CLUBHOUSES OF CAPE COD

By Ron Driscoll
Photos by George Peet

The sign is right there, almost confronting you as you climb the steps onto the deck, through the doors and into the lobby at Olde Barnstable Fairgrounds Golf Course: “No clubs in the clubhouse,” it says.

We laughed the first time we saw it, then thought, well, it’s true – you aren’t allowed to bring your sticks inside. No clubs in the clubhouse.

This weathered, shingled building, set on a hill across the road from a grassy airfield, might seem typical of Cape Cod golf clubhouses, but really, there is no “typical” Cape Cod clubhouse. They range in ambience from the tony retreat high on a bluff above the sea, to the modest, functional “muni” building, to the warm, traditional 1930s era grill room.

And though there is nothing cookie-cutter about them, the clubhouses of the Cape and Islands share an egalitarian quality. The duffer who shot 107 and the hotshot who settled grudgingly for a 77 are on equal footing, as are the corporate suit and the scruffy tradesman. Shots are relished, lamented, commiserated over; matches are tallied, replayed, squabbled over.

In visiting one Cape clubhouse, we spied four members immersed in a card game, one of whom stared balefully across the table at his partner and muttered, “That is the weakest move I’ve ever seen.” We walked out into a chilly October drizzle and heard the playful banter of guys itching for a break in the weather.

“I’ll play you for $5 a hole…” said one.

We didn’t hear the response, but surely it was delivered with similar chutzpah. Sound like your clubhouse? Sure it does – in the course of discussing the shots just played, you learn to give, as well as take a shot.

These clubhouses are all about golf, but that’s not the only game that’s played. They all exude their own character, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a few characters. They all have rules, but that doesn’t mean things don’t occasionally get a bit unruly.

As the sign says, no “clubs” allowed – what you’ll find instead is a community.

When is a clubhouse more than a clubhouse? When it’s a home.

Jack Heher bought Cotuit Highground Country Club from the Mycock family for $10,000 in 1954 and, after “commuting” to the course for two years, he moved his family down to the Cape. Heher, 80, still lives in the clubhouse’s downstairs apartment. From the outside, the rambling, red building resembles a farmhouse more than a clubhouse.

Just one look around the homey interior, with its wood-paneled bar that seats a half-dozen or so and several tables placed about the room, gives one the sense that little has changed since the Heher family took over the place. Nor does it need to. On this day, rain has driven players inside, where they seem equally comfortable playing cards as they would be rolling putts.

The Hehers and their club members, who number about 100, aren’t above poking a little fun at themselves. A framed article from the 1948 USGA Journal about the course reopening after an eight-year hiatus brought on by World War II bears the handwritten headline, “Nationally Famous Short Course.”

Members pay $475 to play the sporty 9-hole, par-28 course. That’s right – one par 4, the rest par 3’s. A family membership is $675, and a junior membership $200, according to Paul Heher, Jack’s son, who counts himself, his wife, his dad, and a number of sisters and brothers-in-law among the club “staff.” When he steps out from behind the bar/cash register to chat, members answer the phone and just get what they need themselves.

When we talked last fall, a group of 40 members had just returned from Myrtle Beach, S.C., where they had played several testing courses, including Heather Glen, where Paul’s brother Steve is the pro. But most of the time, Cotuit Highground is just right for them.

“It’s a very low-key, family-oriented operation,” Paul says. “Every Friday night, we have a pizza scramble. Members call in during the day, and at 6 o’clock we have a shotgun start with foursomes or fivesomes. There’re usually about 45 players. We do it right up until the clocks change.”

The clocks and the calendar do change, but that doesn’t mean Cotuit Highground is in any hurry to change with them.

When we visited Chequessett Yacht and Country Club in Wellfleet, we found head pro and general manager Barbara Boone in the kitchen, helping clean up after a late-season potluck party. It seemed the perfect entrée to the club, which prides itself on its relaxed, friendly nature.

Speaking of nature, that’s another point in Chequessett’s favor – the course sits on Chequessett Neck, between the Herring River and Wellfleet Harbor, with frequent views of Great Island and Cape Cod Bay. The club’s boathouse is across the street on the water, and member Jack Whelan is quick to admit that, despite the name, it’s actually a sailing club, not a yacht club.

We looked at photos of Chequessett in the 1930s, when what is now the tiny practice putting green near the clubhouse was the course’s No. 1 tee. Now the first tee sits down the hill and 100 yards or so away, past the cart barn, pro shop, and tennis courts. The clubhouse was expanded in the 1950s, according to Boone, to add a members’ room.

Boone majored in golf management at Mississippi State University, and her introduction to the Cape was courtesy of a college internship at Blue Rock Golf Course in South Yarmouth. She returned to take the job at Chequessett, where, some six years later, her drawl is intact.

The Cape style clubhouse has picture windows on the front, which overlooks the boathouse and the bay, and an end-to-end deck on the back, set high above the scenic finishing hole.

