Golf, May Festivals, and Bowling is Born at Wildwood

SOURCE: Pleasures Simpler Back Then, But Taken Seriously, by John Coombes,

Columbus Ledger – Enquirer, May 28, 1961.

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Golf Is Late

Golf had been introduced in Georgia in 1756, but not until the 1900's did Columbusites show much interest in the game. Then suddenly it became as popular among men as baseball was among boys. The Columbus Country Club was an outgrowth of Sunday afternoon golf games played on the lawns of Lloyd Bowers' home on Buena Vista Road where discarded tomato cans were used as cups and players stored their golf shoes and clubs in a clothes closet.

Soon Bowers and the late Frank U. Garrard, another golf enthusiast, were looking around for a suitable site for a golf course. On Sept. 23, 1900, papers were signed for the lease of 60.8 acres for a club house and a course. Six years later more land was acquired, and the course was enlarged. The first club house, a log cabin, burned in 1919.

A year later a second club house, a two-story structure, was built and the course enlarged to 18 holes. This second club house served its members until 1948 when the present club was built. Between 1919 and 1948 two swimming pools were added, ten- nis courts were laid out and lit for night games and the dining room and kitchens enlarged.

Distinguished sportsmen and sportswomen have played exhibition matches on its links and courts and competed in its own tournaments which have gained growing prestige through the years. The club has also entertained distinguished guests in the worlds of business, politics, and music who have visited Columbus.

Club's Canny Pro

Edgar Mayo, first secretary of the club, recalls that when it first opened members and guests rode the trolley along Cherokee Avenue (known as Lovers' Lane in those days) and walked up the hill. A carriage carried guests from the road to the club house later. The club soon became the cent- er of the city's social life but it was its golf course which spread its fame all over the South, made it the choicest venue for a dozen ranking national, state and regional tournaments.

A shrewd British golf master named Fred Haskins was engaged as club professional early in the club's history and much of its later brilliance, and that of its star golfers can be traced to Haskins. The club is now the home of the annual Southeastern Amateur Golf Tournament and a Women's Professional Golf Tournament. It has served as the venue for the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce Tournament, The Southern Amateur Golf Tournament, The Southeastern Professional Golfers Association Tournament and the Georgia State Women's Tourney, and a half dozen other regional and state tourneys.

An Atlanta sportswriter once referred to Columbus as "a hotbed of golf." Another estimated there were more active golfers per hundred population in this city than there were in the whole of Scotland. With this following the demand for more and more courses grew year by year. It was partially assuaged by the opening of The Lions Club 18-hole course on Victory Drive some years ago and are expected to be even further satisfied by completion of the club's new 18-hole course in another part of the city.

The Big Eddy Club, one of the oldest and most exclusive in Columbus, formed in the 1920's, recently announced a limited expansion of its membership and plans for the construction of a championship 18-hole golf course in Green Island Hills.

May Fall Festivals

With the 20th Century came the rush to honor each city's or state's agricultural products, flowers or animals. Some celebrated merely the month in which its leaders thought their metropolis was at its best. Mobile had its Azalea Trail, Birmingham its Dogwood Trail; there was a strawberry festival at Cullman and Columbia, Tenn., had its Mule Day, an all-day affair for the "orneriest and workingest work-critter living."

Columbus' colorful May Festival at City Park antedated all these, drew crowds from miles around. The festival was apparently discontinued after 1895, when it was replaced by an even bigger attraction - the annual fall fair. The first of these fairs - forerunners of the Chattahoochee Valley Expositions was held in 1888.

A midway complete with Ferris Wheel and side shows was erected down the center of Broad. Streets were roped off for dancing and the crowning of the fall fair queen was followed by a gala ball at the old armory. Thousands of visitors from The Valley converged on Columbus for the fair which lasted all week.

Later the fair became an integral part of the Chattahoochee Valley Exposition and the fairground, below Broad, was then jammed with livestock stalls, booths for industrial and agricultural exhibits and a racetrack for trotting matches. Visiting went on all week punctuated by considerable feasting at the barbecue pits and in later years the hot dog stands.

Bowling Born

Wildwood Park, the Mecca of the Valley visitors who came to Columbus in the 1880's, was the site of one of the city's earliest bowling alleys. Bowling was strictly a men's pastime in those days and bowling alleys enjoyed similar reputations to those of the saloons - rough, spittoon-littered halls where argument and brawl frequently interrupted the games.

The Wildwood Bowling alley was built at the park's Dummy line station with anterooms for players and passengers. The entire structure could probably be lost in a small corner of the smallest bowling alley operating in Columbus today. Pin-boys replaced the skittles at Wildwood, an operation accomplished by the flick of a switch or ran automatic electronic device today.

And bowling is as much a ladies' pastime as a men's sport today. In the winter months hundreds of housewives, members of neighborhood or sponsored teams gather at the city's four ultra-modern alleys for an afternoon's recreation. At some alleys it is a family pastime with parents and teenage children playing with neighbors, friends or business associates.

Although it has become a more universal pastime in the last few years bowling still remains a test of skill and physical fitness. Its keenest followers, many of whom are women, are avid students of technique and training clinics are arranged at most of the alleys in Columbus to help them attain championship standard.