The lives of the two men whose pooled property provided the bones of Davenport Country Club each would fill a compelling history book on their own.

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A tragic early chapter of Reinhardt Schulz’s long and interesting life, in fact, serves already as Chapter One in “Murder and Mayhem in Scott County,” a true crimes compilation written in 2018 by local historian John Brassard, Jr.

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Schulz was just a boy of 6 when he witnessed the August 6, 1898, murder-suicide that made orphans of he and his baby brother Herman.

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“A Fiend’s Act” was the front-page headline in the next day’s Davenport Sunday Democrat. The accompanying story shared

in graphic detail the horrific end to the brief marriage of the former Mary Hose and her deeply flawed husband, Henry Schulz.

 

The lead sentence was worthy of an Edgar Allen Poe novel: “Four bullets for his wife, one for himself, was Henry Schulz’s solution of the domestic problem that seems to have left him with a tottering reason; although to none but himself, from all accounts, could he charge up the troubles that led him to perpetrate a deliberate and cold-blooded murder of the woman he had sworn to cherish and protect, and to take the life the Creator had given him for better purpose than it had served.”

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Young Reinhardt was a block away when the first shot rang out from the backyard of a Davenport home near the intersection of Kirkwood Boulevard and Brady Street. On his father’s orders, the boy had stayed with the horse and buggy he and Henry Schulz had ridden from the family farm near LeClaire to the Davenport neighborhood where Mary had taken refuge with Herman after filing for divorce a week before.

 

Four shots later, Reinhardt walked upon the backyard scene where his mother lay dead. Shouted away by his father, he only heard the last bullet end the troubled, abusive life of Henry Schulz.

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Had that ugly beginning been the fictional work of Poe, the rest of Reinhardt Schulz’s story likely would have been a tale of torment and tragedy.

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Remarkably, his life’s narrative is nothing of the kind.

 

Undoubtedly the young boy was impacted by the trauma he endured. Yet, it was nothing that kept him from a fruitful future, nor, apparently, something he dwelt upon. “I asked my Mom and Dad, ‘Did grandpa ever talk about that?’’’ recalled his granddaughter, Kathy Schmidt. “And they said, ‘No, never.’’’

 

Raised by their maternal grandparents, Reinhardt and Elise Hose, the Schulz boys came of age on the dairy farm where they were born, and where the Hose family had settled after immigrating from Germany in the late 1860s. After selling dozens of the eastern-most acres of the property that would comprise Davenport Country Club, Reinhardt Schulz lived on the remainder of the Hose homestead until the day he died at the age of 79, just five days prior to Christmas 1972.

 

As a child, he faithfully walked to and from his farm home and a one-room schoolhouse on Forest Grove Road. A framed certificate celebrating his perfect attendance remains a treasured family heirloom.

 

Schulz matriculated to Iowa State in Ames, and earned a degree in Industrial Engineering, specializing in the field of metallurgy. In 1932, he founded the Lunex Co. There, Schulz worked with Lunex employee Robert Sandstrom and fellow scientists from the Rock Island Arsenal to develop chemical compounds that helped the U.S. and its allies prevail on land and sea in the Second World War. The first created a mildew-proof canvas that would keep U.S. troops warm and dry on the battlefields of Europe. The second produced a phosphorescent paint that provided a glow-in-the-dark surface to safely guide pilots back to aircraft carriers in the Pacific and Atlantic Theaters. 

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Most tellingly, the resilient Reinhardt Schulz lived his adult life with a sense of whimsy that belied a lifetime of tragedy that only began with murder and mayhem in Scott County.

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Further heartache included losing Herman on a battlefield in France on the very last day of World War I. Four years later, Reinhardt's first wife, the former Elta Grace Harvey, was claimed by the Spanish Flu pandemic.

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“He had such traumatic experiences in his life, yet you’d never know it,” Kathy Schmidt remembered. “He was a colorful character, a wonderful grandfather.”

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As a young girl, Schmidt recalled her grandfather answering to Colonel Sanders, a nickname owed to the white goatee he sported to cover up burn scars from a chemical accident at the plant. Years later, he dipped swim caps in glow-in-the-dark Lunex paint, adding magic to DCC’s annual Fourth of July celebrations. Kathy’s sister, Barbara, was a member of the club’s synchronized swim team that emerged from the pool, glowing in the gloaming amid fog provided by dry ice.

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Schulz’s relationship with the Country Club extended beyond the family farmland that was transformed into a golfing playground. He was a lifelong DCC member, and golfed well enough to win a trophy or two. Meanwhile, the land Reinhardt Schulz kept in the family, a thin stretch of several wooded lots between DCC’s first fairway and the road that became Valley Drive, continued to yield a healthy harvest Grandpa Hose never could have envisioned.

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“People were always walking over the wooden ladders on the fence line along the first hole to get their balls —if my grandmother didn’t grab them first,” Kathy Schmidt said of the former Anna Fessler, the second wife with whom Reinhardt celebrated a golden anniversary mere months before his death. “She walked the woods twice a day and filled metal flower barrels with golf balls. Our families never had to buy a golf ball.”

