This time of year, the fields are teeming with Killdeer that call their own name day or night
By Susan Campbell
The killdeer is a small, brown-and-white shorebird that breeds in the Sandhills and Piedmont of North Carolina but is widespread throughout North America. It can be found here year round in the right habitat, but that doesn’t mean you should go looking for it in wetlands. Despite its classification as a shorebird, most of the population lives away from the water’s edge. In fact, for egg-laying, the drier the spot, the better! And in truth, sandy soil like that in the Sandhills, is not that much different from the beaches, where one would expect a shorebird to nest.
This robin-sized bird, not surprisingly, gets its name from its call: a loud “kill-deer, kill-deer” which can be heard day or night. During migration, individuals frequently vocalize on the wing, high in the air. Adults will also circle above their territory calling incessantly in early spring.
On the ground, killdeer are a challenge to spot. They blend in well with the dark ground and practically disappear against the mottled background of a tilled field or a gravel surface. Killdeer employ a “run-and-stop” foraging strategy as they search for insect prey on the ground. As they run, they may sir up insects, which will be easily gobbled up as the birds come to a quick halt. Although they live in close proximity to humans, they are quite shy. Killdeer are more likely to run than fly if approached. When alarmed, they frequently use a quick head bob or two. This may be a strategy to make the birds seem larger than they appear.
During the winter months, flocks of killdeer concentrate in open, insect-rich habitat such as ball fields, golf courses, or harvested croplands. Come spring, pairs will search out drier substrates, preferring sandy or rocky areas for nesting. They may even use flat, gravel rooftops. The female merely scrapes a slight depression where she lays four to six speckled eggs that blend in with the surroundings. She will sit perfectly still on her nest and incubate the eggs for three to four weeks. If disturbed by a potential predator, the female killdeer will employ distractive displays to draw the intruder away from the eggs. This may go so far as to involve feigning a broken wing. Calling loudly and spreading out her tail, the mother bird makes herself as noticeable as possible, limping along and dragging a wing on the ground. This “broken wing act” can be very convincing, giving the predator the idea that following the female will result in an easy meal. Once far enough from the nest, the killdeer will fly off, not returning to the eggs until she is convinced the coast is clear. Should distractions by the adults not be effective, the pair will find a new nesting location and begin again. The species is a very determined nester. Killdeer are capable of producing up to three broods in a summer.
Normally, the eggs hatch almost all at the same time. As soon as they have dried off, the downy, long-legged young will immediately follow their mother away from the nest to a safer, more protected area nearby. They will follow her around for several weeks, being fed and brooded along the way. Once they are fully feathered, the young will have learned not only how to escape danger but how and where to find food for themselves.
So, if you hear a “kill-deer” over the next couple months, stop and look closely: you may be rewarded with a peek into the summer life of this fascinating little bird.OH
Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by email at susan@ncaves.com.
Up a rutted, sandy road in a shaded horse country bungalow, Susan Southard, slight and silver-haired, is researching her next book. Her first, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, is being released in Japan this summer, four years after its American publication. Comprised of stark, intimate portraits of five hibakusha — atomic bomb survivors — it took her 12 1/2 years to tell the stories of a world that changed in a second.
Southard’s first trip to Nagasaki was as a 16-year-old exchange student on a field trip from the girls’ school she was attending in Kamakura, locking arms with her classmates in front of photos and artifacts too terrible for anyone of any age to contemplate. Later, working in Washington, D.C., as an assistant to the executive director of a political and economic consulting firm, she locked emotional arms with Taniguchi Sumiteru, one of the survivors whose life she would later document. She pinch hit as his interpreter for two days and in their private moments, he allowed her to ask any question she wanted — and he answered.
“He was 16 at the time of the bombing,” she says, the same age Southard was when she first saw the effects of it. “By ’44 everyone 14 and older had to leave school and work for the war effort because they had no men left in the country. His job was to deliver mail.”
It was 1945, August 9, two minutes past 11 a.m. “He was delivering mail in the hills, and he was riding his bicycle, as everyone did. He was facing away from the bomb, and the blast came and the heat came, throwing him off his bicycle and onto the ground. His whole back was burned off. It’s unbelievable he stayed alive. He had no skin and seemingly no flesh. He didn’t get medical treatment until December. People were rubbing mechanical oil and newspaper ash on his back. That’s the only thing they had.”
Southard and Taniguchi met in 1986. “I didn’t start the book until 2003, but that was the real seed,” she says.
The book, which received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize co-sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, led to a speaking engagement at the United Nations, addressing the delegates from the balcony at the request of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the organization that was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
Last year, she spoke at a U.N. disarmament conference in Hiroshima and returned to Nagasaki, where she gave talks at two high schools. One of the teachers at the second school was the son of Yoshida Katsuji, another of the hibakusha in Southard’s book, whose face had been wretchedly disfigured by the blast. “Mr. Yoshida was such a dear, sweet, hilarious man. He was charming beyond measure,” says Southard. The school where his son taught English was built on the site of the school his father once attended. “It wasn’t until a week before I went there that I realized it was the exact same location. So, there I was, standing in a school that was built on the premises of the school that was destroyed during the bombing, where Mr. Yoshida had gone to school, telling Mr. Yoshida’s story.”
