Course Review- SPRING 2004
The Idylls of Oyster Harbors

By Jeff Blanchard
photography by George Peet
OYSTER HARBORS CLUB
Osterville, MA
Tel: 508-428-6666

Ring bell for service.

It was tempting. There we were, on the edge of the parking lot at the Oyster Harbors Club, standing between the car and the pro shop about 50 feet away. Someone apparently was waiting at the other end of this bell to come down here and pick us up. What a concept.

Even though we did not avail ourselves of the service, it set a nice tone for the day. We would be guests of the club, and as such would be asked to sign our names on a sheet, and that was pretty much all we had to do.
They welcomed us to the club, asked us whether we'd played the course before, set us up with a cart, and sent us off on our way with no one else in front, behind or alongside, and, before we headed out, pointed us in the direction of the bar, where they keep some really nice cigars in a desk-top humidor.

Then they provided us with a golf experience that came as close to perfect as imaginable~ 6,711 yards of masterfully designed, artfully restored and meticulously maintained golf course that is surrounded by inconspicuous modern-day castles and protected from the outside world by a ringlet of saltwater that serves as a natural moat.

How the course got this way is a study in the methods of course construction during the pinnacle of course construction in America ~ the first third of the last century.

In the year before the course opened in 1926, an estimated 800,000 trees were removed from the 140-acre parcel dedicated to the course. John R. Blackinton was among the 200-300 men who worked on the job, in his case to help pay for college, and he described the construction 60 years later in an interview for a club history.

"There was a lot of hand work," he said. "A lot of soil was moved with a slip scoop and one horse. The reins to the horse were on a ring around the neck of the slip scoop operator. They built mounds out of bunker contents. Five or six inches of clay were then placed on top of the soil, particularly around the tees and greens, to which was then added the topsoil which was brought in from a farm in West Barnstable.

"The clay helped to hold the moisture in the topsoil. They used fertilizer to the rate of five cords to the acre, with double on the tees and greens. Cow manure was shipped in from Maine to West Barnstable in 30-40 freight gondolas. It was then loaded by hand from gondolas to trucks and taken to the golf course where eight manure spreaders took two weeks to spread it. When the manure was allowed to sit on the railway siding for too long a period of time, complaints came in from residents of West Barnstable"
The course designer was the legendary Donald Ross, of Dornoch, Scotland, famous for Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina and hundreds of the best courses in America. His concentration was in Massachusetts, where he got his start at the turn of the century and captured a couple of state open championships while he was at it, despite a game several notches below his brother Alex's.

Judging by the time he devoted to the job and to the number of visits he made to see his friends and to play the course in subsequent years, Donald Ross developed a special affection for Oyster Harbors. Along the way he also became close to another friend of Oyster Harbors, Francis Ouimet, America's first golf hero and namesake of the game's leading caddie scholarship fund.

"It is nice to note that its benefit golf outings are often held on Donald Ross courses: Belmont, Essex, Longmeadow, Newport, Oyster Harbors, Salem, Tedesco, Weston, Vesper and Worcester,' according to Paul and B. J. Dunn's Great Donald Ross Golf Courses You Can Play.

Ouimet was a guest of William Danforth, Sr., a longtime Oyster Harbors member whose legendary support for golf was memorialized with a club tournament in his name, as well as a room in the clubhouse at Augusta National. Among the other beneficiaries of Danforth's enthusiasm for the game was Ken Venturi, the champion golfer turned CBS broadcaster, who set a course record at Oyster Harbors on July 23, 1959 with a front-side 31, back-side 34, 65 total ~ in the middle of a four-round spree in which Venturi never carded a five.

Ouimet, as was his habit, returned the favors done him by Oyster Harbors with gifts (and re-gifts) of his own, including many golf prints that he had received as the honorary Captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, and an oil painting by Dwight D. Eisenhower of the caddy-turned-champion Ouimet dressed in his R & A red coat.

Eisenhower's links to Oyster Harbors don't stop at the canvas, either. He spent so much time enjoying the island, the course and the people in the 1950's that serious consideration was given to making the sanctuary a Summer White House. The CIA nixed the idea, saying that the place would be too difficult to defend in the event of an attack, according to club historians.

Two other threats to the idyllic setting that is Oyster Harbors have come in the form of destructive winds ~ a constant visitor to contend with ~ and commercial entities such as Howard Johnson's, which was nearly invited to build a hotel on the island as a solution to a particularly dire financial stretch in the Ô30s. Like many of the best country clubs in America, Oyster Harbors had to crawl out of a deep sinkhole that opened up during the Great Depression.

A dozen different residents have stepped forward over the years to rescue the club from an uncertain fate, but more than any other, the man behind the enclave's continued good health is Paul Mellon.

