Arnold Palmer's Coast Guard Days

Arnold Palmer in the Coast Guard

(See: Birth of the Birdie, p. 103 Arnold Palmer's Coast Guard Days)
Photo from U.S. Coast Guard.

Chapter 9 of Birth of the Birdie

ARNOLD PALMER'S COAST GUARD DAYS

Arnold Palmer was a relatively unknown Coast Guard enlisted man when he first visited Atlantic City Country Club, and he credits with those he played with at the time as having an effect on the eventual outcome of his career.

Palmer began playing as a youngster when his father cut off the handle of a wooden club for the three year old to play. He won his first scholastic match in 1943 and the state amateur title as a sophomore. When his friend Buddy Worsham obtained a golf scholarship to Wake Forest, Worsham convinced the coach to give Palmer a scholarship as well. While Palmer was then unknown, Worsham was from a from a family of famous golfers - his brother Lew had won the 1947 U.S. Open and Virgil "Buck" Worsham was a golf professional at the Atlantic City Country Club.

"I worked as the head pro at Atlantic City in 1951 and 1952," recalls Virgil "Buck" Worsham. "I was hired by Mr. Leo Fraser, who I met through Charlie Price, the Editor of Golf World. I came right after Sonny Fraser had died, so I never met Sonny."

According to Worsham, "Atlantic City in 1951 wasn't like what it is now. It was quite unsettled and sparsely populated along Shore Road. We used to get a lot of people from Philadelphia and New York down in the summer time when people swarmed to the beaches and boardwalk. I certainly enjoyed working for Leo Fraser. It was a nice experience, a nice place to be. We had some good players, too."

As Bucky Worsham recalls the situation, "Arnold was a room mate of my brother in college when he was killed in an automobile accident. When he joined the Coast Guard he was stationed in Cape May and he would come up and stay with me and play Atlantic City every few weeks or so. He played in a few tournaments, but he was playing so infrequently he didn't win."

In his introduction to James W. Finegan's Centennial Tribute to Golf in Philadelphia, Palmer wrote, "In 1952 and 1953, I was in the Coast Guard, stationed at Cape May, New Jersey, and was able to find time for some golf. Most of it was along the Jersey shore - Atlantic City, Cape May, Wildwood. I played quite a few rounds at Atlantic City Country Club. Leo Fraser was running Atlantic City then - I know that his sons run it today - and sometimes there were some pretty good matches against some of the better amateurs in the area."

"I remember playing against Harry Elwell," Palmer recalled, "and also against Beatle Beirne, who was from Riverton." Palmer also played other local courses, including Ocean City - Somers Point, what is now Greate Bay, where Eddie O'Donnell was the longtime professional. Today O'Donnell works as a teaching professional at the Mays Landing Country Club.

Sure he remembers Arnold Palmer. "I was sitting in the pro shop (at Ocean City - Somers Point) with Harry Elwell," O'Donnell recalls, "and this young man comes in dressed in uniform and asks for the club professional."

"That's me," Eddie replied. Palmer introduced himself. He explained that his father was a club manager at Latrobe Country Club and then looked at O'Donnell sheepishly. "Can I play, Pro?"

O'Donnell asked Palmer if he was an officer.

"No, I'm just an ordinary seaman," he replied.

"Then you can play for free," said O'Donnell.

"If he was an officer, I would have made him pay. I made all the big shots pay," recalled O'Donnell.

Palmer never called Eddie O'Donnell by his name.

It was always, "Pro," in a very respectful manner.

O'Donnell gave Palmer a locker, and he went out on the course for the first time with Harry Elwell, who as club champion, was the best golfer around and a frequent Sonny Fraser Tournament player.

Elwell played with Palmer and O'Donnell, who recalled Palmer as, "a good kid, a good golfer, but nobody ever heard of Arnold Palmer at the time. We played a number of times, and eventually he told us why he joined the Coast Guard."

"Palmer eventually played Atlantic City more than he did Somers Point," said O'Donnell, "and he and Leo Fraser became good friends."

Often seen practicing on the Atlantic City Country Club driving range, Palmer was known locally as a pretty good golfer - one of the many players who shot in the 80s. But that would change.

"He wasn't in college anymore," said O'Donnell, "he as a young amateur who was getting the experience of playing regularly with good professionals and great amateurs, so he must have learned something."

One local player Palmer played Atlantic City Country Club champion Joe Rogers, who later recalled the event to friends, including Stan Dudas. "Palmer could never beat Joe at Atlantic City," Dudas recalls, "because the wind came up and Joe knew how to chip and putt. Joe wasn't a strong player, but he could shoot par and he knew how to play the conditions there. That day he beat Palmer by a stroke or two."

In 1954 Palmer won the U.S. Amateur Championship. "What I liked about him," Eddie O'Donnell said, "was that he could have been the lead man on the Walker Cup team, but he turned that down because he wanted to turn pro."

Years later, while vacationing in Florida, Eddie and his wife Mary O'Donnell watched Palmer play an exhibition match with Sam Snead. As he walked off the green Palmer recognized O'Donnell and stopped to say hello.

"Hey Pro, how you doing?" Palmer said, before he asked about Harry Elwell, who had since passed away.

Palmer then stayed and talked to O'Donnell, holding up the match for awhile, paying his respects to a small link in his life's chain that took him to the pinnacle of what they call the greatest game.

