Maybe writers no longer wax poetic about the pastoral beauty of the 140-some acres that encompass Davenport Country Club, but golf course raters rave more now than ever about the timeless track that occupies the land.

 

Essential as geographic form and function are to the ambience and allure of DCC, however, they are not the foundation of the Country Club.

 

By its basic definition, the word club connotes people. And as much as any club’s can be, Davenport Country Club’s heartbeat and character — its basic DNA — has come from the men, women, and families who have enjoyed the privilege of calling themselves its members for 100 years and counting.

 

Likewise, every member of the DCC staff, now and across a century, have contributed to the enduring character of the club.

 

This century of history is a tapestry woven from threads of the life stories of the people of DCC. Many such stories are as impressive as that of the “Old Roman.” More than a few are filled with the kind of tragedy and drama that informed, but did not shape, the resilient life of Reinhardt Schulz.

 

The documented lives of the eight men who joined Joe Lane as original DCC governors, for instance, are fairly representative of the inaugural membership as well as the members who followed, and, thus, a good place to start. Theirs are stories ranging from unquestionably epic to arguably ordinary, although not much of the latter.

 

L.G. (Louis) Bein was a bank clerk in 1924, a humble yet dedicated citizen who helped in the creation of the Mississippi Valley Fair and was a future president of the Davenport Chamber of Commerce. He died years later in Ottumwa, Iowa, having relocated there to serve as secretary of that city’s Chamber.

 

J.S. (Jack) Dow was treasurer of Davenport Elevator Company, the family business on South Pine Street in Davenport. In its heyday, the company’s two elevators could store as much as 280,000 bushels of golden Iowa grain before it was shipped up or down river to feed the heartland.

 

In 1922, Dow purchased a 10-room country home on three acres “studded with fruit, hickory and walnut trees,” said a story in the Davenport Democrat and Leader. The headline said Dow paid $20,000 for an “ideal site above Valley City.”

 

Two years later, that site grew even more ideal, as Dow’s was a short walk up Valley Drive to the Country Club.

 

E.S. (Edward) Johnson was president of the Davenport Locomotive Works, which likely built the trolleys that carried early city-dwelling members to the stop below the original DCC clubhouse. Johnson was part of the first foursome to mashie and niblick its way around DCC, and held fast to the title of lifelong Davenport Country Club member when he died in 1951 at the ripe old age of 90.

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M.L. (Martin Leo) Coleman was general manager of the McClellan Company’s chain of local grocery stores when he became an original governor. Just prior to his far-too-early death at the age of 38 four years later, Coleman had assumed the rank of vice president and general manager of the Davenport-based Gordon-Van Tine Co., one of the country’s largest suppliers of doors and sashes.

 

Kallman Spelletich held that position of VP and GM of Gordon-Van Tine when he joined the DCC board of governors in 1924, His 1928 promotion to president of the company created the opening Coleman briefly filled.

 

E.C. (Edward) Mueller did not die young. The vice president of the well-known family business, Mueller Lumber Co., he was 72 when he fell eight stories from a window in his room at the Mississippi Hotel only 13 years after affixing his name to DCC’s papers of incorporation.

 

Charlie Grilk, like Joe Lane, was a prominent local attorney and activist in the Republican Party. He ran for mayor of Davenport in 1934, but did not win. Similarly unsuccessful was his 1910 bid for the Second District U.S. Congressional seat which Lane had once occupied. That campaign was, however, highlighted by a boisterous pre-election rally headlined by former and future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.

 

“I have never asked you for anything, but I wish you would come here and speak in behalf of my candidacy,” Grilk reportedly said to the man he’d befriended years before when both were students at Harvard University. To that request, Teddy replied with bullish enthusiasm: “Charlie, I’ll do it!”

 

Grilk died tragically in a hotel room in Des Moines after suffering a stroke while attending the 1928 Republican State Convention. Among the many friends at the well-connected Davenporter’s bedside as he neared death was Iowa Governor John Hammill.

 

F.D. (Frederick Dickson) Letts did win that 2nd District Congressional seat, and only a year after first earning a seat on DCC’s inaugural Board of Governors. The former Davenport attorney served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1925 through 1931, but earned a more lasting claim to fame after falling short in his bid for a fourth term and being appointed to the position of federal judge in 1932 by fellow Iowan Herbert Hoover.

 

In 1957, the 80-year-old Letts issued an injunction preventing James L. Hoffa from assuming the office of president of the national Teamsters union, a rank to which 13 Teamsters members alleged Hoffa had been elected through a rigged ballot.

 

Hoffa appealed the injunction he deemed merely advisory. “OK, you’ve advised me; I reject your advice,’’ he said to Letts, who lifted his injunction two years later, allowing Hoffa to run the union under a three-judge team of watchdogs.

 

Letts died at the age of 90 in 1965, a decade before Hoffa “disappeared,” never to be found.

 

Eight good men. Eight great stories.

 

The Country Club had just begun.

 

The Beginning

 

Memberships were offered for sale for the bargain price of $300 apiece on New Year’s Day 1924, a month before the official incorporation. By Feb. 3, more than 200 members were aboard.

 

By March, the initial quota of 300 memberships had been sold, and the club was offering 100 additional memberships for the price of $400 per.

 

By the end of March, another 21 of those had been sold.

 

On Memorial Day of ’24, six holes were available for play, and, in an inaugural round, train builder Johnson rolled off the temporary track with the first ace in club history, having launched a mashie over Stafford Creek and into the cup on the 110-yard fifth hole.

 

“Considering the nature of temporary tees and greens,” the Daily Times described Johnson’s round of 24 in the company of Jack Dow, J.H. McCrory and Ludwig Becker as “nothing short of perfect golf.”

