If you’veever experienced a Carolina summer, you’ll know that the heat and humidity are enough to beat you down to the point you’ll ask a bartender for a Zima. Almost. Instead of having 10 drinks on a menu that each have a hundred steps before the bartender can put that lifesaving, cool drink in front of you, I learned to integrate punches and bottle cocktails that could be served as quickly as pouring a glass of wine. Another batched elixir that’s perfect for taking the sweat out of summer is a frozen cocktail.
I remember going to the bowling alley with my family in the early ’90s and seeing a daiquiri machine. Daiquiri-schmackeri. All I knew was that it looked like something for kids but that I wasn’t allowed to drink it. Once I was of age, I finally got to have a frozen cocktail of my own in New Orleans. I honestly can’t tell you if those slushy hurricanes were nice and balanced. I was in my early 20s. It was the Big Easy. I wasn’t very balanced myself. Trends come and go, but luckily for cocktails, we’re blessed with creative men and women behind the bar who can make what was once unpalatable, desirable. So, I headed out to a few bars and restaurants in the Triangle to learn their tricks for getting frozen cocktails just right.
The restaurant scene in downtown Durham has exploded in the past decade. A town that once took a backseat in the culinary department to neighboring Raleigh isn’t in the shadows anymore. Dashi, a Japanese ramen shop and izakaya (the word for a Japanese pub that’s located above the restaurant), has only had its doors open for a few years, but the combination of yummy and speed keep their guests coming back for more.
All of the cocktails at Dashi are made in the izakaya. “So, when the staff downstairs are really busy, they push these,” says bar manager Gabe Turner, pointing to his slushy machine. “They’re delicious, too, so it’s not like we’re sacrificing quality for efficiency.”
Purchasing a slushy machine was a no-brainer for Turner. “When we started fooling around with recipes, we stumbled into a pretty good template,” says Turner. “We don’t like to use too much sugar. Using an oleo-saccharum (oil-sugar) helps us keep a nice balance in our drinks.”
And you won’t find Gabe and Co. doing frozen margaritas. “The style we’re doing is a Japanese cocktail called chuhai, which traditionally is sh¯oōch¯uū (a fermented Japanese liquor made from sweet potato, barley, rice and other ingredients with a relatively low alcohol proof) and fresh juice. In Japan, they call them sours. The idea was, ‘Let’s do frozen chuhais.’ We used sh¯oōch¯uū, fresh juice, and then sake to round it out. To get the alcohol level up, we’ll add a little bit of vodka, but not enough to change the flavor profiles.”
One of Dashi’s current chuhai slushies combines the classic ingredients along with a spicy ginger syrup, orange oils and juice. How popular are the frozen chuhais? “I’ll make a whole batch of our slushy cocktails every week,” says Turner. Each batch serves around 50 8-ounce drinks. “We use the Bunn slushy machines and have a second machine in the back, so they don’t get too burned out. They’re being used 24/7.” If it’s not slushy season — a rarity at Dashi — two weeks is the longest they’ll keep a batch before letting the staff dip into the leftovers. “Rarely does it not sell out,” Turner says. Too bad for the staff. Dashi carries two different slushy cocktails at a time — a quick and cool option for a bar otherwise known for its myriad sake and sh¯oōch¯uū bottles.
What if your establishment (or you) doesn’t want to invest, or can’t find room, for a slushy machine? Get creative. A block away from Dashi, the chic cocktail lounge Alley Twenty-Six has its own twist on frozen drinks. Longtime bartender Rob Mariani, formerly of Alley Twenty-Six, says, “While a slushy machine is on the wish list, we don’t have one. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t make frozen drinks. By using crushed ice and giving it a good shake, you can get a drink that mimics a slushy and has a similar dilution rate. One would think that smaller ice melts faster than larger ice, which would be true if we were looking at two cubes melting on their own, but when you pack a glass full of crushed ice, there is lots of surface area, and the dilution rate is quite slow.”
Mariani has mastered the technique and suggests adding a bit more sugar to your specs. “The ideal ABV (for a frozen cocktail) is about 10 percent and the max is around 18 percent. Anything above that will not result in a frozen texture. Bitterness and sweetness are suppressed by cold temperatures, so more sugar is needed to achieve a balanced, frozen drink,” he says. “Up your sweet by 50 percent. For example, instead of using 1/2 ounce of simple, use 3/4 of an ounce.” There are many ways to master a frozen cocktail — having a machine constantly rotating the perfect, temperature-controlled slushy is one — but there are multiple ways to skin an ice cube, at home or away. Mariani shares one of the frozen cocktail recipes he uses for his weekly Cap’n Rob’s Waikiki Wednesday.
Frozen Rum and Tonic
1 1/2 ounces aged rum
3/4 ounce tonic syrup (Mariani uses his own Alley Twenty-Six Tonic.)
3/4 ounce pineapple juice
1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
4 dashes Angostura bitters
Combine all ingredients (sans the bitters) with crushed ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake like hell or until you can’t feel your hands. Pour into a Pilsner glass. Top with crushed ice and four dashes of Angostura bitters. Garnish with a large sprig of mint and dehydrated lime wheel.PS
Tony Cross is a bartender (well, ex-bartender) who runs cocktail catering company Reverie Cocktails in Southern Pines.
His favorite book is No Death, No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh.
On a lushfour acres of land nestled between Chapel Hill and the Haw River, 24-year-old Raimee Sorensen spends his days growing, harvesting, assembling and delivering stunning bouquets and custom flower arrangements. According to his mother, Rebecca, “He emanates joy.” The oldest of three siblings, Raimee works alongside Rebecca and a small, devoted team of farmers. It’s clear that everyone at Blawesome flower farm is dedicated to two things: delivering high-quality, organically grown flowers to the waiting hands of their customers and ensuring that everyone on the farm has the opportunity to live and work to their full potential, including Raimee, who has a diagnosis of autism and epilepsy.
“When given the opportunity to be amazing and successful,” says Rebecca, “folks with disabilities will rise to meet that challenge. If we are able to provide more opportunities for folks with disabilities to be successful, then I think we would see a moral shift in our communities.”
And farming is certainly challenging. “There are always opportunities to problem solve,” Rebecca says. “It’s very cerebral work.” In the morning, Raimee looks at his check list and gets to work, deciding how much preservative solution to add to which type of flower and what kind of tool is necessary to harvest each variety. “And when he takes his bouquets out into the world, he gets the confirmation of ‘You’re a wonderful farmer, and you grow amazing things,’” Rebecca adds. From season to season, Raimee’s knowledge and confidence have grown, and Rebecca has seen the skills he’s learned on the farm transfer to other areas of his life. For example, when they host tours and workshops on the farm, Raimee is able to share his knowledge about what’s going on in each production zone, and if someone asks a question, it’s Raimee, despite challenges with expressive and receptive language, who often chooses to answer it.
Before starting the farm, the Sorensens homeschooled Raimee for eight years, and during that time, they set up community internships where he could explore a number of opportunities while building varying sets of skills. He particularly excelled at a community farm where he volunteered for four years. He enjoyed being outdoors and working alongside others. Eventually, the Sorensens enrolled Raimee in a charter school specifically geared toward students with disabilities, but when the school abruptly shut down, they realized they needed to find an opportunity for him to achieve his greatest sense of independence. Better yet, they would create one.
Initially, the Sorensens’ decisions were practical. They had a 1/4-acre strip of land alongside their driveway, and based on how Raimee performed in his work at the community farm, they decided to cultivate the small area into a flower garden. After all, he was good at growing things, and he enjoyed connecting with the community. What better way to connect with others than by putting fresh flowers in their hands?
