Golfing In Jackson
summertime liaisons dangereuses
Golfing was mentioned during the presidential debate. I tend to see golf differently from most people, not in a good way.
During the long summer, when I turned from fourteen to fifteen, I lost my virginity at the Country Club of Jackson. At the time, there were these bunk beds squirreled away in the lower level of the clubhouse in case a member needed to sleep one off. I don’t know how often that happened, but it certainly was in the realm of possibilities.
I hadn’t imagined my first time on a bunk bed at one o’clock in the afternoon, in a tiny room designed to act as a more polite drunk tank, desperately listening for somebody who might catch us, but a fella often doesn’t get to pick these things.
In less than three days’ time, my shiny new girlfriend found my replacement, and my part in that story was over. I might have been in her top ten that summer, but definitely not in the top five. Since I didn’t intend this to happen, and she had a reputation for snakes in the head, I didn’t mind.
An athletic woman with more money than sense and a grudge against her father is an absolute agent of chaos. I’d heard stories about her for two years, but when it was my turn, I was surprised it wasn’t a bigger deal. I wasn’t looking for love or companionship. I didn’t even think she was all that attractive, other than her body, but she did provide an answer to the question of “what’s sex like?” and once I found out, I wasn’t in too much of a hurry to try again.
There was a bit of a risk. She had a reputation for getting with guys and then having her daddy beat them up. A psychotherapist would have a field day with that one. I wasn’t too worried about getting beat up, though. I was bigger than her daddy was, and everybody in town knew he’d been dropping hints to get on the board at First National Bank. At the time, most of the board had been Alpha Upsilon KA’s with Daddy at Ole Miss at both First National and Lamar Life, including the new CEO. He wasn’t the kind of guy to put protecting his daughter’s honor for the sixth time above his aspirations to get on a board.
It may sound strange that a fourteen-year-old boy would know these things, but financial and political power in Mississippi were strangely (and I thought unsafely) concentrated. Children in some families just had to listen at the kitchen table to get all the dirt. I don’t know if that was a productive and safe way to raise children, but nobody asked me. A fourteen-year-old shouldn’t know or care about who is on what board and who is having trouble financing their latest venture.
Two summers before, at Strong River Camp, I argued with some boys over whether the new Deposit Guarantee Plaza Building would be taller than the First National or Lamar Life Building. In those days, your bank affiliation was more important than who you supported in the SEC. I was First National; they were Deposit Guarantee. It was a strange sort of competition. I had always heard that Deposit Guarantee came into being because some guys in the twenties and thirties felt like First National was exercising too much power, so they squashed some smaller banks together until they came up with something that could balance the score.
When the Deposit Guarantee Plaza building was complete, it had secret passages to the First National building. When you did the obligatory Christmas Party every year, a stratum of people needed to visit both, so they used the secret passages. It was a very friendly but very serious competition.
The father of my very brief girlfriend never got that board position, and he never beat me up. He made a lot of money, but most people didn’t like him much more than his daughter did. His Country Club membership was very, very important to him. It was an outward sign that he’d “made it.” “Making it” in Jackson, Mississippi, isn’t really all that impressive, but to some people, it’s everything.
At Strong River Summer Camp, after we had argued over dinner about which bank had the tallest building, they showed us a 16-mm film about all the great things Americans had accomplished, including the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building. After about the tenth mention of the one hundred and two floors of the Empire State Building, I wondered if this choppy-voice narrator wasn’t making fun of our new twenty-two-story marvel.
In the 1970s, parents believed that they could let their kids roam all over the Country Club of Jackson and that they would be safe and wholesome. Neither was the case. Besides wanton sex with a woman who could beat me at any sport except weight lifting, when I was in high school, if you wanted to purchase pot or cocaine, the transaction most likely took place in the Country Club parking lot.
I didn’t care for coke. I still don’t, but it was very popular at the CCJ. For a while, there was a pretty strong rumor that some of the young wives had gotten hooked on coke and were turning tricks at the Country Club to pay for their habit. I doubt if that was ever true, but for a pretty good while, coke was easy to get, and the biggest proponents were young women.
My grandfather was always very athletic. He went to college on a basketball scholarship but played football instead. In those days, Millsaps played Ole Miss and beat them. They’ve never forgiven us. He played golf for the first time in Atlanta with a fella who was also in the stationary business and eventually became one of the most important Mayors in Atlanta's history.
Enjoying it, he thought he’d like to play in Mississippi and get better but soon found there was no place to play. Before the war broke out, he talked Orrin Swayze to go with him and Carter O’Ferral to Scotland to see how they laid out their courses. Upon their return, they decided to use their own money, do most of the labor themselves, and build a nine-hole golf course near the Observatory at Millsaps College. Four generations after the maintenance crew dug up the last hole on the Millsaps Golf Course, people still call that area “the golf course,” even though it’s mostly soccer and softball fields now.
This golf thing was pretty popular. After a while, a group started discussing building a “Country Club” like they had in other cities. The Country Club proposition had two purposes: one was to play golf. The other was the idea that, even though Mississippi was still a dry state (one of the last) since this was a “private club,” they might serve alcohol there and have a defensible position should they ever get raided. (When they eventually did get raided, it didn’t work out that way, but that’s another story.)
The Crystal Lake Club was built on the same premise. Basically, a cabin on an oxbow lake feeding off the Pearl River, the Crystal Lake Club was a happening place for a while. On the border between Hinds and Rankin Counties, the Crystal Lake Club could take advantage of the Rankin County bootleggers, but if the sheriff ever showed up, they could say it was a private club. Crystal Lake Club still exists. I think Hebron Morris is the last surviving member.