The boathouse, meanwhile, sports “one of the finest water views in Wellfleet’’ from its deck, according to the club website. When the club isn’t renting the facility for weddings and other functions, it hosts occasional member cocktail parties there.

Chequessett has about 280 members, only one of whom has a tournament named for her. Sylvia King of South Wellfleet joined the club in 1980 and walked the course every round until a hip injury last year. At age 93 and still going strong, she isn’t happy about being forced to ride, but she is still keeping her appointed rounds.

About 15 miles due south of Chequessett Neck, on Nickerson Neck in Chatham, is Eastward Ho! Country Club, one of the jewels of Cape Cod golf since it opened in 1924.

Many years before that, in 1890, a group of investors recognized the potential of the site and built a huge summer hotel, according to an Eastward Ho! history by former club secretary Edward N. Harriman. The project was not a success, and the hotel was torn down about 1910.

The neck was named for the Nickerson family, and the Nickerson homestead was moved and incorporated into the original clubhouse. Its bar and men’s locker room were once the old Nye cottage in Acushnet, built in the early 18th century and moved to Eastward Ho!, its hand-hewn beams, pine paneling, and wide floor boards preserved.

“The grill room has those soft pine floors, and some wonderful old murals, including one of (1922 US Amateur champion) Jess Sweetser playing an exhibition here,” said Jack Bohman, a longtime member of the club who has also been a pro at several local clubs.

Back in the 1980s, the pro shop was moved out of the clubhouse proper into its own building, near the former site of a cart barn. The club also leases land to the Chatham Platform Tennis Association for its three courts and accompanying space, and to the Chatham Yacht Club, which sits on Pleasant Bay below the 9th green.

Bohman noted an interesting distinction of Eastward Ho!: it has a rare view, for an East Coast club, of the sun setting over the water, thanks to its Pleasant Bay location. Its members are planning to make some changes to maximize those views, he added.

“The clubhouse will close this coming Labor Day weekend, and it isn’t scheduled to reopen until July 4 of 2008,” Bohman said. “They plan to preserve the core of the building, but carve out more useful space, improve the locker rooms, and make the dining room less stark. Everyone wants to eat in the grill room now; we want to make the dining room more like the grill room.”

The $8 million overhaul will also add a 19th hole lounge atop the present dining room which will boast 270-degree water views, Bohman said.

When the topic is water views, one place immediately comes to mind: the Hyannisport Club and its perch high above its own ribbons of fairway slicing through the marshes, with Squaw Island, Hyannis Point and Nantucket Sound as a backdrop. On a clear day, you can see forever … or at least to Martha’s Vineyard.

Longtime pro Rick Johnson said that club history tells of a previous clubhouse built around 1910 on the same site as the present one, but it was destroyed by fire just 10 years later. So the clubhouse here dates from 1920, starting as what Johnson calls a “cottage-style” building that was continually added on to. Some 80-odd years later, it underwent a major overhaul.

“Our pro shop was moved out of the clubhouse and into a separate building near the first tee,” Johnson said. “We wrapped up our fourth year there in December, and the remodeled clubhouse is three years old.”

Johnson noted a trend in moving the golf operations out of Cape clubhouses, with clubs such as Cummaquid, Woods Hole, Oyster Harbors, Eastward Ho! and Pocasset all either planning or having completed similar projects.

“I think the reasons for it vary from place to place,” Johnson said. “Here it was logistical, just an overall need. We moved our carts out of the clubhouse about 12 years ago, then the golf shop followed.”

The payoff is a pub-like room in the vacated space that seats about 70, which allows members a sanctuary when the upstairs dining room is occupied by a wedding or another function. Previously, Johnson said, the clubhouse “kind of shut down” to members when an event took over the main dining room.

The sprawling clubhouse now has modern appointments, and it also maximizes the views. Johnson said the previous deck was somewhat piecemeal, but now it’s spectacular and “the centerpiece of the club in the summertime.”

Johnson bemoans one aspect of the changes, wherein the golf shop is no longer adjacent to the locker rooms, but detached. It feels that way to him, too.
“I like to think your golf shop is the control center of the club,” Johnson said. “The old pro shop made it easy to be in the flow of things …”

Instead, the shop has been nudged a little closer to the ebb and flow of the tides that are such an important aspect of Hyannisport.

The Brookside Club in Bourne sits just off Route 28 on little Brigadoon Road. The journey from a trailer clubhouse to its new digs on a bluff must have at times seemed like the mythical trip that Gene Kelly made in the 1954 movie “Brigadoon.”

The “temporary” trailer accommodations were open in 1997 when pro Dwight Bartlett and his wife Karen set up shop there, and it would be nearly eight years before they moved up the hill to the stunning vistas and expansive space afforded by the new 10,000-square-foot clubhouse.

“People aren’t going to come back to a course that operates out of a trailer unless the course is very good,” Bartlett said. “But this clubhouse was always part of the plan. I don’t think anyone realized what they were trying to do up here.”