Raimee was not the only Sorensen with a background in farming and a love for flowers. Rebecca grew up in rural northeastern Pennsylvania with a father who was an avid gardener. In high school, she worked at and eventually managed a greenhouse, and later, on the other side of the country, she worked at an organic farm, growing peppers and houseplants in greenhouses in Oregon. She felt confident that she and Raimee could turn this small plot of land beside their house into a successful venture that would allow them to explore their interests and talents.
And then the four-acre lot next door went up for sale. Rebecca and Raimee’s vision for what they could do grew, and the family shifted again.
After purchasing the land, Rebecca applied for a micro-enterprise grant. The initial grant was for $5,000 but after completing the application, she learned that more money was available. She went back to the drawing board, carefully envisioning a project and wrote a proposal that eventually won a $50,000 state grant from the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. The shift had happened. The Sorensens were now owners of land that would become a flower farm, and all they had to do was build it.
Working with a team of land specialists and local farmers, the Sorensens grew intimately familiar with their new land, working to create a plan that was realistic in terms of what they could grow and harvest with their small crew. At the same time, Rebecca, whose background is in social work, was traveling the state, leading workshops on affordable housing for adults with mental illnesses. She met an architect from Elon University whose son had a diagnosis, and he suggested that they work on a project together. He went on to design the barn on the Sorensens’ new property, and he brought out teams of university students to help construct it. He would later design the home where Raimee and a supported-living provider live.
Blawesome was born, and the flower farm that began on a small strip of land beside the family’s driveway grew into a working farm that provides fresh flowers for everything from weddings to businesses, plus events at UNC-Chapel Hill.
But no matter how much the Sorensens had been willing and able to shift over the years, COVID presented an incredible challenge. They lost national contracts with huge corporations. Weddings were cancelled, and the university moved nearly all of its business online. But people still wanted flowers, and Blawesome met that need. Individual orders soared, as did memberships in their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), which provides seasonal flowers year-round to subscribers. “The community just came out and lifted us up in a way we could’ve never anticipated,” Rebecca says. “It was extraordinary.”
That says a lot coming from someone who has seen extraordinary things happen, both in her family and in her community. Raimee took medication for obsessive compulsive disorder for eight years, and then he was able to stop taking it one year after starting the farm. He has epilepsy, but according to Rebecca, he’s had only one seizure in the same time span. “You can pull Raimee’s Medicaid file for the past four years and see that he has not accessed any of the services he used to access since we started the farm, because he’s happier and healthier than he’s ever been,” she says. Both Raimee and the farm are thriving. “A lot of people in his situation don’t get told how special they are,” she adds.
But it is hard work, and the work never stops. “I don’t know if people understand how completely consuming farming is. It’s a lifestyle,” Rebecca says. “I like that for Raimee because it’s every part of his day. There’s not any time when he’s not thinking about it or planning for it or anticipating something, but it’s pretty miraculous to be part of something that is a living, breathing organism. I feel like I’m surrounded by miracles all the time.”PS
Wiley Cash is the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. His new novel, When Ghosts Come Home, will be released this year.
His all-time favorite book? Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.
Patrick Dougherty’s most recent sculpture, What Goes Around, Comes Around, blossomed in three weeks from a dogwood flower. After laying a few petals on the ground, the internationally renowned artist, who grew up in Southern Pines, posed himself a question: “What could we do if these flower petals had walls and became something else?” What they became was the large stick sculpture that stands, for as long as Mother Nature will allow, behind the visitors’ center of the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens at Sandhills Community College.
Dougherty and a cadre of volunteers worked for three weeks in June creating the piece. “We drilled a series of holes around the perimeter of our footprint, set scaffolding and bent those limbs over into the shapes you find out there,” he says. Like drawing on a canvas, Dougherty uses additional sticks to give the outer wall of the sculpture its flowing surface. He and his crew spent the last few days “really, erasing things we didn’t like” and sprucing (no pun intended) up the installation so people could walk through it and interact with it.
The commission was a chance for Dougherty, who graduated from the old Southern Pines High School on May Street, to reconnect with the community, and friends, of his youth. “Everybody that I knew in a previous lifetime ended up coming back and talking to me,” says Dougherty. “And I look at all the new friends I made. My volunteers. Each person brought their own story, their own expectations. They know about me, so I get to understand about them.” And leave a door to the imagination behind.
The stitch was starting to come undone, shedding fine, thin threads at the corners of her mouth. For as long as she could remember, she had never seemed to notice it — a ribbon the color of dust woven tightly around her lips. It had been there ever since she was a child, ever since her mother taught her how to roll her first grape leaf, ever since her grandmother read the thick, musty grounds of Turkish coffee at the bottom of her first kahwa cup. By the time she did notice it, she was a mother herself, devoting her energy to her husband and children, her feet firm in the fabric her family had sewn. When she awakened one morning to find the stitch unraveling, a wild terror overcame her. She dared not tug at the loose ends of her stitch in fear her world would unspool.
She paused to think now as she hurried to complete her chores before her children returned from school. What was it that had snagged her stitch loose now, after all these years? She wondered if she had done something wrong. The worst thing a woman could do was question her condition. Her mother had told her that once. Only she’d barely been thinking lately. She knew such freedoms were the province of boys and men, not for women, whose delicate fibers were spun like webs on the kitchen curtains like a daily reminder. Not for a woman whose life was a tight pattern overlapping her mother’s. There was nothing to think about. Things have always been this way.
She closed her eyes to the image of her 7-year-old face as she waited in line at the fabric store. Mama had prepared her for the stitching tradition the way Mama’s own mother had done before, wrapping her unruly hair and staining her hands with rust-colored henna. While all the other young girls had locked their eyes on the brightest ribbons, her gaze fell quietly on a strand as pale as wheat. She snatched it, gripped it close to her chest. She thought if she must endure the numbing and needling, the pain that comes with saying words too full, the swallowing of thoughts, the stitch should at least blend in with her olive skin. Others should never know.
She stood over the stove now, her afternoon chores completed. The steam from an ibrik of mint chai prickled her stitch. She felt her mouth stiffening, a burning sensation around the edge of her lips. In the distance, she could hear the sound of a school bus, then her two children approaching — a boy of 8, a girl of 6. She tucked her thoughts away. She didn’t want them to notice her loose stitch, confusing them, or worse, igniting their curiosity. She had no answers to the questions they might ask.
The oven clock read 7 p.m. by the time she finished helping the children with homework and cooking dinner. More than once she considered calling her husband to ask when he would be home. But each time she stopped herself. It would be unseemly to question him, to ask where he was or what he was doing as if he wasn’t working the way she was working. Only what if he wasn’t? She teased her loose stitch with the tip of her henna-stained finger before pulling it away. No, she shouldn’t question such things.
Growing up, Mama had said the stitch would make her more desirable, not only in the eyes of men, but also women, who were taught to see beauty in lips that were tightly sealed. Yet it was Mama who originally suggested that she choose a ribbon that would blend in. A plain ribbon will help you endure the pain, Mama had said, holding her hand at the fabric store, steering her down the fig-colored aisles. She could see other mothers in the aisles too, smiling as they helped their daughters select their ribbons. Some ribbons had the luster of pride and joy; others had a glow of satisfaction. But not hers. She had wondered why her mother steered her to a ribbon that was barely visible, and why she even needed to get a ribbon at all. What would happen if she decided not to get a ribbon, like some of the unstitched women she knew? She wondered what her world would be like without a stitch around her mouth.
