim the NCAA Men’s Golf Championship in 1963, won the Illinois State Amateur on his home track at Short Hills in 1967, and ultimately played his way onto the PGA TOUR.

In a professional career sadly shortened to 180 Tour starts by a wrist injury, Jamieson won the 1972 Western Open and posted nine top 10 finishes. Four of the latter came in major championships, including a runner-up finish behind Gary Player in the 1972 PGA Championship.

Behind Fleck, Moline native Jamieson was the second most accomplished golfer in Quad Cities history. Yet, according to Mike Rock, Jamieson himself would concede he was not the best Quad Cities golfer of his own generation.

“Jim Jamieson never beat Dick Smith,” Rock said, noting Jamieson told him years later he was in awe of DCC progeny Smith’s game. “We would chat and he’d say, ‘Dick Smith and I played golf all the time and I was never in his league.’ He contended Dick Smith was going to be the next Arnold Palmer.”

Smith never got the chance. After a stellar junior career that saw him make the Iowa Amateur field at the age of 14 and finish as runner-up in the second flight of the state am in 1956, Smith took his talents to North Texas University. There, he captained the men’s golf team after qualifying for the United States Amateur in 1960.

In April of 1961, Smith died in a car crash near Denton, Texas.

“The golf career that had been very good and which promised to become brilliant had ended,” wrote John O’Donnell. “Dick Smith had reached the last green.”

While Smith was the most promising of countless products of Pelcher’s strong DCC junior program, he was far from alone.

Before Smith, there was Tom Garside. He won the 1964 Iowa high school individual state title while leading St. Ambrose Academy to a team championship. That crew’s top five was completed by fellow DCC junior golf standouts Bob Powers, Mike Underwood, Toby Kristopelt and Blake Garside.

Before them, Dave Gross became the fourth DCC member to claim an Iowa State Amateur. At age 21 in 1962, he joined Dr. Paul Barton (1930), Joe Von Maur (1937), and Nel Staats (1949) in that venerable foursome.

Yet, Dick Smith still is the most venerated player in DCC history.

“I remember being in church one Sunday and hearing that Dick Smith had been killed in a car accident, and I had idolized Dick Smith,” Joe Kehoe remembered. “When he was practicing, I would just go watch in awe of how well he would hit a golf ball. And I remember bursting into tears in church. It just always stuck in my mind.”

On the Way to 1969

Throughout those years when Pete Pelcher and Tommy Nobis defined two sides of the Country Club’s character, grand memories continued to be made on the bluff.

Many of today’s long-standing members well remember good times and eventful holidays shared at the old picnic grounds amid the bluffs north of the 15th and 16th holes.

“There were swing sets and they’d have barbecues and we’d go play on the cliffs and walk in the creeks, looking for crawdads,” B.J. Weigle said. “Our holiday weekends were at the picnic grounds. We’d set off fireworks and sparklers.”

Dana Waterman remembers caddying for his father during regular weekend golf games with Binc Bawden, Dudley Priester and others. In the process, he developed an appreciation for the camaraderie the gentleman’s game can build. He and Werner have carried that weekend tradition into a new DCC century, creating stories they tell so frequently, each can finish the other’s sentences.

Dick Schmidt and Chuck Von Maur served stints on the Country Club’s board in the second quarter of DCC’s existence, and they well remembered surfing the politics endemic to the running of any country club.

Schmidt’s board made the critical decision to keep the club open year-round, a necessary change from past practice.

“We were losing too damned much money,” he said. “We’d lose our whole staff, we’d lose pots and pans. It was almost like we had to start over every spring. So we started keeping it open in the winter. We had parties and stags and that sort of thing.”

Von Maur remembers the old guard’s objection to attempts to introduce irrigation in the 1960s. And, like so many long-time members, he fondly remembers that storied clubhouse built from Joe Lane’s old dairy barn.

“That old barn saw some parties walls should never talk about,” he said. “The stags out here at the Country Club … You don’t know what a stag is unless you witnessed some of those. Every story you ever heard is true. All hours of the night.”

And, of course, everyone who was part of the club remembers where they were when they learned that quaint old clubhouse burned to the ground in the early-evening hours of Jan. 25, 1969.