In the summer of 1990, four years after meeting Taniguchi, Southard and her ex-husband, Eric Black, moved from the humid heat of Washington to the dry heat of Phoenix. (Their grown daughter, Eva, lives in Las Vegas and works for Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen.) Having discovered a social outreach theater company in D.C. suggested to her by the actor Stanley Anderson, Southard quickly founded Essential Theatre, an improvisational acting company working with marginalized communities. It has lasted 29 seasons.
“We use the foundational techniques of Playback Theatre, which was created some 40 or 45 years ago,” says Southard. “It’s an art form where people in the audience tell stories from their lives and we, the ensemble of actors and musicians, create works of art to honor their stories. It’s interactive; it’s improvised performance. When it’s done well, it’s so beautiful and so moving and so theatrical because everybody in the audience has just heard the story and they’re, like, ‘What are they going to do?’”
Lorenzo Aragon has been with the company almost from its inception. “We created a theater that was more about our audiences, and we loved that,” he says. “Our company has always had many colors, many genders, many orientations. Susan wanted the company to reflect what was in the audience.”
Southard doesn’t act anymore. Living 2,100 miles away makes it nearly impossible to nurture the familiarity necessary to be as skillful with the improvisational work as she was with Aragon. “Lorenzo and I have done thousands and thousands of performances together,” says Southard. “If you were telling a story and it’s just the two of us, we can read each other’s mind.”
As an actor, Aragon says Southard, “calls on her experience in life. She’s a stickler for clarity. And versatile. I’ve seen her be Dr. Martin Luther King and I’ve seen her be a baby that’s being born. In fact, I gave her birth one time.”
The theater has branched off into two parts with Southard maintaining her work with Phoenix’s Youth Development Institute, a treatment program for juveniles who have sexually abused somebody. “We have to create a community of trust first,” she says. “Many of them have experienced various levels of abuse and neglect themselves. They’ve been in jail already, and they’ve been adjudicated to this treatment program. So, they’re quite closed down.”
Aragon puts it another way. “When you deal with kids in the joint, you’ve got to be pretty real,” he says.
Progress can be slow. “We teach them basic theater techniques, how to step into a character, how to use imaginary objects as props, how to change your voice,” says Southard. “They have to learn to listen. We see these incremental changes, not in every boy, but most. And the therapists see it. We teach the older boys about metaphor. They think of one of their victims and one of the episodes of an offense, then they write the victim’s story from the victim’s point of view, in first person.” Using the professional actors and other boys from the theraputic group, they perform. “It’s very powerful for everyone in the room. When you’re listening to someone’s story and you’re stepping into their shoes, that is an act of empathy.”
It should come as no surprise that Southard has brought her community involvement skills with her. She will be holding a “Civic Saturday,” her second such event since moving to the Sandhills in 2016, on Saturday, June 15, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., at the Pinehurst Village Hall, at 395 Magnolia Road in Pinehurst. The theme is “Facing the Climate Crisis: Urgency, Action and Hope.”
The Civic Saturdays concept was gleaned from a Seattle program called Citizen University. “Their goal is to promote civic engagement around core values of liberty and ethical responsibility as citizens,” says Southard. The gathering is non-partisan. The stated goal is to “nurture and energize a spirit of shared purpose and effective citizenship around our nation’s creeds of liberty, equality and self-government.” The program will consist of a brief talk by Southard, some music, and readings from American civic literature that could range from excerpts of famous speeches to parts of the Constitution.
And that next book? It remains a secret. “I learned from Nagasaki you have to really choose topics that you’re willing to stay with for years and years and years,” she says.
It’s worth the wait to be the memory of a generation.PS
Jim Moriarty is the senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.
The 1999 U.S. Open has stuck with me, the way it has anyone who ever daydreams about golf instead of more important things, because it was quite a week. The event was a long time coming to Pinehurst, so long that it felt as if it would never occur, that the roster of North and Souths, World Opens, Tour Championships and a lone PGA when FDR was in the White House would never get this kind of fancy company.
“You just assumed it was something that would never happen,” says Curtis Strange, who before winning back-to-back U.S. Opens in the late ’80s won consecutive North and South Amateurs on No. 2 in the mid-’70s.
Then it did, concluding on an oddly cool and drizzly June afternoon as packed with drama as a longleaf pine with needles. Twenty years down the road, Pinehurst’s first Open remains one of the best.
Before it became Payne Stewart’s, the ’99 Open belonged, at least a little bit, to me, to all with close ties to America’s golf capital. As someone born and raised in the area, I’d like to think it still does.
I remember coming to town a month or so before the championship to report a story for Golf World magazine — whose home used to be in the Sandhills and was my professional home for many years — and feeling both anticipation and anxiety about the exposure my hometown was about to receive. Given that the community already was in a growth spurt, the attention from the U.S. Open was going to be an accelerant for that change.
When the USGA announced in 1993 that the Open would be played on No. 2 six years later, the late Brent Hackney wrote in The Pilot: “For Pinehurst, being chosen to host the Open is golf’s equivalent of being the site of football’s Super Bowl, baseball’s World Series or college basketball’s Final Four.”