The next thing she knew, the thought escaped her lips. “What if I don’t want to get a stitch?”
“Nonsense,” Mama said, shaking her head.
“But not every woman gets stitched,” she said, frozen in the center of the aisle. “The woman who reports the news doesn’t have one. Or the widow who opened up the pharmacy in town. Or even the girl who lives a few blocks away from us.”
Mama fixed her with a glare. “This is the way things are, daughter. It’s always been this way.”
Soon after the stitching she began to feel a burning sensation in the corners of her mouth, the quiet ripping of flesh. She did what she could to dull the pain, swapping out words, shortening thoughts, sometimes even getting rid of ideas altogether. Some words, she realized, would never be hers to say. Maybe her mother was right. After all, women were woven with a fabric meant to endure the knots and coils of their lives, like carrying the bulbous world in their center. The stitch was just another natural difference, another law of womanhood.
Now there was a sound at the front door, then the twist of a lock, and quickly she turned off the faucet, dried her hands, tucked a strand of dry hair behind her ear. She felt the tip of the dusty wheat ribbon tickle her hands, like the touch of her grandmother’s finger when she read her palms as a child. What would her grandmother say if she knew her stitch was coming undone? What would Mama say? Surely they would tighten it. Her stitch was supposed to last a lifetime, a legacy passed along generations. A loosened stitch was the ultimate disgrace, a shame that would swallow her family whole. Wasn’t it her grandmother who said that no good can come from a wide-mouthed woman? And hadn’t Mama agreed, unquestioning, stitching her lips before she learned how to question? Well she was a mother now, to a daughter whose mouth would soon need stitching. She swallowed a lump in her throat. She didn’t like to think of it.
Her husband awaited her at the kitchen table, glancing at her with knitted brows. There was a silence between them, one which she had learned not to mind, and she hurried to pour the lentil soup into four bowls. A blanket of steam covered her face and she withstood the temptation to open her mouth, if only for a moment, and stretch the stitch loose. She could feel her children watching her and she didn’t want them to see her this way, opening her mouth in such an unnatural position, the contortions of her face the opposite of womanly. No — there are some moments a child will never forget, like the sound of a mother’s tears, roaring like rain against the roof. Her children shouldn’t have to feel what she felt now, a mountain of memories clung to her chest. She decided she would only stretch her stitch when no one was watching.
Somehow at the dinner table, she could hear her grandmother in her ear, the same way she had heard her as a child. Sayings and lessons, like fortune cookies hanging from her ears. “A woman belongs at home,” her grandmother would say. “No good will ever come from a woman thinking.”
Her husband cleared his throat, bringing her back to the room. “I have to travel for work tomorrow,” he said.
“Where to?” She let the words leak through her stitch as if by accident so as not to make her mouth hurt. It was a trick her mother taught her.
“A conference in D.C.,” he said, shoving soup into his mouth as if to purposely end the conversation.
She said nothing, having learned from a young age to find safety in silence. She placed a crumb of bread between her slightly parted lips and clenched hard.
Dinners were the same every night, with her husband sitting at the end of the table and all three of them curled around him like children. More often than not, one of them would signal her, and, as if wired to be true to her nature, she would drop her food and leap with eagerness, refilling cups and bowls, smiling to the rhythm of clinking spoons. Look how much they need me, her tender heart would whisper as she scurried around the table. Delighted, her husband would look at her and smile as if to say: Look at the family we’ve created, you and I. Look at what we’ve done.
Only tonight, huddled around the dinner table with her family, she could hear another whisper: What has she done?
The question grazed her stitch, bitterness on her tongue. She looked up at her daughter and felt a tide of guilt rolling in her chest. For a long time, she studied her daughter’s face, resting her eyes on the dull brown mole on her left cheek. All she could think of was the fine needle, slithering up and down her lips like a snake. Soon her daughter would be 7 years old, and what could she do then? She couldn’t stop it. Lately she had begun to think the stitch was the reason she only had two children. Her mother-in-law never missed an opportunity to remind her to get pregnant, as if she had somehow forgotten her duty. In fact, she closed her legs purposefully at night, feigning exhaustion or sleep, or when she was particularly distressed, a desperate sadness. On those nights she felt an ache swelter not only from her stitch but from a place buried inside her. But now, looking at her daughter’s mouth, thinking of what was soon to come, never had she felt a pain deeper than the shame of mothering another girl. She wondered if her son knew how lucky he was.
Her husband, noting the strain on her face, scrunched his eyebrows in a knot. “Is there something wrong?”
She met his eyes and instantly turned red. Had her face betrayed her? Had her thoughts escaped her stitch? “No, no,” she whispered. “Nothing’s wrong.”
He lowered his gaze to the bowl, stirred the soup fiercely before scooping a spoonful into his mouth. Swallowing at once, he said, “There’s something on the corners of your mouth.” He handed her a rag. “Here, wipe.”
Calmly she took the rag from his fingers and pressed it against her stitch. She looked at the stain: it was blood.
Her husband stared at her in silence before clearing his throat. “Careful now,” he said, reaching over to tighten her stitch. “The children and I need you around.”
At that, her children looked at her in their usual way, their eyes glistening with the past and future as if always to remind her. It was as though they’d made a permanent mark upon her heart from which she could never escape. No, she would never escape. In awe of herself, she swept the thought away. Wasn’t she a believer of God, a believer in His will? If He wanted her this way, with this stitch around her mouth, then surely it was for the best. Besides, did she want to be like some of the unstitched girls she knew, still in their mother’s house, unmarried — or worse, divorced — an ocean of shame in their ribs? Of course she didn’t want that. Yet within herself, she didn’t understand why she couldn’t be happy. Inside she could hear all the women, and all the women she could hear were tired. She bit the inside of her lip, swallowing her thoughts. She could hear a whisper in her ear. Be thankful, or God will take it all away.
The days passed and her stitch kept bleeding: at the dinner table, during the day, whenever she stopped to think about it. Only when she wasn’t thinking did she seem to forget the uncomfortable grip around her mouth. But soon enough she would remember, feeling the heaviness in her mind sink into her lips whenever she spoke. Then the sound of a stitch unraveling, then the taste of blood. Sometimes it felt as if her mouth was only one stitch away from slitting all together, as if at any moment a thought would come and undo everything. Her life as she knew it. She became afraid. Then she began to wonder: Perhaps it’s all my fault. Perhaps I am being unreasonable. And even though there were no noticeable changes in her, all she could think of was what would become of her life if she let the stitch unravel. This fear had become an everlasting whisper in her chest which no amount of thinking could get rid of.
Four months passed. The day had finally come. Outside, the sky hung oppressively low, suffocating her. Quietly she reached for her daughter’s hand as they walked into the fabric store. The room was made of glass, with gold circles glistening across the walls. Between the brightly colored aisles, she thought she could hear, very faintly, the silent sounds of sorrow. She let go of her daughter’s hand. From a distance she watched her reach for a dusty pink ribbon, almost identical to her own. Her heart swelled in her chest. She could feel her stitch ripping open, blood leaking from her lips, desperate to spare her daughter. But she said nothing.
