By Francis Lide, Wake Forest College Class of 1951
100 years of history – Wake Forest’s past remembered
In 1942, when I came to Wake Forest at the age of 12, my family rented the sandstone house on Durham Road built by Sybil Gulley. It was then the last house in town and across the road from the College’s golf course.
Directly across the road was a small parking lot where the golfers, mostly faculty members, parked to start their round in the nine-hole course. The holes have long since been renumbered, but I’ll call that hole the first. It started on Durham Road and ran in a northeasterly direction alongside the Paschal’s pasture. {Like many other Wake Forest resident’s, the Paschal family owned at least one cow, probably had a pig fattening behind the barn and kept a coop full of chickens for the eggs and Sunday dinners.}
In contrast to newer golf courses in the Midwest, most holes were not laid out in opposite directions separated by s single row of recently planted trees. No, the fairways of the first and eighth (Richland Creek) holes had a substantial patch of woods between them, providing cover for quail and rabbits, and balls lost there had to be searched for using a golf club as a swing blade to push aside the honeysuckle and poison ivy.
In contrast to golf courses I’ve seen in the Carolina coastal plain, there were no artificial hillocks bulldozed up. No, all the holes followed the substantial natural contours of the ground, and the first hole went gently downhill, and then uphill again to the green.
The tee for the second hole was atop a sandstone bluff known affectionately to the courting youth of the town as Sunset Rock. It was easily accessible from the College football practice field. If you and your lass wanted to take an afternoon or moonlit stroll on the golf course, you would go to the end of the street that went past the front of Gore Gymnasium, clatter down the big concrete steps that had once been the stands of the College’s stadium, and traverse the practice field to the golf course. The flag for the second hole, a par three, was easily visible directly below, which helped nurse many a forlorn hope of holes in one.
The third hole ran west, across Richland Creek. The fourth hole went approximately north. The fifth hole ran west again, while the sixth doubled back toward the south, ending at The Pond. The tee for the seventh, a par four, was just off the dam of The Pond, and the green was just on the west side of Richland Creek. It was separated from the third hole by a single row of long-leaf pines. The tee to the eighth hole, a par five, was next to the green for the second. Teeing off, you had a large patch of pine woods to the west and the east, with the branches of a huge, impressive old pine sticking out about halfway up the fairway. Behind the pine tree, and in woods along the west of the fairway, lay Richland Creek, which ran from north to south.
It was on the eighth hole that I remember seeing my classmate Arnold Palmer practicing his powerful tee shots.
The ninth tee ran uphill from along Durham Road to the starting point. For the children of the town, it’s fondly remembered as a sledding course on one of those blessed intervals when the snow stuck and we had a couple of days off from school. When snow-covered, that hole had a drop-off that rocketed your sled into the air, and for sledding it was probably a lot sportier than it was for golf.
There were no sand traps, and the “greens” were greens in name only. They were small, perfectly round, and of oiled sand, and the etiquette was that after you putted you were to drag a canvas rake in a circle over the green to restore it to its original condition – like raking a miniature Japanese garden. Since then, I’ve always thought that the putting game has been overemphasized. With no greens to keep watered, there was no need for an elaborate sprinkling system, and the only grounds keeping was provided by a small tractor pulling a rotary gang mower, usually driven by someone on a football scholarship.
For townie youths, finding a golf ball was like finding a nugget. It was a source of instant childhood wealth and of insights into the habits of the golf-playing professoriate.
Some of the balls we found had wicked slashes in them from slices of at least 45 degrees. In at least one case others, lost by one of the more prominent members of the faculty, had the name of the owner imprinted on it. We sub-college-age finders resented this practice as the ultimate in chintziness and an attempt to counteract the rule of finders keepers. If you were playing and your ball went into the rough, you spent many long, frustrating minutes looking for it. How multitudes of balls can be found easily where anybody practices golf today (several have been rolling around on the floor of my car for years) never ceases to amaze me. How disgustingly rich have we become!
With no elaborately maintained greens or sand traps, and with relatively light use during the war years, the attitude of the College toward the course was laissez-faire when it came to trespassing. You could go to the links for any youthful adventure, and you could set out across them with your shotgun in search of rabbit or quail. I have a fond memory of a beautiful point by two bird dogs on a very late winter afternoon in the rough on the fifth hole, the one farthest from town. Now, I understand, the entire area around the course is surrounded by suburban houses, but before the college moved you were in the country.
A favorite magnet of the course was The Pond. It was fed by a pretty little stream that ran past a patch of beech trees. I remember trying to ice skate on it, and falling through the ice on one occasion and foolishly trying to dry my socks over a fire. Why the pond was created was unclear. It must have been a swimming hole at some time, but by the mid-40s it had become increasingly choked with water weeds. My friends and I built a raft to float on it and even used it to launch a poorly designed homemade boat.
I suspect that seeing the golfing faculty members coming out regularly on afternoons during the school year may have influenced my decision to join the American professoriate. A calling allowing that much conspicuous leisure must be a goal worth striving for.
In a later stanza of Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne,” the poet fondly remembers extended youthful wanderings “about the braes.” For those of us who grew up in Old Wake Forest, those braes were the Paschal Golf Course.
(This is printed with Mr. Lide’s permission, and we thank him for sharing his memories.)
And also . . .
The memoir was printed in the February 4, 2004 edition of the Gazette. That edition also included a long article including two letters exchanged between the city managers of Raleigh, Russell Allen, and Wake Forest, Mark Williams, in which they politely disagreed about several aspects of the then-potential merging of the Raleigh and Wake Forest water/sewer systems.
The Wake Forest Town Board had stopped futilely searching for other ways to grow the water/sewer systems to allow the town to grow and accepted the inevitable – merger with Raleigh, but it was not a simple or friendly acknowledgement.
***