My preview article reflected the reality of the village’s transition before a shot was struck in the 99th U.S. Open. Pat Corso, then president and COO of Pinehurst, Inc., who had been a key force in the resort’s return to glory under ClubCorp’s ownership, noted the construction of several dozen homes on Pinehurst No. 6.
“You can’t play a hole without hearing a hammer,” Corso told me. “But from where I sit, it’s not so bad. If it’s so bad, why are they all still coming? It’s a matter of perspective. But it’s not the way it was for the resort and it’s not the way it was for those who lived here (before). It’s different.”
As I grew up in Southern Pines during a time when everyone’s world was much smaller, Pinehurst could seem much farther away than 5 miles. In the 1960s and ’70s both places were more afternoon nap than loud party, a sophisticated “Mayberry” of natives and transplants, the latter decades away from moving here in droves.
Charles Price, one of best to ever write about golf, lived in Pinehurst in the middle of the 20th century, as a reporter for The Pinehurst Outlook and Golf World, and visited the village three decades hence before settling here later on. “There was and is something venerable about the place,” Price wrote in Golf magazine in the 1970s, “something almost holy about its atmosphere you can’t find in the newness of Palm Springs and the clutter of Palm Beach. While Pinehurst is nowhere near as graybeard as St. Andrews, it still has a church quiet you won’t find even there.”
When I was a small boy, Pinehurst was mostly a turn we didn’t take driving over to Jackson Springs on Sundays to visit my grandmother. My parents had gone to movies in the theater when they were courting. The Pinehurst golf courses might as well have been in outer space until I got I my first set of clubs in 1969, then they became an aspiration.
I saw them before I played them, walking No. 2 for the first time as a 14-year-old spectator during the two-week-long, 144-hole World Open in 1973, the first professional golf at Pinehurst since the final North and South Open in 1951. I would carry a scoring standard in subsequent tour events — the late Bruce Edwards wouldn’t give me a golf ball one year following 18 holes with Tom Watson, which I kidded Bruce about after becoming a golf writer — and a couple of times took up gallery stakes and rope with some fellow Pinecrest students on the Monday after for $20 and lunch. It was a wonder we didn’t get gored with the sharp end of one of those metal rods, but somehow we avoided injury.
Our high school golf team got to play the No. 1 course a lot, along with occasional rounds on No. 4 and No. 5, with our matches and a local junior tournament held on No. 1. I shot a 72 in one Monday match to lead the team to what was then a school-record total, but compared with the local kids who came along a generation and two later, who could really play, ours was weak sauce.
Getting to play No. 2 was a very special occasion, which meant that my several appearances in the Donald Ross Memorial Junior, a Christmastime staple, were fraught with nervousness. I’ve blocked out what I shot, and hope there is no surviving archive of scores, but I am sure I never broke 90. Once, when I was 22 and well past the point of knowing I would not ever earn a living with a scorecard in my back pocket, I thought I was about to get some revenge on No. 2 for those desultory December days. I was 1 over through 16 holes in a round with three good players but finished with back-to-back double bogeys, the CliffsNotes of a career that never really was.
That was my Pinehurst golf background heading into the ’99 Open but far from all my history there. I was in the crowd when the World Golf Hall of Fame, adjacent to the eastern edge of No. 2, was dedicated in September 1974, with newly promoted President Gerald Ford part of the ceremony for the original 13 inductees.
Seven years later, immediately after graduating from Carolina, I worked at the WGHOF in a brief stint as a greenhorn public relations director. My duties included writing press releases, making appearances with television hosts Lee Kinard of WFMY and Jim Burns of WECT to promote the Hall of Fame Tournament, and putting out buckets under a perpetually leaky shrine-building roof.
We were doing the tournament, which almost didn’t happen because of a lack of funds, on the cheap, and if you watched a commercial for the event that had a close-up of driver meeting golf ball, that was me making contact with my persimmon MacGregor on the fifth hole. It was a good strike, but rest assured not like the prodigious pokes Davis Love III made going around No. 2 in winning the 1984 North and South Amateur, an awesome driving display of accurate power that stands out many years later.
In 1988, our rehearsal dinner was at the Pine Crest Inn, wedding ceremony at Community Presbyterian Church, reception at the Manor Inn. We spent our honeymoon night in the Carolina Hotel, the start of a decade-long marriage that ended in divorce about six months before the ’99 U.S. Open.
While some homeowners in the Sandhills were getting many thousands to rent their houses to visitors for the week of the Open, my mother got enough from Golf World to buy two new mattresses so photographers Steve Szurlej and Gary Newkirk could bunk upstairs with me in our house not far from downtown Southern Pines. (Most of the magazine staff stayed in a rental house in Pinehurst.) It really felt like old home week when I pulled my rented Chevy into the media lot, a.k.a. Pinecrest High School, where for junior and senior years I had parked my aging Ford.
Having covered the Tour Championship and U.S. Senior Open at No. 2, as well at the U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles, within the previous decade, I was no stranger to returning to my hometown on assignment. This time, though, given the gravitas of the event and my place in life — just turned 40 and newly divorced, writing for a publication I’d grown up reading and wanting to work for — it felt a bit like swinging a club with a weighted doughnut around its neck.