How she sewed the ribbon, how she stitched her daughter’s mouth — none of that could she remember later. Only one thought came to her now: the mild expression of submission painted on her daughter’s face as if it had been given to her since birth. Alone, she studied her own stitch in the mirror with shame. She ran her fingers along the edges of her lips, dug them into the corners as if to rip the ribbon out. Trembling, she tried to keep from screaming. She could taste her mother on her stitch and it made her weep.PS
The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She has a Masters of Arts in American and British Literature as well as undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and English and has taught undergraduate courses in North Carolina, where she lives with her two children. Etaf is also the founder of @booksandbeans. A Woman Is No Man is her first novel.
All-time favorite book: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Donald and Aleck Ross left indelible marks on golf and Pinehurst
By Bill Case
Even the closest of brothers look to pulverize one another in competition. This was undoubtedly the case at the North and South Open held at Pinehurst Country Club in April 1907. The tournament hinged on the battle between Scottish ex-pat siblings, both employed as professionals at Pinehurst CC — head man Donald Ross, 34, and his kid brother and assistant, Aleck (Alec or Alex) Ross, 27.
Outdistancing their fellow competitors, the Rosses stood deadlocked atop the leaderboard after Saturday’s morning round with identical scores of 73. Donald took charge during the afternoon’s closing 18, surging to a comfortable lead of four strokes over Aleck with six holes to play. But a couple of loose shots by Donald frittered away half of the cushion, and his regrettable 7 on the 16th dissipated it altogether. The Ross brothers finished the championship tied again, but Aleck capped his comeback by winning the playoff. His third North and South title equaled Donald’s victory total in the event.
For Aleck, the triumph ignited his greatest year of golf, 1907, while it would also mark a critical milestone in Donald’s life: His crowning architectural achievement, Pinehurst’s No. 2 course, would debut later that year.
The Ross brothers’ emergence as notable figures in American sport could not have been foreseen during their youth in Dornoch, Scotland, a remote northerly town in the Scottish Highlands. The eldest of four brothers (John was two years younger, Aleck seven and Aeneas nine), Donald was drawn to golf at an early age and frequented the local course at every opportunity. But, as the eldest, Donald was expected to support himself financially at an early age. It seemed a pipe dream to be able to make a living from golf in his home village — Dornoch Golf Club did not even employ a professional. The boys’ father, Murdo Ross, a stonemason, steered his sons toward traditional trades like his own and, at age 14, Donald began an apprenticeship with local carpenter Peter Murray. While the woodworking skills he acquired would prove useful, Donald found shopwork overly confining.
The lad was much more interested in the comings and goings at the local club where Old Tom Morris of St. Andrews had just transformed Dornoch’s seaside links into a magnificent test of golf. The lure of the redesigned links was irresistible to the oldest Ross boy. He spent every spare hour outside the carpentry shop there, caddieing and playing, and quickly developed into a stellar golfer.
Dornoch GC’s secretary, John Sutherland, impressed with Donald’s talents, thought he might be the right man to become the club’s first golf professional, but he believed the young Ross, by then 19, needed further seasoning. Who better to provide it than Morris? Old Tom had mastered the varied skills required of professionals: greenkeeping, clubmaking, instruction, competitive playing — he was four times the “Champion Golfer of the Year” — and managing the disparate needs and bruised egos of members. Disregarding his parents’ wishes, Donald headed south to St. Andrews in 1892 to begin an apprenticeship with the legendary Morris. So miffed was the family that Donald’s mother, Lillian, refused to speak to Sutherland for some time.
In The Life and Times of Donald Ross, Southern Pines author Chris Buie suggests that Ross’ exposure to Old Tom’s multi-layered role at St. Andrews would be the “template Ross used in his approach to Pinehurst and the development of American golf.” Following his apprenticeship with Morris, Ross received additional training in Carnoustie at Simpson’s Golf Shop, founded in 1883 by renowned clubmaker Robert Simpson.
In November 1893, Ross returned to Dornoch and became the golf club’s professional, a job he enjoyed except for the tedium of greenkeeping. “What I really did was to go out in overalls on my hands and knees and care for the turf and the bunkers and the greens,” Ross said. “And how I used to hate it. But, as it turned out, that was the best training I could have had for what turned out to be my future.”
Aleck, 14, and a natural golfer, joined his brother in the Dornoch shop. “Being the older brother, it was left to me to order him about occasionally, and, as you would expect, he generally told me to mind my own business,” Donald said. It made for a busy, though not particularly prosperous, life for the golfing brothers. In the 1890s, Dornoch Golf Club (now Royal Dornoch Golf Club) was far from the must-play golf destination it is today. Given its backwater inaccessibility — the closest railroad station was 7 miles distant — few outsiders visited Dornoch. If intrepid Harvard professor Robert Willson had not made his way to the town during his 1898 holiday abroad, the Ross brothers might never have left the Scottish Highlands.
Recently hooked on golf, the American arranged for a series of lessons from Donald that resulted in the educator’s rapid improvement. The delighted prof was doubly pleased with Donald’s recommendation of a local tailor who took care to measure both of Willson’s sleeve lengths — an unusual nicety.
Impressed with Donald’s acumen, Willson advised him to consider emigrating to America, indicating that golf was new in the country and there was money to be made. “He said I could make 50 cents an hour for lessons,” recalled Ross in an interview. “You see that was three times what I was making in Dornoch.” Willson also urged Donald to “call him up” should he ever find his way to Boston.
Ross wasted little time mulling over the pros and cons of leaving Scotland. By March of the following year he was bidding adieu to Aleck and the rest of his family and sailing off on the ship Majestic to New York. Once in America he boarded a train for Boston, arriving at that city’s South Station with $2 in his pocket. Ross sought to contact Willson in hopes the Harvard professor would assist him in getting settled. After a kindly operator showed the perplexed Scot the vagaries of using a telephone, Ross was able to reach his lone American friend. The professor told him to take the trolley to his home but, fearful of exhausting his limited resources, Ross hiked the 8-mile distance. Willson greeted his erstwhile swing instructor with a sandwich and a glass of milk.
As luck would have it, the fledgling Oakley Golf Club, where Willson was a charter member, was looking to hire its first professional. With the professor vouching for Ross’ credentials, he was quickly hired. While Ross was getting settled into his new post, there was an unforeseen development in the construction of the Oakley course. Several holes required re-routing after the club failed to renew a lease on the land where the holes were supposed to be built. Adding to this chaotic state of affairs was the unavailability of the course’s architect due to illness.
The desperate Oakley board asked Ross if he would take charge of relocating the holes. Their new professional had hands-and-knees experience with turf maintenance and proper drainage. So, why not? He assured the board he was up to the task.
With the additional responsibilities thrust upon him, Ross persuaded the Oakley board to hire a second professional to give lessons and assist with clubmaking. The man he had in mind was an ocean away — his brother, Aleck. Soon, the younger Ross, now 21, made his own Atlantic crossing, joining Donald at Oakley.
By the fall of 1900, the new holes laid out by Ross were ready for play. His surehanded work received rave reviews, and the grateful Oakley board paid him $2,000 for his efforts. The dutiful son promptly forwarded the windfall to his mother in Dornoch. It was Donald’s first taste of the kind of money that could be earned by designing golf courses.
Ross’ efforts drew the attention of wealthy New Englanders, including soda fountain magnate James Walker Tufts, who had founded Pinehurst and its resort five years before. Tufts had originally conceived Pinehurst as a restful haven that would furnish fellow Northeasterners a soothing place to restore their mental and physical health. In particular, he courted sufferers from tuberculosis. Once it was discovered that the disease was communicable, Tufts needed a new business plan. Ultimately, he redirected the resort’s marketing campaign to emphasize golf and other outdoor activities. Sensing that Ross could enhance Pinehurst’s golf profile, Tufts offered him the head professional position. Donald was amenable but with two caveats: It had to be a package deal that included Aleck, and the Ross brothers would be permitted to retain their summer positions at Oakley. A deal was struck and on December 5, 1900, the Rosses arrived in Pinehurst and established quarters in the Casino Building.
