A Community Bright Spot
The Boys & Girls Club turns 25
By Jim Moriarty
It was a perfect storm, for good. Twenty-five years ago the stars aligned — money, advocates and a societal need — and the Boys & Girls Club of the Sandhills was born. That quarter-century will be celebrated at a gala event sponsored by Lin Hutaff’s Pinehurst Realty Group on Thursday, Oct. 19, at the Carolina Hotel’s Grand Ballroom. Among those being honored that evening for their many contributions, then and now, will be Robert (Bob) Dedman Jr., Tom Fazio and Walker Morris.
The club officially opened its doors at the Southern Pines Public Housing Community Center on Feb. 1, 1999. Today the Boys & Girls Club of the Sandhills has grown to include four facilities — the Baxter Teen unit at 160 Memorial Park Court in Southern Pines, the Logan-Blake unit at 15 Dawn Road in Pinehurst, the Trinity unit at 255 S. May Street in Southern Pines, and the newest facility in Kennedy Hall on the campus of Sandhills Community College — and has served over 6,000 children and teens during its 25 years of existence.
The confluence of people of good will, coupled with the financial boon of the first U.S. Open Championship on Pinehurst’s No. 2 course, literally opened the new club’s doors. It was the policy of the USGA in 1999 to allow the host club to manage the championship’s logistics, essentially dealing with everything outside the ropes. “We did it all,” says Pat Corso, who was, at the time, the president of Pinehurst Resort and Country Club. “The USGA said, ‘Good luck, God bless. We’re not going to take the risk. You take the risk.’” The resort created its own tournament division to sell tickets, corporate hospitality, everything. What could have been a financial black hole turned out to be anything but.
“We had the ’91 and ’92 Tour Championships, the ’94 U.S. Senior Open Championship, and we always left money in the community,” says Corso. “The expectation was that we would do something in ’99.”
But what?
The world is never shy of worthy places to put charity dollars, and donating to existing causes would have been an easy choice. There were people who had other ideas. Among the first was retired Brig. Gen. Francis J. Roberts, a close friend of Corso’s who at the time lived in a house on Carolina Vista a couple of well-struck 7-irons from Corso’s desk. Roberts was a West Point graduate who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, where he was awarded the Silver Star. “He was quite a guy,” Corso says, “and he was persuasive, as you can imagine.” As a boy in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Roberts had been a member of a Boys & Girls Club, and he advocated for creating one in Moore County.
“The next thing I know, I get hit up by Tom Fazio,” says Corso. Fazio had designed Pinehurst’s No. 8 course, opening in 1995 to celebrate the resort’s centennial, and in advance of the ’99 Open, he was a frequent visitor to Pinehurst as he reworked the No. 4 course. He and his wife, Sue, founded a Boys & Girls Club in their home of Hendersonville, North Carolina, in the ’80s.
“I kind of twisted Pat’s arm a little bit,” Fazio says. “You guys are looking for a charity. It’s a good thing,” he told Corso. “They do good things for kids. It’s a great opportunity to help.”
Corso took the idea to Walker Morris, the president of Muirfield Broadcasting Inc., who picked up the phone and called Frank Quis, at the time the mayor of Southern Pines. The project was beginning to pick up speed.
“We were planning to move the fire station and expand it, which we did,” recalls Quis. “We knew we’d have a building available. The timing was good for everybody.” A committee was formed to visit Hendersonville, using that club as a template for Southern Pines. Eventually, they would even hire Hendersonville’s executive director, Hoyt Bynum, to take the same job in Southern Pines.
There was still the not incidental matter of seed money and, beginning from scratch, they were going to require a lot of it. “It became obvious we were starting to get into the weeds on it so I had to go to Robert Dedman,” Corso says of Bob Dedman’s father, whose company, ClubCorp, purchased the Pinehurst Resort in 1984.
“I said ‘Robert, if we can do it, we should probably peg it at, like, a half-million dollars to really make this work. The town is going to throw in, basically, a free lease on the old fire station in Southern Pines. We’d have to do the rehab of the building to convert it to a club. I think that’s the magic number.’ And he said OK,” Corso says.
“Locally, we had the inspiration through Fran and Tom and then worked hard together with Walker and Frank and the board we put together but, really, at the end of the day, it was Robert who said ‘yes.’ I think one of the interesting things is the Dedman family has stayed involved in it over the years. Boys & Girls Clubs became a key effort on behalf of the family, both here and in Dallas.” John Earp, the Boys & Girls Club’s director of development, estimates that, over the years, the Dedman family has contributed over a million dollars to the Sandhills club.
While former Sandhills Community College President John Dempsey wasn’t involved in the creation of the club in ’99, he became a Boys & Girls Club board member and was twice its chairman. “Next to Sandhills, it’s been the joy of my life to be involved with the Boys & Girls Club,” says Dempsey. “It’s one of the bright spots of our community. I can’t imagine this town without it. Honestly, it’s difficult to quantify why that is so, other than to say Boys & Girls Club kids, in addition to having a safe place to go — and we all understand the dynamics of quasi-urban living and having too much time on your hands — there is a confidence about these kids, a willingness to engage with adults.
“It’s just a fresher, more zestful approach to life. To see that in an organization that you’re involved in is just mind-blowingly satisfying. You can’t help but love the place. My parents gave me the greatest of all gifts, love and self-confidence and relative security in my own persona. And I never said ‘thank you’ to them enough when they were here. Anything I can do for the Boys & Girls Club is just one more way I can thank my mom and dad.”
Of course, finding the funding to support the clubs is a never-ending project, taking all forms from golf outings to person-to-person outreach by the club members themselves. The black tie gala on Oct. 19 is another opportunity to help. Tickets are $175 per person or $2,500 for a table of 10 and can be purchased on the Boys & Girls Club of the Sandhills website. For more information on the 25th Anniversary Celebration call Larry Smith at 910-692-0777, ext. 2231 or John Earp at ext. 2221. The link to the event with more details is: https://one.bidpal.net/25thcelebration/welcome. It’s one more way to say thank you. PS
Jim Moriarty is the Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.