Photograph from the Tufts archives
Payne Stewart was just slightly older than me, 42, married and the father of two. He certainly had been a constant presence on the PGA Tour in my golf photography and writing career, known for his old-fashioned swing, the plus fours he wore on the course, liking a good time and, more than occasionally, not treating everyone with kindness. One contemporary of Payne’s told me he was the only fellow pro he ever wanted to punch — not once but twice — and for every memory of a fun-loving competitor is a recollection of when Stewart, a good harmonica player, was off-key, arrogant, churlish.
Stewart’s ability to get over the hump with his manners seems, by most accounts, to have lagged behind his transformation into a tournament winner, which came after lots of close calls that earned him an “Avis” nickname. Once that moniker was mostly history, Stewart still had more than twice as many career runner-up finishes as victories (11), a reality that might have been related to his attention deficit disorder, which was undiagnosed until 1995.
Dr. Richard Coop, a UNC-Chapel Hill education professor and a pioneering golf psychologist, worked with Stewart starting in 1988 and became a dear friend and confidante of his. I got to know Stewart a bit through Dr. Coop, with whom I collaborated on magazine columns and Mind Over Golf, his primer on how to become a better golfer through a sound mental approach. Stewart wrote the foreword for the book, published in 1993. The year after he began seeing Dr. Coop, Payne won his first major, the 1989 PGA Championship. He got some help that day at Kemper Lakes from a poor finish by Mike Reid, and Stewart’s behavior as Reid struggled home was indicative of his immaturity.
Stewart won the 1991 U.S. Open before winning the 1999 edition in Pinehurst, John Garrity in Sports Illustrated writing that while he was among more than a dozen golfers to win two U.S. Opens in a decade, he was the first to do it with two personalities. That was certainly a popular theme around the time that Stewart won in Pinehurst, his demeanor change credited to a newfound Christianity, old-school maturity and a talking-to from his mother, Bee. “I gave him an attitude adjustment,” she told Sports Illustrated. “He’s learned you can’t go around being rude to everyone.”
There was no doubt the fellow who put on a costume every time he teed it up was a real human being, complex to the core.
That made him no different, really, than the golfers with whom he would spar that fateful Sunday in Pinehurst: Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh, Tiger Woods, David Duval.
Any doubts that No. 2 would stand up as host to its first professional major in 63 years were quelled that Thursday when, after an inch of rain Wednesday night, no one torched the place — a quartet of 3-under 67s including Mickelson and Duval leading with Stewart and Woods among those at 68. The ground got firmer and the flagsticks were tucked as the week went on, the ingredients mixing for a fantastic finish on a misty Sunday that could have been ordered by course designer Donald Ross, a native Scot.
Arguably the closely cut grass around the turtleback greens could have been slightly taller to encourage more chips and fewer putts from the fringes, but it still was the most distinctive U.S. Open setup in years, with everything from fairway woods to lob wedges utilized around the putting surfaces, the heart and soul of No. 2.
“It’s not the hardest course I’ve ever played,” said Tom Watson, who won the tour event at Pinehurst in 1978 and ’79, “but it may be the hardest to get the ball close to the hole on the green.”
Through 54 holes Stewart was the only player under par, at 209. In search of his first major and with his wife, Amy, expecting their first child that had him a beeper away from departing, Mickelson was one back with Tiger and Tim Herron at 211. Duval, Singh and Steve Stricker were three behind. The only logjam was on the leaderboard, as pre-Open fears of the village and surrounding towns being overwhelmed by traffic never materialized. Shop and restaurant owners, in fact, were disappointed that customers seemed to be scared away by the imagined congestion.
The golf did not disappoint, though, particularly as the fourth round simmered into a stew of stars. The often-seen attrition of leaders in an Open was replaced with clutch play. Stewart and Mickelson each closed with 70s, as did Woods, with Singh shooting 69. Only Duval sputtered to the clubhouse, with a 75. The final two hours were the very definition of golf drama, the protagonists and plot ranking up there with other great finales in the championship’s history, roars reverberating through the pines, Augusta-like, as if a dormant stage had reopened for the finest actors of the day to perform.
Mickelson and Stewart swapped the lead half a dozen times over the final nine. Woods was never far away either, and when he birdied the par-4 16th to pull even with Stewart one behind Mickelson, the game was truly on, the outcome in doubt. Stewart’s personality, while making it difficult to maintain his focus week in and week out for a whole season, also allowed him to exhibit keen concentration for short periods, particularly under difficult circumstances. (It is not unlike an average golfer being able to execute a fine recovery shot through a gap in the trees because a small, defined target narrows his focus.)
Stewart, wearing a waterproof jacket from which he had scissored off the sleeves himself so his classic swing wouldn’t be constrained, was never more focused than on the last three holes at Pinehurst on Sunday. He faced a double-breaking 25-footer for par that went uphill and then downhill on the 16th, and sank it as if it were for kicks on the putting clock on Tuesday morning. He converted a 3-footer for birdie on the par-3 17th after a gorgeous 6-iron, a birdie Mickelson hadn’t been able to match from inside 10 feet after a wonderful tee shot of his own.