Tufts did not hire Donald for the purpose of designing new courses. The resort already featured a challenging 18-hole course. A second pitch-and-putt layout, played mostly by ladies, was opened during the brothers’ first season in Pinehurst. Donald did, however, initiate course improvements, lowering tees and acquiring a steam-powered machine to roll the resort’s sand greens.
The brothers were often called upon to compete in exhibition matches for the benefit of the resort’s guests. Many were new to golf and keen to observe how experts played the strange game. Well-heeled patrons passed the hat, building a purse to add some buzz to the matches. Sometimes the siblings teamed together in four-ball matches, but more often wound up on opposing sides. While the Rosses rarely faced each other in one-on-one exhibitions, they played numerous individual matches against visiting professionals. One such opponent was English pro Bernard Nicholls, who had the temerity to defeat the host pro, Donald, in a singles match in the spring of 1901.
A revenge match was scheduled days later between Aleck and Nicholls. It would be the kid brother’s first big test in an individual exhibition and came, no less, against a player who was known to have defeated the great Harry Vardon the previous summer. Aleck routed Nicholls, posting a medal score of 152. The Pinehurst Outlook reported that his performance “was one of the best exhibitions of golf ever seen here” and that older brother Donald was “highly elated.”
As the Ross brothers’ first Pinehurst season wound down, the Outlook praised their teaching skills. “Pinehurst has been very fortunate in having two such instructors as Donald and Aleck Ross . . . They have the faculty of imparting to others the science of the proper stroke to make a successful drive.”
A formidable team, the Ross brothers integrated themselves into Pinehurst society. Both men were elected honorary members of The Tin Whistles, the club’s male golfing society. As professionals, they rarely participated in the Whistles’ weekly competitions, but they could be counted on to attend dinners and other social events.
https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/stereo.1s19006
The Rosses commuted between their jobs in Massachusetts and North Carolina depending on the season. While Donald summered at Oakley, Aleck moved on. In 1905, after a brief stint at Woodland Golf Club, he was hired as the pro at prestigious Brae Burn Country Club in West Newton, Massachusetts. As influential as the Ross brothers were in Pinehurst, they also became a force in Bay State events. Donald won the first Massachusetts Open in 1905, and Aleck was the victor in the ’06 championship. Together they would eventually win eight Massachusetts Opens.
Both Donald and Aleck entered the 1907 U.S. Open, scheduled for the St. Martin’s course of the Philadelphia Cricket Club. Donald had finished in the championship’s top 10 several times, but his chances at St. Martin’s seemed modest, at best — he had spent the bulk of his time the previous year designing courses for Leonard Tufts. A second nine had just been seeded for course No. 2 and its existing nine was being substantially toughened. The new improved No. 2 was scheduled to open for play in the fall, but there remained a plethora of final details to resolve. He had also designed a third Pinehurst course of nine holes that had posed a significant challenge due to the hilliness of its terrain. Keeping his golf game in top shape had taken a backseat.
By contrast, Aleck was in good form. His successes in ’06, including a sixth-place finish in the U.S. Open, filled him with confidence. After Thursday’s opening two rounds in Philadelphia, steady cards of 76 and 74 staked Aleck to a one-stroke lead over Scot Jack Hobens. Three other contenders lurked two back. One of them was Bernard Nicholls.
Despite a decent third round of 76 in the morning, Aleck fell two strokes behind the surging Hobens and one in back of Nicholl’s younger brother, Gilbert. Another 76 in Friday afternoon’s final round proved good enough to vault him past his rivals to the title. Ross’ finishing score of 302 bested Gilbert Nicholls’ by two strokes. He collected the munificent sum of $300 for winning America’s national championship. Donald finished 10 strokes behind his champion brother.
While Aleck’s playing ability had always been respected, his victory in the U.S. Open, along with a repeat victory in the Massachusetts Open later in the summer, catapulted him into the front ranks of America’s golfers. Aleck’s presence in exhibitions was suddenly in high demand. For the first, and perhaps only, time in the brothers’ careers, Donald played second fiddle to his younger brother as the two played matches throughout New England in 1907. The barnstorming afforded Donald an opportune time to do what he called his “missionary” work, touting the wonderful new courses he was building at Pinehurst.
When Pinehurst’s course No. 2 opened for play in the fall of 1907, initial reaction in some quarters was that the layout was too difficult — a “freak” course. But public opinion rapidly turned around and soon the course, and Ross’ architectural talents, were being applauded. Course No. 3’s nine holes (later expanded to 18 holes in 1910) would also receive high praise. In The Legendary Evolution of Pinehurst, author and course architect Richard Mandell wrote that No. 3’s popularity, “quickly trumped its older siblings,” and that many deemed it Ross’ “best yet.” The acclaim for his new courses caused design work to flow Donald’s way. In 1908 the commissions included a redesign of Essex County Club in Manchester, Massachusetts. Ross would become the professional there from 1909-13 until his design work became so popular he needed the time more than he needed the job.
In ’08 Aleck would achieve a three-peat in the Massachusetts Open with a then historically low 72-hole score of 290. He also won the North and South for the fourth consecutive time. As the sun was setting on the first decade of the 20th century, the Ross brothers continued to play excellent golf. Aleck would eventually win a total of six North and South Opens and six Massachusetts Opens. In 1910, Donald made a spirited run at winning the Open Championship contested at his old stomping grounds, St. Andrews. He finished tied for eighth, 10 strokes behind winner James Braid. It was Donald’s last hurrah in championship golf as the volume of his course design business exploded, leaving little time for anything but casual rounds. Soon, Donald Ross-designed courses could be found in nearly every state east of the Mississippi. A lot of that business transpired when resort guests, wowed by the Pinehurst courses, would ask Donald to build them a course back home.
Detroit attorney Horace Rackham was a prime example. Having made a $5,000 investment to help his client, Henry Ford, get his new automobile business off the ground, Rackham became a millionaire many times over. He retired early and relished his frequent golfing visits to Pinehurst with a group that called themselves the “Snowbirds,” fellow members at Detroit Golf Club. Dissatisfied with the existing Detroit course, Rackham retained Ross to design not one, but two new 18-hole layouts. Donald completed the North and South courses for the Detroit GC in 1914. Today, the club hosts the PGA Tour’s Rocket Mortgage Classic.
Rackham liked Donald’s brother, too. At Horace’s urging, Detroit GC tapped Aleck to be its club professional in 1916. One newspaper hailed his hiring this way: “The advent of Aleck Ross, former national open champion, at the DGC has caused a boom in golf interest in the motor city. The members of the new club in which he is attached are expecting that his instruction will put the club on the golf map with a vengeance.”
With his competitive skills waning, Aleck segued into administrative roles. He served as the Michigan PGA’s first president in 1922 and did much to promote junior golf in the state. He continued wintering in Pinehurst, but also found time to travel. A favorite destination was Switzerland. The veteran had enough game left to win the Swiss Open championships of 1923, ’25 and ’26.
While Aleck was not especially outgoing, once they got to know the man, the Detroit GC members found him endearing. Donald described his brother as having “a heart of gold and is full of kindly sentiment, but he has a hard time showing it, which is a characteristic of the Scots.”