Arnold Palmer's First Course in Cape May

Lost But Not Forgotton

IN SEARCH OF ARNOLD PALMER’S FIRST COURSE – ONLY HE REMEMBERS

In his published memoirs “Arnold Palmer : Memories, Stories, and Memorabilia : from a Life On and Off the Course” (New York : Stewart Tabori & Chang, 2004), Arnold Palmer not only writes about his life and career in golf, but includes replica memorabilia, copies of letters, scorecards and photos that are pasted together like a scrapbook.

Most golfers know the Palmer story, of how he went to college at Wake Forest in North Carolina on scholarship with his best friend Bud Worsham, who was from a famous family of golfers, the younger brother of Lew Worsham, the golf pro at Pittsburgh’s Oakmont who won the U.S. Open.

When young Bud died suddenly in a car accident, Palmer quit school and joined the Coast Guard, which brought him to the training base in Cape May, where he stayed after training and became known locally, though playing golf infrequently.

In his book Palmer recalls, “Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, I shoveled a lot of snow and endured a lot of long, cold winters as a youngster. But the coldest I’ve ever been in my life was the winter of 1951 in Cape May, New Jersey, where I attended basic training for the Coast Guard. The wind whipping off the Delaware Bay that winter cut through me like a sword…”

One bad winter wasn’t enough to send Palmer away however. Palmer writes that during the Korean War, “…I didn’t see any combat. In fact, I didn’t get any further east than Cape May. After basic training the fine officers at our base decided I should stick around New Jersey and train other recruits. I accepted the job because I figured Cape May was a lot better than Guadalcanal and that training recruits, given what I’d just been through, would be fairly straightforward. What I didn’t expect were the ‘added duties’ that came with this assignment.”

Among the “added duties,” Palmer recalls, was the laying out and construction of his first golf course, a none-hole affair on the base. “Golf was a big-time officer sport in the Coast Guard, as was in the other branches of the service after World War II,” write Palmer, “So when the base commander found out I had been the number-one golfer at Wake Forest, I was given a new charge: design and build a nine-hole course on a flat, brick-hard, overgrown vacant field between two airstrips at the base.”

Like his first love, Palmer says he was profoundly influenced by the construction of this nine-holer. “That was the first course I ever designed, and it gave me a profound appreciation for the art of golf course architecture. There’s a heck of a lot more to it than routing holes on a topographical map. My Cape May design was even more demanding because I had to build the darn thing single-handedly. That is a lesson I think a lot of other course architects could learn: It’s one thing to have a vision. It’s quite another to move the dirt and make it happen.”

“To date, I’ve designed over three hundred golf course around the world, but I’ve never forgotten the lessons I learned from that little nine-holer in Cape May….”

“By the time I received my discharge papers from the Coast Guard, my golf game was pretty rusty. In college I had played every day. In the service I was a yeoman first class, trained recruits, built and maintained a golf course, and spent several hours a week as a life-guard at a nearby beach. Golf fell to fourth or fifth on my priority list. Even though I still loved the game and played as often as I could, the demands of my job took precedence.”

While Palmer may have been profoundly influenced by his first course, others failed to notice or even remember the course that Arnie built. William Carson, the public information officer at the Cape May Coast Guard base, who has been there since the 1970s, doesn’t recall a golf course on the base. “I checked with the facilities engineer and while we’re still looking, and will ask the base historian, we can’t come up with anything that proves or even indicates there was a golf course here. We just can’t see it.”

Although Palmer’s description is pretty precise, “…a flat, brick-hard, overgrown vacant field between two airstrips at the base,…” Carson said that they checked old maps, and “while there was a runway there in the late 1940s, there’s no indication of a golf course here, though it’s possible it’s been built on and developed. We can’t come up with anything, but we’re still searching.”

Nor do the local golfers who knew Palmer and played with him here recall him building a nine-hole golf course, though it could have been restricted to officers and men at the Coast Guard base. Ron Ward, longtime Wildwood Country Club golf pro, now at Mays Landing, was with Palmer at the Shawnee Country Club when he first me this late wife Winnie. “I’ve known Arnie since right after he got out of the Coast Guard and won the U.S. Amateur, and that’s a long time, but I don’t recall any course he designed on the Cape May base.”

Jim and Jack Byrne, who played with Palmer back in the 50s, don’t recall him building a golf course, or inviting them to play there either. “I talked to my brother,” Jim Byrne said, trying to refresh their memories back a half-century, “and we can’t recall anything like a golf course on the base.” They speculate that maybe Palmer did design and layout a course at a Coast Guard base where he was stationed, but it was somewhere else.

If not on the Cape May base, where the runways were later replaced by helicopter landing pads, perhaps Palmer laid out his course at the Cape May County Airport, where the old Navy Air Station was located, and where there is two runways and a lot of hard, flat land between them. But local historian Joe Salvatore, at the Naval Air Station Museum there, said there’s no indication there was ever a golf course there either.

While Arnold Palmer still has fond memories of designing his first golf course at the Cape May Coast Guard base, locating it today is as illusive as finding a first and lost love fifty years later. If still there, would be like finding a lost civilization in an overgrown jungle, and if located and revived would make a unique tourist and golf history attraction, but alas, the “nine-hole course built on a flat, brick-hard, overgrown vacant field, between two runways,” is lost history, and now only a fleeting vision etched in Arnie’s memory.

Bill Kelly can be reached at (609) 425-6297 or billkelly3@gmail.com