WEATHERING 1969

On the bitterly cold evening of January 25, 1969, Joyce Bawden stood on the deck of her family home on Bettendorf’s Devil’s Glen Road and could see the towering orange glow of an inferno raging more than five miles away.

When they heard the news, Joan and Bob McGee were among the many startled members who jumped in their cars and made their way up Valley Drive to see what was left of the old barn that was home to heartbeat of their beloved Country Club.

They did not see much. “The barn went up quick,” Joan recalled.

George and Jane Vieth were en route to a potluck when they heard the news.

“On the radio we heard, ‘Davenport Country Club is on fire,’” Jane remembered. “When we got to the potluck, we called Alice MacDonald who lived across the street. She said, ‘I have to hang up. The firemen are here to douse the sparks on our roof.’

“We immediately dropped everything. I don’t know where we parked but we were standing there, and heard the crackle and the noise. It was just awful.”

It didn’t take down a city the size of Chicago, but Mrs. O’Leary’s cow could not have cooked up a much more powerful blaze than the one that ended the colorful history of the barn that once housed Joe Lane’s prized bull.

The rustic building that had served as the Country Club’s social center for more than 30 years was gone.

“A raging fire whipped by strong, shifting winds raced through the Davenport Country Club clubhouse Saturday night and reduced the three-story, remodeled dairy barn to a mass of ashes and charred smoldering embers,” read the start of the banner story on the front page of the next day’s Quad-City Times.

“Firefighters from Pleasant Valley, Riverdale, Princeton, Bettendorf and LeClaire battled the flames and thick acrid smoke for almost four hours in near-zero temperatures,” the story stated.

All furnishings were consumed by the blaze that Pleasant Valley Fire Chief Jim Beek speculated began near the first-floor dining room sometime before the first alarm sounded at 6 p.m.

Pro shop and dining room equipment and inventory went first. Golf clubs and clothing stored for the winter in or near members’ lockers next were consumed as the fire rapidly spread beyond the firefighters’ control. Once the flames reached the open expanse of the second-floor dining room, then spread to the third floor, the old barn was lost.

“We were able to hold the fire for quite a while,” Fire Chief Beek told reporters that night. “But when it reached the second floor, there were just no firebreaks to check it and it just went wild.”

No one was injured in the building where Dick Schmidt remembered a group of eight to 10 members had been watching a college basketball game just a few hours before. Schmidt speculated years later that an unextinguished cigarette left behind by a club employee may have ignited the fire. Yet, after a week-long investigation conducted by State Deputy Fire Marshall Robert Smith, the official cause of the devastating fire remained unnamed.

Schmidt’s suspicion is widely held by others, and other unproven theories continue to be mentioned, but the official cause remains a mystery to this day.

“There are a lot of possibilities on how the fire started,” Beek said after the investigation concluded on Jan. 31, “but fixing on any one would only be a guess.”

The loss of the historic clubhouse was a difficult, but not crippling turning point in club history. Through the years, the old barn had become as much a part of the Country Club’s character as Tommy Nobis’ golden buddha belly, and it is remembered as fondly decades beyond.

The building also was fast approaching obsolescence as 1969 dawned, however. Just months prior to the blaze, club officers had launched a feasibility study on whether to remodel or replace the clubhouse.

Now the barn was gone.

“The question on what to do now is pretty academic,” club secretary Robert V.P. Waterman told the Times two days after the fire.

The next step, however, was anything but academic. The old building was appraised at $200,000 to $250,000, while the low-end initial estimate on constructing a new clubhouse was closer to $500,000.

Less than a month after the barn went ablaze, a $620,000 package to erect a new clubhouse and install a fairway watering system was presented at the club’s annual meeting. After paying down an existing loan, only $110,000 of the insurance settlement would be available for the project. The board’s proposal called for the remaining cost to be covered through a new loan coupled with an assessment of $500 per member. That was estimated to provide an additional $160,000, said a story in the Feb. 21 Quad-City Times.

The plan faced two critical challenges.

First, members would have to approve both the assessment and the loan request.

Second, a significant new challenge to retaining more than a few of those members was months away from its debut 15 minutes north and west on the Davenport-Bettendorf border.

As The Crow Flies

By 1968, the Quad Cities proper featured five 18-hole country clubs, four on the Illinois side.

Thanks in large part to its proximity to Deere & Company’s shiny new corporate campus, Short Hills had long been regarded as the pre-eminent club in the Quad Cities. It would, for a time, retain that status.

Sixteen years shy of its centennial anniversary, meanwhile, Arsenal Country Club maintained a very loyal membership base. Mill Creek Country Club, located off of Knoxville Road outside Milan, technically was the baby of the bunch, having debuted in the spring of 1963. But the newest country club course actually belonged to Oakwood. In 1967,  a new 18-hole Oakwood made its debut on a bluff of its own, this located above the Rock River and Route 6 in rural Coal Valley. The golf course was built from a blueprint drawn by a fledgling architect named Pete Dye after the old nine-hole course in Moline made way for Interstate 74.

In March of 1969, ground was broken off Utica Ridge Road just a couple of blocks north of 53rd Street for what would be the second country club in the Iowa Quad Cities.

Crow Valley Golf Club was the creation of Crow Creek Estates, Inc., a collection of 34 well-connected QC businessmen intent on centering a private playground amid 600 acres of high-end housing in Bettendorf.

The veritable Who’s Who that comprised the Crow Creek 34 included several long-standing DCC members, including Whitey Barnard, Al Howard, Mel Foster, Dudley and Wally Preister, Larned Waterman, Bob Van Vooren, and Ray and Jim McLaughlin.