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Reinhardt Schulz also served 12 years as DCC’s first grounds superintendent, after having first assisted Charles Hugh Alison in building the golf course.

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“He and Alison put the course together a hole at a time,” Schulz’s son-in-law, Dick Schmidt, remembered just months before his death in December of 2022 at the age of 99. “With a lot of liquor for both.”

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Hail, The Old Roman

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Joe R. Lane’s relationship with the Country Club wasn’t nearly as long as that of Reinhardt Schulz. Nor was his life story filled with as much drama.

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His role in the club’s creation, however, was foundational and fundamental. And a biography of Joe R. Lane would best be told not by Poe, but instead, perhaps, by Milton Friedman, as a non-fictional celebration of benevolent capitalism and stalwart civic leadership

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Lane died a wealthy man seven years after DCC debuted, having built an immensely successful law practice that continues today as Lane & Waterman LLP. While establishing himself as one of Iowa’s foremost legal minds, he also amassed his fortune by investing in business, real estate, banking, and lumber.

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In addition to his legal work, Lane served one term in the U.S. Congress along with several years as a highly influential member of the Davenport City Council. He also was instrumental in the creation of St. Luke’s Hospital, the Blackhawk Hotel, the Crescent Railroad bridge, the First National Bank, and all manner of industry and businesses that remain essential parts of the Quad Cities economy to this day.

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Yet the currencies in which Lane was richest when he died of complications from a stroke were friends, respect and admiration for a lifetime of civic leadership and philanthropy.

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The May 1, 1931 edition of the Friday Evening Davenport Democrat and Leader dedicated nearly three full pages to retelling Lane’s countless accomplishments and revealing the whys behind such well-earned honorifics as “Davenport’s leading citizen,” “the business doctor,” and “The Old Roman.”

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The coverage included glowing testimonials from more than 30 of the community’s primary business and legal leaders, filling a large chunk of page one and all but a single column of an inside page.

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“Joe R. Lane was a big man,” read one such tribute by former Judge M.F. Donegan. “In public affairs, in business activities, and in the practice of his profession, he took part in big things and was always a mastermind. But Joe Lane was a big man in another way which endeared him to everyone who was thrown in personal contact with him. He was big hearted, thoughtful, and sympathetic with those who pursue the more humble pathway in life.

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“Perhaps very few knew of his many acts of kindness and assistance to others, because those were matters which were not made known by him,” the judge continued. “For half a century he has been a leader in everything that was for the benefit of his community. Davenport should not soon forget him or the things that he accomplished for her good.”

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DCC: A Lasting Tribute

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Fittingly, the only column on page 29 of that edition that was not about Joe Lane contained a preview of the annual spring tournament at Davenport Country Club.   

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Clearly, Lane’s essential role in the creation of DCC was not the largest of the things the “The Old Roman” bequeathed to his hometown. Yet, it stands as a century-old testament to his drive and lasting influence.

 

According to news reports, Lane “played golf occasionally, although he was never an ardent devotee of the sport.”  Instead, he most liked to fish when he heeded his wife Jennie’s urgent pleas to “leave your business. It will keep.”

 

That passion for fishing, coupled with his penchant for searching the countryside for real estate investment opportunities, likely led him to purchase a dairy farm and country estate on the Mississippi River bluffs two decades prior his death.

 

Lane’s sprawling, two-story, nine-bedroom country estate located halfway down the bluff on the river side of Valley Drive would serve as Davenport Country Club’s first clubhouse.

 

A report in the Feb. 2, 1924, Daily Times found the clubhouse as magnificent as the land across the road. One paragraph framed the panoramic scene modern-day DCC members ofttimes miss when they turn into the club's parking lots, and away from the river: “Mention already has been made of the remarkable view from the clubhouse,” it read. “The club property slopes down to a waterfront on the new government canal, from which the eye travels across green islands to the Illinois hills beyond. Far up and down the river, one can follow its windings, and the scene from the broad clubhouse veranda on a moonlit night surpasses all attempts at description.”

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In March of 1924, Lane sold the estate, along with four smaller dwellings, his 104-acre dairy farm and a large barn with an interesting future for the under-market price of $65,000. An earlier auction already had disposed of the dairy farm’s produce, straw, equipment, four horses, and 58 head of dairy cattle for what The Daily Times described as proportionally high prices.

 

Between 600 and 700 bidders were on hand for the sale described by the Daily Times as “one of the best attended ever held in this vicinity.”

 

Lane looked on that day without regret.

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“I would never have sold this farm to any private individual,” he reportedly said. “I can always have the privilege of coming back here to visit the scenes I have come to know and like.”

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Indeed, “The Old Roman” remained attached to the club and the old-boned property it occupied for the short remainder of his life.

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He served seven successive terms as founding president of a club that continues to honor the historic contributions of many men and women, not the least of them Reinhardt Schulz and Joe R. Lane.