What they did was build a gorgeous clubhouse evocative of the classic Stanford White design at Shinnecock Hills. It opened in late May of 2005 to rave reviews.

“It sits in a great spot – you have views of Buzzards Bay and the Railroad Bridge,” Bartlett said. “It was nice to see the looks on people’s faces when they first saw it.”

The view is enhanced by beautiful landscaping around the building, by the restaurant appropriately called the Sunset Grille, and by the top-floor Atlantic Room, which hosts golf outings and other functions.

“Karen and I were fine in the trailer, really,” Bartlett said. “But now people can come in after they play, have a sandwich and a beer, and watch the TV… In the summertime, the deck was packed.”

Cape Cod Country Club is set in a quiet corner of Falmouth called Hatchville, but at one time the neighborhood was anything but quiet.

The clubhouse here is a homey, white L-shaped building that is actually two buildings in one. A former hotel on nearby Ranch Road was moved to the site long ago and now houses the snack bar. The existing building is home to the pro shop, and a long set of stairs leads down to an old locker room area.

Little space is wasted here. You literally walk out the door of the snack bar onto the practice green, which melds right into the 10th tee. Step out of the pro shop and the first tee is right there, just a few feet from the door. In each case, be careful not to step into someone’s backswing on the tee.

This old-fashioned, prudent use of space translates well to the course, which was built in the 1920s and has a timeless feel – one can almost see the players of a gentler, less hectic time whiling away an afternoon near Coonamessett Pond. Indeed, Geoff Converse can remember when they did.

Converse worked as an assistant pro to George Clausen at the course in the early 1970s, when it was known as Clausen’s Inn and Country Club. The course formed a destination in those days, together with the adjacent Falmouth Playhouse and Clausen’s Inn, which was behind the course’s 17th tee at the head of the pond.

“A lot of the people who performed at the playhouse would come over to the snack bar for a drink,” Converse said. “They usually stayed at the Carleton Circle Motel (on Sandwich Road), not the inn. And they would play the course if they were golfers.”

The course hosted three consecutive State Opens in the 1950s. When Converse was there, it hosted more lively pursuits.

“They used to have these Sunday jam sessions at the inn in the summer,” he recalled. “We would take our cash deposits over there and there would be 300 or 400 people there, spilling out of the lounge into this big courtyard. That was a lot of fun.”

The inn advertised golf packages, with rooms available in the inn and in cottages around the property. The packages were particularly popular with visitors from Canada, Converse recalled.

Today a poster advertising a 1929 golf match and trick-shot exhibition by Joe Kirkwood ($2 for both) hangs in the clubhouse grill room. The old inn behind the 17th tee has been razed, and the parking lot is now used for the Coonamessett Reservation, a town conservation area. The playhouse, where legend has it Jimmy Stewart got his first bit part as a college student, burned to the ground in 1994, and a short-game practice area now occupies the site.

Even before it opened for business in 1998, Waverly Oaks Golf Club was turning heads. The course parallels Route 3 in Plymouth, and the dramatic 16th and 17th holes that run along the highway whetted many a player’s appetite as they zipped toward the Sagamore Bridge.

The layout, and its accompanying clubhouse, have done nothing to disappoint anyone who has taken Exit 3 and experienced its roller-coaster ride of a round.

“We wanted to build a course that would be second to none in the area,” said Mark Ridder, Waverly Oaks owner (with his father) and general manager. “Likewise, we wanted the clubhouse experience to be taken up a notch.”

Ridder notes that many of his friends are members at nearby private courses, and they pay upwards of $7,500 a year.

“Let’s say they play 30 rounds a year,” said Ridder. “That’s $250 a round, and a lot of people can’t justify that expense.”

At Waverly, players are enveloped by a massive, 24,000-square-foot clubhouse with the golf shop on the lower level and the well-appointed clubhouse above, including the upscale Waverly Grille restaurant. The columned, shingle-style building evokes Long Island or Nantucket.

“It’s classy, but understated,” said Ridder, whose father built Ridder Farm Golf Club in East Bridgewater in 1960. Waverly Oaks, Ridder says, is the product of all the golf experiences they’ve gleaned over that time.

Though barely eight years old, Waverly Oaks is about to undergo a facelift of sorts. The club’s function business is booming, spurring the construction of a new building that will hold 350 guests. It will be located off the 10th tee, not far from the present clubhouse.

“We’ve basically been sold out for weddings the past two years,” said Ridder. “The new building should be open for the 2008 wedding season.”

The club will also add a 3,500-foot sports-themed bar on the pro shop level, so the upper level, which can host an event for up to 200, sees fewer distractions from post-round golfers.

Ridder said the second function facility was always part of the plan, noting that, “You can’t support a facility like this on beer and burgers.” Not that Waverly Oaks ever had such modest goals to begin with.

With an explosion in course construction over the past decade, Plymouth has become a magnet for golfers. Waverly Oaks and its clubhouse high on a hill set the standard for all that would follow.