For the more business-minded of the 34 founders, the real estate component was a critical piece of the Crow Creek pro forma. But for several others, the driving motivation was creating a club with modern amenities, an irrigated golf course with lush fairways and easy access closer to Davenport and Bettendorf.

As much as anything, those founding Crow members desired unfettered entry to the first tee. That was a critical difference from DCC, which had long required its members to make reservations before taking the tee, a practice that continues to this day.

“The real impetus for founding the new club was that these guys were all avid golfers and they didn’t like to have tee times,” Van Vooren said in an interview for "Magic Happened: Celebrating 50 Years of the John Classic," a book published in 2021. “They wanted to be able to walk up and play. And, to this day, Crow Valley has never had tee times.”

By the summer of 2023, Van Vooren was the last surviving member of the Crow Creek 34.

“It was no tee times and an assurance that it was not going to get overwhelmed with new members,” the longtime partner at Lane & Waterman said in 2023. “It was going to be small membership, reasonable cost and a bunch of guys that loved golf.”

Crow emerged at a time when Arsenal CC and Short Hills were beginning to wrestle with older facilities, but, because Crow Valley had been on the drawing board for well over a year prior to the March groundbreaking, DCC’s lost clubhouse was not a factor in the new club’s creation.

And while a large number of the more than 150 members who signed on in advance of Crow Valley’s June 1970 opening were current or past members of the club on the bluff, Van Vooren said he and other expats never doubted DCC would carry on in fine fashion.

“It was no reflection on Davenport, but we just felt there should be another top flight club,” he said. “That did not do damage to Davenport. DCC continued to be a top club and still is.

“The golf course has always been a great golf course. The membership was good, fine people. Good company and they ran the club well. They ran the club for the membership and did their best to keep the cost as low as possible.”

The last part of that sentence would be a widely debated piece of the DCC history over the next few decades. But a far more telling and lasting piece of the Crow Valley-DCC story is the close relationships and collegial co-existence that followed the rival Iowa club’s emergence.

Friends left for Crow Valley. Friends stayed at Davenport Country Club. And friendships forged on the fairways on the bluff and elsewhere carried on.

“I never sensed any resentment at all,” said Van Vooren, who briefly maintained memberships at both clubs but, having purchased condos off the second fairway at Crow Valley ultimately kept only his membership at the new club close to home.

“There was room for all of us, and we co-existed very well,” he said. “We had mutual respect and there was no criticism or hard feelings between the groups. Or at least I never felt there was.”

Friends and business partners who stayed at DCC largely echo that sentiment.

“I think it was just sort of meant to be,” Nancy Von Maur said.  “Crow Valley was in the city, whereas the Country Club was an eight-mile drive out here and a lot of people just aren’t comfortable driving out here, particularly at night. Or going home at night. Access and egress has gotten a lot better but even so, (the club) felt the pinch in the number of evening meals and such.

“There was a certain number who were going to stay at the Country Club no matter what, and then a few who were going.”

A Friendly Rivalry

The Von Maurs, of course, stayed at the place where a teenaged Nancy had started her day with a swim.

“I just said, ‘Chuck, I don’t care about that Crow Valley place. We are going to stay with the Country Club,” she said. “I love it. It’s a beautiful course. I don’t think Crow Valley could ever compete with DCC beauty-wise.

“I just thought, ‘We can’t leave the Country Club.’”

They didn’t, but Nancy and close friends such as Jane Vieth often played together, both on the bluff and at the upstart new club, and Chuck did likewise with George Vieth, Whitey Barnard and countless others. Those inter-club rounds included several played on frequent trips to different locales, including at Tamaron Country Club in the mountains of Colorado, where Bob Fry had landed upon leaving as Crow head pro in 1975.

“Three days of golf, 36 holes a day, and on one of the first occasions out there we went to dinner,” Chuck recalled. “A few voices got a little loud. Just a little loud. We paid the bill and they said ‘Gentlemen, thank you for coming to dinner but we’d prefer that you don’t come back.”’

To this day, the Von Maurs and Bob Van Vooren still share a membership at a Florida club where they spend winters.

Despite entreaties from his brother Larned, Dana Waterman II also chose to remain at DCC, where he was the incoming president. He and Binc Bawden lost a regular Saturday golfing partner in Dudley Preister, but the trophy match the trio started as youthful friends played on.

“They played together for years and years and years and even after Dudley left to go to Crow, they would still play at least three times a year,” Dana III said. “They had a trophy they started playing for in 1954. They recorded the winner’s initials and winner’s score on that trophy for probably 30 years.”

The matches ended when Binc died in 1985. Waterman II passed away four years later. “They had a lifelong golfing association even after Dudley left for Crow,” said the son.

​

Yet, however friendly the rivalry between then two clubs may have been, it was, and remains, a rivalry.

At the start, Crow had the upper hand. While DCC worked to rebuild from the fire and the challenge of retaining membership, Crow Valley was shiny, new and modern, and, when the Quad Cities Open debuted there in 1971, its stature in the community grew.

Many of the Country Club’s strongest players took their games to the Bettendorf club, and carried Crow to the Velie Cup crown in 1970. The QC’s newest club claimed the Cup 21 times more between 1979 and 2004.

Yet, while Davenport weathered more challenges and change over the course of the ensuing decades, the Country Club’s most loyal members stood fast.

In a race that was not a sprint but a instead marathon, the old-boned grounds stood strong as well.