The idea was that there would be three levels of places to drink, from really pretty sketchy at the Flowood Gold Coast, Crystal Lake in the middle, and this proposed Country Club for church people. The Country Club was a place where you could drink and bring your wife at the same time.
There was a concerted effort to build Jackson to the West for a while. State law prohibited a city from annexing land across county lines, and there was more space to the West than to the North or East, where we eventually did start to go. Land was purchased from the Mynelle family, and Granddaddy and his two friends started again designing a full golf course this time. It was still a few years before there would be professional golf course designers you could hire.
When he wasn’t playing golf or selling textbooks, my Grandfather dearly loved officiating SEC football. He ended up in the Sports Hall of Fame for it, back when it was still called the Jackson Touchdown Club. One year, in a game between Ole Miss and some school from Baton Rouge, a fella named Boudreaux tackled Granddaddy rather than the fella with the ball. I doubt if his name was actually Boudreaux, but for boys from Louisiana, the odds favor it.
With a broken back, Grandaddy’s officiating days were over. So were his golfing days. The doctors fused together three of his vertebrae, and he walked with a cane for the rest of his life. He still loved golf but he couldn’t play it anymore.
In the '60s, it became clear that Jackson wasn’t growing to the West; it was growing to the North, and the decision to move the Country Club of Jackson coincided with the construction of the Pearl River Reservoir at the corner of Hinds, Madison, and Rankin counties.
I’ve always gotten kind of a kick out of reports of all these environmental impact hearings about the two-lake proposal. In the fifties and sixties, when the Pearl River Reservoir was being planned, there was none of that. The only consideration was whether Misssipppi had the political clout to get that kind of money from the feds.
Grandaddy was again the head of the Golf Course Committee, even though, this time, they would have actual designers come in to build the course. At one point, there was a plan to merge the Country Club of Jackson with the Jackson Yacht Club, but a late-in-the-game change of where the spillway would go made that impossible.
There was a pretty considerable contingent that wanted an antebellum-style clubhouse. Daddy and Brum Day, Rowan Taylor, and Bob Hearin were deadset against it. Antebellum architecture made people think Mississippi wasn’t part of the modern world. For guys who did business outside of Mississippi, our image in the rest of the country was important, and in the sixties, it wasn’t great. The financing was coming through First National, and Hearin was a fan of Mid-Century Architecture and made sure that his acolytes felt the same way, so the new Country Club of Jackson looked like it would be at home in 2001, A Space Odyssey. Some of the mid-century design elements still shine through, but they’ve been trying to cover them up for twenty-five years.
No longer able to play golf, Grandaddy started playing Gin Rummy. He died playing Gin Rummy with Toby Trowbridge at the Country Club. For Grandaddy and Toby Trowbridge, the country club wasn’t a place to show off how successful you were. It was a place where a guy could get a sandwich and a drink without getting in trouble with the sheriff or their wife, even after alcohol became legal.
Daddy was a very competitive person. For a while, he decided that he wanted to be a scratch golfer. A lot of guys he knew were pretty serious about golf, and in the National Office Products Association, many deals were made on the golf course.
Daddy’s career started to get pretty crazy. When my brothers were little, he thought he could play golf and coach Y-Guys Baseball, football, and Indian Guides. By the time I came along, things were changing pretty rapidly. I never got to play Y-Guys baseball or any baseball, but I played Y-Guys football through school, not my daddy. One day, Daddy asked if it was okay if he didn’t go to Indian Guides with me anymore. He didn’t have the time.
He learned that being a scratch golfer meant playing almost every day. He attempted it because his cousin Robert Wingate was doing it in Greenwood. Robert became a scratch golfer by playing every day at Sunup and finishing in time to start work by 8:30. My dad and his dad opened the mail at Sunup and started work by 7:30, so that plan was out.
Beyond that, Daddy was starting to see some of the new guys at the Country Club contemptuously. They had very different ideas about what club membership meant than he did. They saw it as a way to make people take them seriously, which usually didn’t work, at least not how they wanted.
After about age ten, Daddy never spanked me or beat me, but if I ever acted like I was taking on airs, he’d embarrass me till I cried. He believed and preached to us that nobody in Mississippi was better than anybody, and trying to act like you were was close to sinful.
We used to go to Chicago every year for the National School Supply and Equipment Association meeting at the Blackstone Hotel. They eventually moved it to Nashville, but it wasn’t as good.
In a cab with my dad, he asked the driver his name, then began asking him questions about Chicago from his perspective as somebody who lived there. His name was Thomas. After a while, Daddy said, “Boyd, is there anything you want to ask Thomas?”
When Daddy tried to teach me a lesson, it was obvious. His point was that people at the convention were already starting to treat me like a scion of the School Supply business. Daddy wanted me to remember that I was no better as a human being than Thomas, our cab driver.
Daddy eventually got to the point where the only time he’d go to the country club of Jackson was to take the family to the Sunday Buffet Lunch, and that was mostly because, other than Old Tyme, nearly every other place was closed on Sunday.
I quit going, too. I soon realized that there wasn’t anything going on at the Country Club that I needed to be a part of. When I left college, Daddy asked if I wanted the company to include a country club membership in my compensation package. I told him that I was good on that. I didn’t need to impress anybody by being a member at the Country Club when I sucked at both Golf and Cards. He could give me some money to upgrade my computer because I felt like there may be some opportunities there.
I lost my virginity at the Country Club, and twelve years later, I lost my grandfather there, too. They didn’t need me to be a part of whatever they had going on. My father thought it was very important that I learned humility. In time, I agreed with him. I wasn’t going to learn humility chasing debutantes around the Country Club.