Aleck did possess a bitingly dry wit. A friend once criticized his dog as being too fat.
“Too fat!” responded the pro. “What do you know about dogs?”
The man replied, “I ought to know something. I have six of them.”
To which Aleck rejoined, “That doesn’t prove anything; you have eight golf clubs and you don’t know a blessed thing about any of them.”
Aleck Ross served as Detroit GC’s head professional for 30 years, retiring in 1945. The banquet the club threw in his honor produced an outpouring of affection. Donald could not attend but forwarded a warm message extolling Aleck as his “loyal friend and beloved brother.” He also summed up Aleck’s estimable accomplishments, writing that he, “had a full part in the early development of golf in America. He was a great player, a lover of golf, and he believed in its finest traditions. He was a good loser as well as a modest winner.”
When Horace Rackham died, he honored the Scottish immigrant he had brought to Detroit by establishing a $30,000 fund for Aleck’s benefit, payable in monthly increments upon the pro’s retirement. Horton Smith, winner of the Masters in 1934 and again in 1936, succeeded Aleck as Detroit GC’s pro. Smith was later followed in the post by 1953 PGA champion Walter Burkemo, giving Detroit GC three head pros who had won major championships.
In his penultimate book, Unplayable Lies, the brilliant, albeit curmudgeonly, golf writer Dan Jenkins makes the point that the early pros have never been given proper credit for their important tournament triumphs. Prior to the advent of the Masters in 1934 and the PGA Championship in 1916, the North and South Open, the Metropolitan Open, and the Western Open were considered the important titles of their day. Aleck’s six North and South victories coupled with his U.S. Open triumph would give him a whopping seven titles of major import. While it is true that his first three North and South wins were against lesser fields, the last several were not. Donald Ross was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1977. Aleck has never been nominated.
Donald, the oldest of the Ross boys and the architect of over 400 courses, died in Pinehurst in 1948. Aleck passed away in Florida in 1952. His ashes were spread over the grounds of Detroit GC. While Donald’s passing received high profile coverage in all of golf’s publications, Aleck’s death was generally noted on the back pages, the obits invariably mentioning that he was “the brother of Donald Ross.”
If Aleck Ross didn’t mind being in Donald’s shadow, it may have been because he managed to shine quite brightly himself. PS
Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.
WhenCOVID-19 shut down the world as we know it last year, I decided this was a sign from on high to finish building my backyard shade garden.
The cosmic joke, as any gardener worth his composted cow poop knows, is that, while no garden is ever really finished, it may well finish (off) the gardener.
That said, I set myself a goal to have the garden fully laid out and growing by the time the dog days of August rolled around. Beneath ancient white oaks, I began to see elegant stone pathways winding through beds of cool ferns, colorful hostas and other shade-loving trees and plants — the ideal place to sit and read a book when the oppressive heat of late summer lays upon us.
You might say I worked like a dog — and with a dog — from February to July, hoping to get the job done. After clearing out the last of the weeds and some forlorn, overgrown shrubs of the property’s former owner, I drew up plans and constantly revised them, laying out pathways and building beds for young plants.
Alas, August is here, and while I toiled and toiled away, my ambitious shade garden is yet unfinished.
Still, my old dog, Mulligan, never missed a day of work. She’s 16, and either deaf or simply uninterested in whatever her owner has to say. We’ve been together since I found her running wild and free in a park where I’d just given a talk at a festival, a joyous black pup with the happiest eyes I’d ever seen.
Workers in the park told me she was a stray that nobody could catch, had been around for weeks, either a runaway or a pup someone simply dumped. She was living off garbage and small critters she chased down in the woods. The girl was a hunter.
To this day, I’m not sure whether I found her or she found me. She raced past me as I was preparing to leave, heading back for the woods across a busy highway where I’d seen her cross into the park an hour before, somehow just missing the wheels of a truck.
I simply called out, “Hey, you! Black streak! Come here.” Something remarkable happened. The pup stopped, looked back, then ran straight into my arms. I named her Mulligan, a second-chance dog. Mully, for short.
We’ve been together ever since.
Any time I’m working in the garden, she’s there. Every trip to the plant nursery, the grocery store, or any errand around town, she’s along for the ride.It’s been like this for a decade and a half. She’s my constant travel pal — my best friend and the best dog ever — always ready to hit the road.
Four years ago, Miss Mully was along for the ride when I started down the Great Wagon Road for a book about the Colonial Era “highway” that a couple hundred thousand Scots-Irish, English and German immigrants, including all three wings of my family, took to this part of the world during the 18th century.
As I laid out this long-planned journey in my mind, Mully and I would simply breeze down the mythic road together from Philadelphia to Georgia over the span of three or four weeks, meeting colorful characters, diving into frontier history and gathering untold tales from America’s original immigrant highway. The book would almost write itself. I’d finish it in no time flat.
Evidently, God and wives both laugh when foolish men make plans, to paraphrase an old Yiddish proverb. From the beginning, my wife, Wendy, thought it would take me five years to complete my mighty road book.
She was right. Ditto God.
Like my backyard shade garden, my mighty road tale is not yet finished. The sweeping scope of its history and people, not to mention the motherlode of remarkable folks Miss Mully and I encountered along the road, argued for a much deeper dive and more thorough approach to my subject. An unplanned bit of plumbing surgery and a worldwide pandemic that shut down the globe for more than a year hardly helped to shrink the time horizon.
But that’s life.
We all have unfinished business. We are all works in progress.
With a little luck and continued work, I hope to complete both my book and my backyard garden around the same time, maybe by Thanksgiving.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I understand that the day is growing late for my old dog and her master.
She still walks a mile with us every morning, and her dark eyes still shine with the happiest light.
Every afternoon, she takes a slow walk around the garden as if inspecting my work or memorizing the plants. I often catch her just sitting alone in the middle of the garden, thinking God knows what.
For the moment, our journey together is unfinished. But someday I hope to sit in the middle of Miss Mully’s Garden, reading a book and thinking God knows what, too.
Something tells me that won’t be the end of the journey. Maybe just the beginning.PS
His all-time favorite book: James Salter’s Light Years.
— Looking to eat better, fewer carbs and processed foods, and shed those COVID pounds?
— Searching for ways to work more vegetables into your diet?
— Need to avoid gluten due to sensitivities or auto-immune issues?
— Want a simple, low-fuss, low-muss meal?
Spaghetti squash, coming onto markets this month, is the gourd for you.
You’ve probably seen these largish, lemon-colored winter squashes in local markets. This plain, oblong vegetable contains a surprise inside — an extraordinary texture, long strands of squash that, when cooked, make a useful substitute for pasta noodles.
I have grown it in my Sandhills vegetable garden. Local markets will start to feature it toward the end of the month, and it is readily available in supermarkets. Spaghetti squash stores fairly well, about two, even three, months in a cool place.
Once cooked, the flesh of spaghetti squash can be forked into fine strands resembling angel hair pasta. Its mild flavor offers a clear stage for a variety of tastes and treatments such as pestos, red sauces and curries.
The simplest dinner treatment is to halve a 2-3 pound squash lengthwise, scoop out the seeds from each half, brush with a little oil, season with salt and pepper, and roast in a baking dish at 375 degrees for 30-45 minutes, or until the flesh is fork-tender. Cool slightly, enough to handle.