On No. 18, Stewart’s drive finished in a gnarly lie in the wet, right rough. In the distance the chimes from The Village Chapel made the air tingle. Forced to lay up, Stewart would have to pitch and putt for a winning par unless Mickelson was able to sink a sidewinding 30-footer for birdie. Phil couldn’t do it, leaving Payne 18 uphill feet to his second national championship. The stroke was pure and the roar was deafening after the ball dropped into the cup, Stewart’s fifth one-putt on the last six holes, dreamy putting on a magical day.
Arm up, leg out — a pose that became a memory and, too soon for the wrong reason, a statue.
Payne hugged his caddie, Mike Hicks, and consoled Phil Mickelson. When his press conference was over and all the pin flags were signed, Stewart got in a car, trophy at his feet, to ride to Hicks’ home in Mebane, where the hardware was their flute, champagne and white lightning flowing to toast an unforgettable day.
I retreated to my childhood house, to the desk where I used to do my homework to try to type the story. I could hear my mother and my sister downstairs, reliving their Sunday — they had attended, watching for a couple of hours in a grandstand, prior to watching the giddy finish on TV. Ten o’clock became 11 and 11 became midnight, and my laptop screen was still empty, the occasion seeming to put a tourniquet on the flow of my words. Over more than 20 years working for Golf World, I would pull dozens of all-nighters at a computer, the stories solid, sometimes even lyrical. I wrote clean copy and met deadlines. This Sunday night, though, when I most wanted to come through, while Payne Stewart was swilling bubbly in celebration, I fizzled at the keyboard.
Eventually, around a groggy sunrise, I filed my 2,000 words but they weren’t very good words. Someone at our Connecticut office had their way with them after flying back from North Carolina. I didn’t blame them for that, because the article needed more than a little TLC, but didn’t appreciate not getting a crack at making some improvements myself. My byline is on the story, but many of the sentences aren’t mine.
Monday evening, as I ate dinner with my former wife at The Squire’s Pub, homecoming week nearly over, I felt like a loser.
Time, and well-written stories, of course, changed my perception. I got to go to lots of U.S. Opens after that one, unlike Stewart, who died in an aviation tragedy about four months later. I was in baggage claim at LaGuardia Airport late on that October Monday afternoon returning from the Nike Tour Championship when the man who was driving me home said, “Awful about the golfer on the plane.” As my mind scanned for possible victims, someone nearby said, “It was the guy who wore the knickers.”
Twenty years later, I don’t think much about the bad story I filed but the good day the guy in the knickers had in the rain on No. 2. There have been other U.S. Opens at Pinehurst, with more to come, but the first will always stand out. Folks attempt Stewart’s putt and pose with a cast figure that commemorates the defining day of a life cut short. My childhood desk isn’t there for me anymore, but I can go home, where you still hear hammers, bells and, if you use your imagination, the cheers of a misty Sunday, long, loud and happy.PS
Bill Fields has covered more than 100 major championships, including U.S. Opens at Pinehurst in 1999, 2005 and 2014.
The world of golf is chock-full of great father-son stories. Fourteen of the first 30 Open Championships beginning in 1860 were won by fathers and sons from two families — the Willie Parkses (Sr. and Jr.) and the Tom Morrises (Old and Young). Arnold Palmer learned to play from his father, Deacon, the greenkeeper and pro at Latrobe Country Club, and they played golf together on junkets to Pinehurst. Jack Nicklaus nervously ambled around Pinehurst No. 2 in 1985, watching his son Jack II win the same North and South Amateur title the elder Nicklaus had won 26 years earlier.
This summer will mark the 50th rendition of the Sandhills’ oldest tradition invoking dads and their boys. The Country Club of North Carolina’s National Father-Son Invitational was conceived by noted amateur golfer Dale Morey, and the first one was held on the Dogwood Course at CCNC in 1970.
“We think with the quality of golf courses and the tradition we have, the Father-Son is one of the special tournaments in all of amateur golf,” says CCNC Director of Golf Jeff Dotson. “We’ve had teams come from across the country, and it truly is a national event.”
CCNC opened in 1963 on land just to the southeast of Pinehurst Resort and Country Club, and was conceived as Moore County’s first true private golf club and one viewed as a weekend and leisure escape for businessmen and avid golfers from across the state and beyond. Willard Byrd and Ellis Maples designed what would be known as the Dogwood Course. The first nine holes of the Cardinal Course followed in 1970, with nine more added in 1981.
Donald and Jeffery Hall won the inaugural event and were followed in 1971 by Tom and Tom Kite Jr. — the latter at the time a 21-year-old University of Texas golfer. Another future PGA Tour standout, Scott Hoch, won the Father-Son as well, teaming with dad Arthur in 1977 and ’79 when Scott was still playing at Wake Forest.
The tournament is generally held in July — the 25th through the 28th this year — and utilizes both the Dogwood and Cardinal Courses. Both courses have been updated in recent years with modern turf and drainage, with the Dogwood Course getting a complete overhaul in 2015-16 from architect Kris Spence.
The format is to play the Dogwood Course for the first round, the Cardinal for round two, and then Dogwood again for the final round. The first two rounds are better ball and the final 18 is aggregate — both scores counting. So each team posts four scores over three days. If one player is the dominant player, he can carry the team for the first two rounds. But there’s nowhere to hide on the final day.