 

By early August, the old barn where Joe Lane once housed his prize bull had successfully been converted into a space for lockers. “The bull has departed,” the Daily Times’ Lynbrook Barry declared in his “HOOKS AND SLICES” column, “but only until some of the golfers’ stories get started after playing those six temporary holes.”

 

A month prior, the former Lane estate across the road had opened as a full-fledged clubhouse, bringing “a continuous and increasing patronage,” one news report said. Particularly popular were the Friday night suppers.

 

“It is already evident that he club will fill a long-felt want in Davenport,” the Daily Times stated in September. “With the permanent golf course in playing condition, as it will be early next season, and various other sports provided for, Davenport will have a club which will compare favorably — not only with any in the west but with any in the country.”

 

That was true, the paper declared, “in spite of the fact that memberships for clubs offering similar facilities sell for $1,000 to $3,000 on the average. It is the realization of this fact which is rapidly selling the few remaining memberships.”

 

The January 1925 annual meeting of the club saw R.J. Clausen, Ben C. Mueller, Edward L. Ruhl and George White join holdovers Lane, Bein, Coleman, Dow and Johnson on the second board of governors.

 

And, with membership at 333, plans were presented at that meeting to remodel the old barn to include a kitchen and club rooms. The plan called for a “comfortable” porch stretching 80 feet around the former barn, providing a scenic overlook of the golf course, along with “commodious locker rooms for both men and women.”

 

By March of ’25, another 25 members were on the roster and the club was projecting a full roster of 400 members by mid-summer, with more names to be assigned to a waiting list.

 

Chairs were appointed for the standard committee assignments of overseeing membership, greens, house, entertainment and handicaps. Also formed were committees in charge of horseback riding, water sports, horseshoes, tennis, picnics and trap-shooting.

 

In March, the club hired its first professional. That was Art Andrews, the son of an English club professional who shipped three boys across the Atlantic Ocean to teach the game in the U.S.

 

One Andrews brother, Eddie, was head professional at Elmhurt Golf Club near Chicago, and narrowly missed qualifying for 1925 U.S. Open. Another, Amber, taught the game via a Chicago radio station, and was head professional at a new, $1 million club near the big city. That Shriner-created club was called Medinah.

 

Beginning in April, a nine-hole DCC layout opened as host to a spring handicap tournament, and major planning was underway for the grand opening on May 30, Memorial Day, starting with a match pitting amateurs G. Decker French and Willard Velie against Art and Eddie Andrews.

 

Following the momentous day’s ceremonial opening tee shot pegged at 225 yards by the Old Roman himself, a gallery estimated in the hundreds saw the amateurs take it to the Andrews boys, closing out a 3-up win on the Hole of Grief.

 

The day concluded with dinner and dancing at the newly refurbished clubhouse that was the old Lane estate.

 

The Country Club was on its way.

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The Haig Pays A Call

 

Before there was Tiger, before there was Nicklaus, before there was Arnie and Bobby, and Nelson and Hogan, there was Hagen.

 

Walter Hagen was the smooth-talking, sharp-dressing, trophy-collecting face of the game in the 1920s. He won 11 major championships in his career, still the third-leading total on record behind Nicklaus’ 18 and Woods’ 15 nearly 100 years later. Hagen’s 46 wins, meanwhile, still rank eighth on a list of all-time PGA TOUR victory leaders.

 

In an era when touring professionals weren’t allowed access to locker rooms at clubs the PGA TOUR visited, Hagen elevated the game of golf in America and lifted the status of those who played golf for money through equal measures of elegance and flamboyance.

 

As evidence of the former, he was called “Sir Walter.” In a nod to the latter, newsmen also called him “The Haig.”

 

Herbert Warren Wind, the incomparable American golf writer famous for coining the term “Amen Corner” at Augusta National, captured the essence of “The Haig” in a single sentence.

 

“Great as he was as a golfer,” Wind wrote of Hagen in one of his many retrospectives on American golf history, “he was even greater as a personality — an artist with a sense of timing so infallible that he could make tying his shoelaces seem more dramatic than the other guy's hole-in-one.”

 

Professional purses were meager in the vagabond beginning of professional golf in the U.S., and Hagen’s extravagant lifestyle was not inexpensive. He often arrived at tournaments in chauffeur-driven limousines, drank copious amounts of the finest liquor, and stepped onto first tees dressed out like the Hollywood dandies whose company he frequently kept.

 

So, “The Haig” supplemented his earnings as the pre-eminent barnstormer of the barnstorming age, playing exhibitions wherever and whenever his agent could find them.

 

In late July of 1925, Hagen  found himself on the Mississippi River bluffs, christening the nearly brand new Davenport Country Club in a two-ball match vs. DCC head pro Andrews and Tom McQuarrie, head professional at neighboring Arsenal.

 

Sir Walter’s partner that day was the polar opposite of flamboyant. But Paul “Doc” Barton could play. Destined to win the first of his 14 DCC club championships a month later, the Davenport dentist was described thusly in a preview of the match by The Daily Times: “The doctor is uncommunicative and very retiring in manner. He doesn’t talk his game. He shoots it.”

 

In the July 26 match before a gallery estimated at 1,200, Barton shot a smooth 3-over-par 74, second in the foursome only to the course-record 67 his professional partner carded while playing the course sight unseen.

 

“Golfers who witnessed the match are of the opinion that July 4 will be a wonderful day for ski-jumping when the mark of the brilliant Walter is surpassed,” read the report in the next day’s Evening Democrat and Leader.

 

The paper reported The Haig was “tickled” by the impressive young golf course, but, perhaps, was less impressed by his effortless 67. It was, after all, the 10th time in as many barnstorming days “Sir Walter” left a locale with a new course record.

 

The Country Club definitely was off and running.