If you don’t like wrestling large squashes with sharp objects, you can also bake yours whole. If whole, slice off the stem end, then pierce the rind with a fork before placing in an ovenproof baking dish with a little water. Sealing the dish with foil helps speed things up a bit. The baking may take longer, up to an hour and a half for a larger squash. Remove when skin is softened. An oven mitt is helpful to steady the hot rind. Open carefully — the steam can scald — and scoop out the seeds.
The fastest method for a quick supper is to microwave the whole squash. Pierce the rind several times to avoid a buildup of steam. Place on a plate and microwave until tender, 20 minutes or so, until softened.
The easiest dinner prep? Place each squash half on a plate and fill with your favorite jarred marinara. A sprinkle of Parmesan on top and . . . Voila! A healthy, easy meal for two. The eater does the work of pulling free the squash strands.
For a less-slack treatment, tease out the strands by drawing a fork gently down the flesh lengthwise. Toss the strands with some iteration of garlic, red sauce, Italian spices, grated cheese, mushrooms, peppers, ground sausage, etc., before returning the mix to the baked squash rind.
The scooped flesh can be used in casseroles in place of thin wheat pasta. The “noodles” can be given an Asian, Indian or Southwestern twist with a change in seasonings and flavors. Low-carbers even make a ketogenic pizza crust using the strand, eggs and cheese.
For a fancier plating, some folks have been known to take the scooped strands and form “nests” in muffin tins, to be filled with your favorite stuffing. The nests can also star at breakfast, baked with eggs.
Or cut your squash into horizontal “rings” instead of in half lengthwise. This fun baked presentation shortens the cooking time and can then be stuffed with goodies.
Speaking of goodness, spaghetti squash is nutrient dense but low in calories. It can deliver vitamins A and C, folic acid, niacin, manganese, potassium and other nutrients. A whole cup of the squash is only 10 carbs, much lower than wheat pasta — 28 percent, in fact — and only 42 calories.
If you haven’t explored spaghetti squash yet, give this interesting vegetable a try.PS
Jan Leitschuh is a local gardener, avid eater of fresh produce and co-founder of Sandhills Farm to Table.
Her favorite book is Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry.
It was a 20-hour drive from the outskirts of Toronto to the Florida coast town of Titusville, and dead in the middle of the drive was Pinehurst. Just as the goldfinch, sparrows and blue jays made their annual migrations in fall and spring from north to south and vice versa, so too did a curious little golf professional named Moe Norman.
Each April headed north and each October going south, Moe drove his Cadillac stuffed with golf clubs, shoes and balls and most of his worldly possessions off I-95 and ventured into the Sandhills, where he found friends, smiles and comfort at Pinehurst, Knollwood Driving Range and Pine Needles, and dropped in on village shops like Gentlemen’s Corner and Old Sport & Gallery.
“Moe was a remarkable guy,” says Eric Alpenfels, director of instruction at Pinehurst Resort and a young intern in the golf shop when he first met Norman in 1983. “He was a big history buff. I think he appreciated Pinehurst for its history. I think people in town made him feel welcome and comfortable. So every fall and every spring, you expected to get a call from Moe or just see him show up to hit balls.”
Norman was a crack Canadian golfer from the Toronto suburb of Kitchener who won back-to-back Canadian Amateurs in the late 1950s, played in the Masters, and in 1966 won five of the 12 Canadian Tour events he entered. Over his career, he shot three 59s, made 17 aces and nine double-eagles, and counted his course records at 41. But he never made a mark on the PGA Tour because with his childlike persona and eccentric ways (he routinely drank two dozen Cokes a day), he was uncomfortable in the fishbowl of tournament golf and nervous around strangers. He never sought psychological treatment, but when the movie Rain Man came out in 1988 with Dustin Hoffman portraying a middle-aged autistic man, many who knew him said, “That’s Moe.”
But he was a mythical figure among golf pros and had an insatiable appetite for hitting balls. He was so straight and so consistent he had the nickname Pipeline Moe.
“I don’t know of any player, ever, who could strike a golf ball like Moe Norman,” Lee Trevino once said. “If he had just had some sort of handler, manager, someone to handle his affairs, everyone would know the name today.”
Moe was short at 5 feet, 6 inches, liked pastel colors, often mixed plaids with stripes, and wore turtlenecks in warm weather. He often said things twice and with a noted up-lilt on the final syllable. He gripped the club in his palms with a wide stance and took what looked to be a three-quarters swing on one plane, ending not with a picturesque follow-through of a limberback but with his hands and club gyrating above his head à la Arnold Palmer. He liked to say he and Ben Hogan were the only golfers who took the clubhead straight down the line exactly 22 inches. He once said he played the same wooden tee for seven years.
The stories of his ball-striking are legendary.
Moe was playing an exhibition with Sam Snead and Porky Oliver at Toronto when they came to a par-4 with a creek crossing the fairway 240 yards out. Snead advised Norman against hitting his driver, saying, “This is a lay-up hole.”
“Not if you play for the bridge and run it across,” Moe said, and then did exactly that.
He once hit more than 1,500 drives in a seven-hour exhibition, all landing within a 30-yard-wide landing zone. “I wish we played 30-yard fairways and out-of-bounds,” he once said. “I’d be the only guy hitting driver.”
At other times he’d fire off dozens of piercing 4-irons in succession, pause and chirp to anyone listening, “Never off-line. This swing can’t hit it crooked.”
Once Moe spent several days being filmed hitting balls and giving instructional tips on drivers, fairway woods, long irons and wedge shots. The third morning, the producers planned to ask him about long-distance putting.]
“Moe, we want you to talk about lag putts, how to manage a 50- or 60-footer.”
Norman blew them off. “I never had one. Why would you want to be 50 feet away?”
If someone told him a hole was a “driver-wedge hole,” Moe was liable to hit a wedge off the tee and a driver into the green and say, “You’re right. Driver-wedge.”
Pat McGowan, the head of instruction at Pine Needles, was playing the PGA Tour in the 1980s when he first saw Norman give an exhibition at the Canadian Open.
“Ben Crenshaw, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, the whole golf world would stop practicing and walk over and watch Moe hit balls,” McGowan says. “I remember the first time I saw him. He hit 25 or 30 straight drives. Every one of them carried over 220 yards and stayed in a 25-yard fairway. Moe smiled at everyone and said, ‘You want me to hit 50? I’ll stay all night.’”
Alpenfels was working the counter at the Pinehurst golf shop in 1983 when someone nodded to a little man and said, “That’s Moe Norman.” Alpenfels remembered the name from conversations with Jim Hardy, his mentor in California. Alpenfels struck up a conversation, watched Norman hit balls and developed a friendship. He was invited to Norman’s winter headquarters at Royal Oak Country Club in Titusville that year to hang out.
“Moe was a brilliant ball-striker,” Alpenfels says. “He virtually could do what he said he could do. If he told you that he was going to hit five drives in a row and that all would land within a 5-foot radius, he’d pretty much do that. He was amazing. From a ball-striking standpoint, it was crazy how good he was.”
Chris Dalrymple, owner of the Gentlemen’s Corner clothing store in the village, remembers Moe would “just appear out of nowhere, sort of like a genie,” and would look around the shop, never buying anything.
“I remember he wore two watches, one on each wrist,” Dalrymple says. “I asked him why he did that. He said, ‘I just do.’”
From Pinehurst, Norman would drive down Midland Road and visit another friend, Greg Gulka, the head pro at Knollwood, and then on to Pine Needles to hit balls with Peggy Kirk Bell and Jim Suttie, the head instructor there in the 1990s.