Ronnie and Hunter Grove have the most titles with five — collecting them in 1990-92, ’98 and 2000. A Senior Division was started in 2000 and a Super Senior Division in 2014, and Tim and Chris Miller have the distinction of being the only team to win in two divisions; they were overall champions in 2007-08 and then graduated to the Senior Division, where they won three straight from 2012-14.
Dick Schwob has been a CCNC member since 1999 and has cherished the times he and son Leighton have teed it up in the Father-Son.
“There is nothing like having three days one-on-one with your son playing the game you love on courses you love,” says Schwob. “We both played sports as kids growing up and have that competitive drive, and this is an outlet for competition and having fun with your son.”
Leighton works for the USGA as director of operations for the U.S. Open, so his summers are busy with travel, but he makes every effort to clear out that weekend for the Father-Son.
“The Father-Son at CCNC is as fun an event as you can have,” the younger Schwob says. “The field consists of a bunch of like-minded fathers and sons from all over the country who love the game of golf. We have met many great people over the years and look forward to seeing them each year.
“But the most important part of this event and what separates it from so many others is the time I get alone with my father out on the golf course. Life can be hectic these days between the Open and the growing family, but getting to spend quality time with my dad playing a sport we both love and are passionate about is as good as it gets.”
Rick Jones Jr. of Youngtown, Ohio, is the only golfer who has won as a son and a father. He was the son playing with Rick Sr. to win in 1980, ’85 and ’86. He was the father playing with son Connor two years ago, in 2017. That 1986 win was notable because in the final round on the Dogwood Course, Rick Jr. aced the par-3 16th, Rick Sr. birdied 17 and both Joneses birdied 18 — that’s 5-under in three holes to come from behind and win.
“It’s the best week of the year,” Rick Jones Jr. says. “It always has been, always will be. CCNC is my favorite place to play golf. I’ve never been anywhere so quiet.”
Bob Dyer and his son Kenny started playing in 1985 and were regulars for more than a decade. Bob is 87 now and says they aged out several years ago, but his affection for the annual trip sparked him and his wife to buy a house in Pinehurst and join the club.
“I finally got here in 2005,” Dyer says. “As soon as I walked into the property in 1985, I said, ‘Wow, this would be a good place to live.’ We had such a good time over the years. It was a wonderful experience.”
One of the interesting dynamics of fathers and sons teaming is melding the experience and strategic thinking of the more mature father with the “what, me worry?” attitude of the younger golfer. And then there is the evolution of age — as the fathers lose their athleticism and distance and their sons become the team leaders.
“You don’t realize how much pressure the dads are playing under,” Jones says. “I had no idea when I was young. When you’re young, you’re just playing and having fun. But the dads are grinding. They tend to choke a bit. You’re grinding so hard for your son. I learned that when Connor and I started playing.”
Kelly Miller, whose family owns the Pine Needles and Mid Pines resorts in nearby Southern Pines, has long been a competitor at the top level of national amateur golf. He’s a member at CCNC and has competed with son Blair often in the Father-Son, the Millers collecting the championship in 2002.
“I guess you’ll always be a father to some degree, but there’s a stage where you want to become a friend as well,” he says. “The Father-Son is a place to do that. You enjoy the time you spend with your son. That part is great. It’s an interesting dynamic as you grow older and your games change. You go from your son depending on you (when he’s younger) and all of a sudden you’re depending on him. It goes full circle.”
The Father-Son Invitational participation history for the Keim family of Erie, Pennsylvania, dates to the late 1970s and includes five golfers over three generations. Jim Keim, a top-ranked amateur golfer in Ohio and later on national levels as a senior golfer, brought his son Michael to the tournament in 1978 when Michael was 16. Another son, Chris, was four years younger, and over the years Keim played with both sons in the event. Michael has two sons, Aaron (now 34) and Alex (32), and both of them have competed either with their father or grandfather.
“It would be difficult to top the experience of playing at CCNC with your dad, your brother and your sons,” Michael says. “The golf courses are spectacular and challenging in every way, and the fact that the staff and the board managed to keep this thing going all these years I think is no small miracle in itself. My dad was very single-minded in his passion for golf over his entire life, and this tournament was perfect to enjoy the game with his sons and grandsons.”PS
For information on the CCNC National Father-Son Invitational, contact Director of Golf Jeff Dotson at (910) 692-1502.
Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst area golf scene for more than 30 years. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com.
The way Iunderstand it, after the Industrial Revolution engineers emerged who could design a machine to perform any task, make almost anything: put toothpaste into tubes, peas into cans, ketchup into bottles. Tires and engine parts scooted off an assembly line. Pills were formed, counted and routed into containers. Buttons were sewn onto shirts with a hammering needle.
Making the machines that made the products became an industry itself — the tool and die trade. We hardly consider the ways and means anymore when purchasing socks or soda, books or baseballs. Metal is molded a million ways, from body parts to car parts. Plastic? Don’t ask.
I’m not too concerned with the mechanism that catapults a spacecraft toward the moon, but as I stare down into a bowl of Cheerios I wonder
. . . do they concoct a sludge of oats, sugar, whatever and pour it into a mold with a trillion little O indentations? What then? Baked, dumped into a silo, I suppose.
Then, the eternal mystery of the aerosol can. If the cream goes in as a liquid, why can’t I hear it swoosh when I shake a full can? Does the gas pressing down silence the cream?
America’s insatiable desire to demystify the wrapping of Hershey Kisses (why the name?) has been assuaged by a display at two factories where machines wrap 33 million a day. But I still don’t know why or how Pringles and other “stackable” potato chips come about.
From a logical standpoint, a potato chip should be made from a potato sliced paper thin, then deep fried — a grand total of two processes if you omit peeling, which is entirely unnecessary. But who wants logical, when the alternative has been peeled, pulverized, flavored, adulterated, formed, fried before the chip clones are stacked in a cylinder.
OK, maybe the package takes up less room in the pantry. But the integrity of the potato is lost.
Oreos require punching out, embossing, baking, filling with the flavor of the month, sandwiching. Makes the machine that pits olives and cherries seem like child’s play.
I found some vindication watching kindly old Italian women hand-twisting tortellini in a Venetian pasta factory. Hope their insurance covers carpal tunnel syndrome. One reason crabmeat is so expensive is that picking out shells remains a task best performed by human eyes and hands.
Speaking of pasta, picture the gadget that extrudes angel hair, the finest strand, and slides the right weight strands into the box, unbroken.
Wouldn’t you love to see the machine that affixes bobby pins to the card?
Here’s the kicker: half a dozen educational TV channels have been trying forever to figure out how the great pyramids were built (the latest being an interior spiral roadway designed by space aliens) without agreeing on a method. Yet, after putting in only two letters my cell phone knows what word I want and insists on being right, rejecting any unfamiliar spelling. Maddening.
Sometimes, capabilities go too far. In his Western movie days, Ronald Reagan popularized “stonewashed” jeans attained after hundreds of wearings and washings. Denim-meisters figured, why wait? So they dumped new jeans into giant metal cylinders laden with rough stones, including pumice. Rotating the cylinders subjected fabric to abrasion. When pumice became scarce, manufacturers turned to cellulose enzymes. Sandblasting promoted fading and fraying. I don’t want to know how they accomplish threadbare knees. Those opposed to cruel and unusual punishment perpetrated against denim hired cowboys to wear a new pair for a year or so. Not really. But used jeans stores were the rage back in the ’70s. Most precious were specimens with the outline of a Marlboro hardpack on the seat pocket, à la the Shroud of Turin.
Some machine-assisted tasks have been immortalized (mocked?) in the American lexicon, like “the greatest invention since sliced bread.” All I know is if the Egyptians could figure out pyramid construction and keep the secret, think how they could improve Cheerios, not to mention Levis.
Yet they consumed barley and spelt, figs and dates, wine but little meat. And they wore simple linen tunics while performing tasks no electronic or human brain can fathom.
Hmm . . . PS
Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.
A Pinehurst palace celebrates its centennial in mod attire
By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by John Koob Gessner
Attention all amateur and professional Pinehurst house historians. Forget everything you saw, read or heard about Thistle Dhu — the 13,000-square-foot Roaring 20s palace built by James Barber, the very same Midas who conceived and constructed, in his yard, America’s first miniature golf course. No kiddie putt-putt, this. Barber’s Lilliput stumped the deftest duffers.
Forget stuffy furnishings, a predictable layout. Instead, whirl into a phantasmagoria of color, art, whimsy, shock. Think pink tufted velvet sofas. A pop-art portrait of Queen Elizabeth. A stairwell mural worthy of 8-year-old Picasso left home alone . . . with fingerpaints. Metallic gold dinette chairs. The mother of all leather massage recliners for après golf. A fitness room and sauna, speakeasy bar and movie theater.
Look up: The living room (in four sections) ceiling is wallpapered in a dizzying metallic kaleidoscope pattern.
Look down: Floors throughout are original narrow heart pine strips stained mink brown.
At last! Those floors, moldings, window panes and upper kitchen cabinets provide a link to an era when wealthy industrialists and their socialite spouses spread money around Pinehurst, the newly chic winter destination.
Then imagine the Barbers’ reaction to such décor hedonism accomplished by young-and-restless owners Patricia and David Carlin, who commute — sometimes by chartered jet with three big dogs — from their primary residence in Park City, Utah.
Upfront, Patricia makes this statement:
“For 20 years nobody cared about this home. It was abandoned, an eyesore. The land was parceled out and the true entrance destroyed.” Then, she continues, she and David fell in love with golf, Pinehurst and the Barbers. They spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours resurrecting a notable historic property, creating an emotional tie to the house and its first family.
The backstory: London-born James Barber and his brother founded Barber Lines in 1886, relocated to America in 1912. By 1917 the company had grown into Barber Steamship Lines of New York, with trading routes worldwide, including Africa, Russia and Australia. Barber merchant ships played a major role in supplying troops during World War I. James Barber’s wealth allowed him to indulge in his passion, golf, at fashionable Pinehurst, where he moved in 1916 and eventually served as Tin Whistles president. Here, he built Cedarcrest, a mansion large and elaborate enough to please his wife and seven children . . . for a while, since in 1919 he built a yet more elaborate home first dubbed Mrs. Barber’s House and later Thistle Dhu, a riff on “this will do” which is what Barber said upon viewing either the house or his miniature golf course. The phrase stuck, given thistles are emblematic of Scotland and Scotland emblematic of golf.