“The first time I ever saw Moe, he was hitting drivers out of divots,” says Kelly Miller, Mrs. Bell’s son-in-law. “He was rifling golf balls down the range, one after another. They came out of that divot like a rocket.”
Moe had money problems for most of his adult life, saying he “had slept in bunkers all across Canada.” He never had a credit card or a checking account. He refused Miller’s offer for a bed at Pine Needles but would accept several hundred dollars Miller would slip in his pocket after entertaining guests at Pine Needles with an exhibition. Some thought Norman spent most of his nights in his car, but he usually had enough funds for a Motel 6 or Super 8. His finances were buttressed significantly when he met Titleist CEO Wally Uihlein at the 1995 PGA Show. Uihlein watched Norman hit balls and said Norman was a national golfing treasure and allowed that Titleist would pay him a $5,000-a-month stipend for the rest of his life.
That lasted until September 2004, when Norman died of a heart attack.
“He had everything he needed. He had a good car, a place to stay and wonderful friends,” Alpenfels says. “He’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it.”
A documentary film about Moe Norman’s life is in the works.
“It’s an underdog story. It’s a story about a guy who never should have succeeded, but did,” says Barry Morrow, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Rain Man and a co-producer of the film.
“I think he wanted to be the best at something. And hitting a golf ball was it,” adds Suttie.PS
Lee Pace has written about golf in The Sandhills for three decades. His newest book, Good Walks — Rediscovering the Soul of Golf at 18 Top Carolinas Courses, will be available wherever you buy books.
His personal favorites include anything by P.G. Wodehouse. Tied for first are Heart of a Goof and Right Ho, Jeeves.
North Carolina’s link to the fall of “The Last Emperor”
By D.G. Martin
One ofNorth Carolina’s most interesting stories takes us back to the 1880s when a young Chinese boy winds up in Wilmington, where he converts to Christianity and then returns to China as a missionary. He becomes wealthy, and his family becomes extremely powerful. How it all happened is a saga that is almost unbelievable.
In Wilmington there is a small granite monument on the grounds of the modest, lovely Fifth Avenue Methodist Church building. It reads: “Charlie Jones Soong, father of the famous Soong family of modern China, was converted to Christianity in the old Fifth Street Methodist Church, which stood on this site. He was baptized on Nov. 7, 1880, by the Rev. T. Page Ricaud, then pastor. One of his six children, Madam Chiang Kai-shek, whose Christian influence is world-wide, is the wife of China’s devout generalissimo and president. Erected in 1944.”
Here is the report from the November 7, 1880, Wilmington Star announcing an event that would ultimately have a profound impact on modern Chinese history: “Fifth Street Methodist Church: This morning the ordinance of Baptism will be administered at this church. A Chinese convert will be one of the subjects of the solemn right (sic), being probably the first ‘Celestial’ that has ever submitted to the ordinance of Baptism in North Carolina. The pastor, Rev. T. Page Ricaud, will officiate.”
That Celestial, as some Americans then referred to a Chinese person, was Charlie Soong, a teenager, whose North Carolina Methodist sponsors arranged for his education and subsequent return to China as a missionary.
A minister in Wilmington persuaded Durham tobacco and textile manufacturer Julian Carr to take an interest in Soong. Carr brought Soong to Durham and then arranged for him to enroll as the first foreign student at Trinity College in Randolph County.
Carr and Soong developed a “father-son” lifelong friendship, despite Charlie Soong’s serious flirtation with Carr’s niece, which resulted in Charlie’s exile to Vanderbilt University for more religious training. After being ordained as a Methodist minister, Soong went back to China as a missionary. Once there he drifted into business, developing the Bible printing operation that became a springboard to greater financial success, often with Carr’s backing.
When much of China’s limited manufacturing capacity was under the control of foreigners, Soong showed that the Chinese could do it for themselves. He helped construct a platform on which China’s modern manufacturing base is built. He printed Chinese Bibles so inexpensively that they drove the competition — mostly Europeans — out of business and, in the process, became one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful business and political insiders.
It was the last days of the Qing Dynasty and “The Last Emperor,” and China was in revolutionary turmoil. Soong helped fund the activities of the major revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, sometimes called the “founder of the Chinese Republic.”
Soong sent most of his children to the United States for education. When his three daughters came back to China, they married prominent Chinese. One daughter, Ching-ling, married Sun Yat-sen and, as Madame Sun Yat-sen, remained an important figure in Chinese government long after her husband’s death. She even served under Mao Zedong as a vice-chairman of the People’s Republic from 1949 to 1975.
The oldest daughter, Ai-ling, married banker H.H. Kung, who became finance minister in the Nationalist government.
Another daughter, May-ling, married Chiang Kai-shek, who led the Nationalist government until he was driven to Taiwan by Mao’s forces in 1949. Madame Chiang Kai-shek was well known to Americans and a favorite of many until her death in 2003 at the age of 105.
One son, T.V. Soong, represented China at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. After the Communist takeover of China, he moved to the U.S. and became a highly successful banker.
The Soong family was so important in China that it is sometimes referred to as The Soong Dynasty, the title of the most popular and detailed version of this story, written by Sterling Seagrave and published in 1985. It presented an unfriendly version of the family history, but a review in The New York Times saw it differently. “Indeed the charm of the man often outshines Mr. Seagrave’s attempts both to debunk him and make him sinister,” said the Times.
A more recent book by former Greensboro resident Ed Haag, Charlie Soong: North Carolina’s Link to the Fall of the Last Emperor of China, gives us a more balanced account. Although the Charlie Soong story is not new, Haag dug up previously unpublished material, much of it from the Soong papers housed at the Duke University library. Haag explains better than earlier authors how Charlie Soong became so wealthy. While others have written about Soong’s missionary work leading to a business printing Bibles, his association with a flour mill in Shanghai also contributed to his success. According to Haag, Soong’s greatest wealth came from his role as a “comprador,” a fixer and go-between who helped bridge the different customs and expectations of Western suppliers and traders and their Chinese counterparts. Those North Carolinians who already know about Charlie Soong will appreciate Haag’s refinements and additions. For those who never heard of Soong, Haag’s book is a great starting point.
But the Soong family’s connection to North Carolina doesn’t end there.
On Aug. 30, 2015, his great-grandson Michael Feng came to Wilmington to be baptized in the same church where his great-grandfather received the sacrament. Feng and his wife, Winnie, are longtime active participants at The Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, a historic church in New York City, at Fifth Avenue and 90th Street.
“It was the church of my grandfather, T.V. Soong, where Winnie and I were married and raised our two children,” said Feng. “I had just never gotten around to being baptized. I guess my parents were too busy when I was young. Winnie had been after me for a long time to be baptized. And when we were planning a trip to North Carolina for a wedding, we decided this would be a wonderful time and place for my baptism.”
Feng explained to the congregation at Fifth Avenue Church that his family remained grateful to the North Carolinians who provided his great-grandfather the educational, spiritual and financial resources that made the difference for Charlie Soong. “He gave these resources to his children and our family,” said Feng of a Chinese dynasty announced in a note in the Wilmington Star 135 years before.
Almost seven years after his baptism in Wilmington, Michael and Winnie Feng remain active at the Church of Heavenly Rest, where there is another North Carolina connection. The leader of that church is its rector, the Rev. Matthew Heyd, who grew up in Charlotte and was a Morehead Scholar and student body president at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Surely, Charlie Soong would be pleased.PS
D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch Sunday at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.
His favorite book is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