The second house, of Federal Revival style, had Palladian archways framing the front entrance and cost, according to faded documents at Tufts Archives, a whopping $33,000 — about $2 million in today’s dollars.
By 1921, The Pilot called Barber “the biggest force in development of the Sandhills,” for developing Knollwood.
After Barber died at Thistle Dhu in 1928, the house was sold to a Wall Street wheeler-dealer-scoundrel named Michael Meehan, of Good Humor ice cream fame, who deeded the property to the Catholic Church. Nuns from the Daughters of Jesus order in Raleigh renamed it Maryhurst and operated the mansion as a retreat for women.
Imagine the nuns viewing its current flamboyance.
David and Patricia Carlin had never played golf until their honeymoon in 2013, at a Florida resort. After only a few rounds they were hooked — played every day for two weeks, then took road trips from their home in Palm Beach as far north as Hilton Head, where somebody suggested Pinehurst.
“Magical,” Patricia discovered.
Besides golfing through Scotland and Ireland, they continued to visit Pinehurst four times a year, renting houses and riding bikes around town looking for something permanent. Thistle Dhu, in shambles, captured their imagination.
“I figured somebody who knows how to build steamships would build a sturdy house,” Patricia reasoned.
They dug deep into its history, even locating and contacting Barber’s great-great-granddaughter. Finally, they bought it, as well as another house to live in during the renovation, which took almost two years. The floorplan would remain intact except for reducing the bedrooms from nine (or 10, depending on source) to six, thus enlarging the remaining ones. Servants’ quarters near the kitchen became a suite suitable for guests, or even the owners, since Patricia says they sleep all over the house. A corner second floor bedroom became the his/hers dressing room. Bathrooms number 10, meaning never having to travel far. The loos, one with a doggie tub, are notable for their wallpaper — from classic to geometric art deco, to floor-to-ceiling tiny golfers putting away. Linger awhile, and appreciate.
The Carlins’ décor speaks to their lifestyle: young, successful, confident, unencumbered (except for those three frequent-flyer dogs) and, for a project like this, all in. “We don’t plan anything,” David says. Patricia’s mantra is: See it; like it; buy it. Comfort is his. Every stick of furniture, every rug, towel and mug in the house is new. She breezes through a football-field sized furniture warehouse in an afternoon, leaving orders which when delivered fill many rooms. Then, she finishes online at Restoration Hardware. The effect is minimalist punctuated by surprise. That pink velvet on the tufted living room sofa reappears on the master bedroom headboard. Crystal chandeliers are surrounded by metal orbs. Whoever heard of a ping pong table surfaced in planks? Or an oil drum emblazoned with the Chanel logo? The dining room, with original corner cupboards, also houses shrubs trimmed to resemble scoops of ice cream atop 5-foot white “cones.” On the sun gallery stand two year-round Christmas trees. A set of Lucite chairs at the game table channel Frank Gehry — the metallic gold ones in the dinette, probably not. But the couches are definitely Cynthia Rowley.
“If we get bored, we can switch stuff around every year,” David says.
Some rooms have themes, notably the steamship bedchamber with marine blue nautical wallpaper and sailboat art, which makes David feel submerged.
The house had a full basement, unusual for the times except for those with coal furnaces. Here, the nuns built a confessional not far from the existing bar and now, fitness/entertainment equipment.
The intrinsic beauty lies in room size; space allows unusual pieces proper display.
Only the dining room delivers a poignant message. “We’ve never eaten in here,” Patricia says. No Thanksgiving or other dinner has been served on the massive table seating 12. After the housewarming, they hosted no big cocktail parties or cookouts, despite outdoor dining facilities. Because, in truth, although the Carlins feel part of new-generation Pinehurst, they don’t do much day-to-day living at Thistle Dhu. The kitchen — white and pristine as an operating room with a graveyard’s worth of marble — shows no trace of food preparation. The butler’s pantry stands idle.
Instead, rooms are peopled by art, some channeling Beatles-style album covers from the psychedelic ’60s: pop-art Queen Elizabeth competes with a Renaissance damsel wearing ski goggles and paintings suitable as backdrop for Stravinsky’s The Firebird ballet. Still, the piece de resistance has to be the wild brushstrokes in the foyer and up the stairs, inspired by something the Carlins learned from a Beverly Hills (not Versailles) designer.
“We just told the painter to do whatever you want,” David says. “My mother didn’t like it but Kelly Clarkson did.”
The overall effect is startling yet invigorating, representing how fresh, modern concepts transform historic spaces. The Carlins attacked the project of re-imaging a neglected landmark up for auction with verve and attitude. The result is not for everybody, although great-great-granddaughter Kate Barber approved.
A sign in the foyer warns: “For some people, you will be too much. Those aren’t your people.”
Their mission accomplished, David and Patricia may move on, perhaps new construction overlooking a Pinehurst course. Patricia misses her family, who now live in Arizona. Come winter, the avid skiers head back to Park City.