To give you some idea of the current state of affairs on Oyster Harbors ~ and aren't we all enjoying the real estate bubble we're in? ~ the club has embarked on a multi-multi million-dollar clubhouse reconstruction project. This endeavor will require exactly zero assessment of its membership, since the club has eight or so lots they can sell to raise the money without anyone getting dunned.

Describing Oyster Harbors as a good investment wouldn't quite tell the whole story. James Lovell was the first buyer listed in historical records, having paid exactly 517 pounds to pick up the entire shooting match, although the purchase price should come with the disclaimer that the natives he dealt with were the original motivated sellers.

Today the island is home to a handful of household names and 120 other families, many with deep roots here on what used to be called Oyster Island, according to A History of Oyster Harbors, by Zenas Crocker and Elizabeth Murphy (daughter of club members Jim and Kay Murphy).

As a state of mind, Oyster Harbors is unique ~ a gated community on the edge of a village, Osterville, next to a city, Hyannis, in an old town, Barnstable, in a tourist resort, Cape Cod. The earliest settlers came here to get away from the congestion of Barnstable Village, away but without going that extra mile to Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket.

From the first foot of the wooden causeway that carries cars to the island, a visitor is made to feel part of a different time. Welcome greetings come from a sign on an ancient windmill whose vanes are spread in perpetual embrace of any passing breeze and by a guard who pops out of a little house on the far end of the bridge. All around are the waters of Seapuit River, which shimmer and shine in bright reflection of the beating sun, as the road unfolds before you in silent suggestion of a better world ahead.
"It's a hidden gem,' declared Golf Digest, in as silly a snippet as you could find in a course review. Of course it's a hidden gem. What course located off the beaten path couldn't be considered a hidden gem on at least some level?

In any event, Oyster Harbors isn't hidden so much as it is hard to reach, because of its private status and island seclusion. It certainly isn't hidden from the residents whose homes surround the course to the point where in summertime only a glimpse of the water is visible ~ from No. 7, the "Mirage" hole.

"Dick Stimets always used to say that the only thing wrong at all with Oyster Harbors is that it doesn't have a stretch of holes on the water, since it's surrounded by waterfront homes,' said long-time member and champion golfer Joe Keller.

The late Stimets was one of the club's most prominent members, whose passion for the game over a half-century of involvement made him a legend in golf circles all over Massachusetts and beyond ~ as much for his talents as a player as for his contributions to the future of the sport through charitable good works and the lasting bonds of friendship. Stimets was an international amateur champion whose association with the course at Oyster Harbors began as a caddie and culminated with 20 club championships.
Before he died a couple of years ago, it is safe to say that Stimets spent his happiest days at Oyster Harbors, as with many others whose idea of a perfect day includes a round of golf with a congenial partner, a solid swing and a steady putting stroke.

Among the honor roll of men and women who left their mark on the course were LPGA standout Joanne Gunderson Carner, whose 72 was for a time the ladies course record. The low round (although unattested) was a 63 carded by perhaps the club's best player, Dick Chapman, a Walker Cup star in the 1950s. Other notables were Bob Hope and Joe Cronin, the comedian and the baseball manager, club professional (1935-1972) Gene Anderson, a three-time runner up in the Mass Open that was (during the years before and after World War II) a regular feature on the club's long list of distinguished events, Anderson's successor Tom Mahan, Jr., football coach Joe Paterno, golf legends Walter Hagen, Horton Smith, Gene Sarazen and Babe Didrickson ~ and many others whose appearances resulted from a bygone publicity campaign to attract attention to this seaside resort.

From a purely architectural standpoint, few courses in America can compete with Oyster Harbors on the bloodlines of its designers. The neighboring courses at Hyannisport and Wianno can boast of holes designed by Donald Ross, whose firm is credited with mapping out somewhere between 400 and 800 courses. But Oyster Harbors is an all-Ross masterpiece that was subsequently improved by Robert Trent Jones and then renovated by Stephen Kay, a latter day disciple of the masters.

It has been Kay's professional mission to take an old classic and design a rehabilitation program that returns the course to its original splendor, as he has done with other Ross tracks such as The Country Club of Brookline, Winchester and Tedesco.

With Oyster Harbors, Kay said he followed Ross's plans 98 percent of the way by using old photographs and hand-drawn plans. "I try to keep the character or style of the golf course,' he told Golf Course News. What he found on this island in Osterville was a "marvelous golf courseÉwith the best greens, contour-wise, I've ever seen."

It was easy to leave well enough alone, and to focus on the tees and bunkers as the areas in need of repair, Kay said. The tees would be expanded to accommodate the increase in play and to account for today's longer drives, and the bunkers would be replenished and reconfigured in order to recapture their original shapes and purpose.

Kay's study of golf architecture had taught him that Ross preferred to build bunkers that players could see, so while some of his traps had sandy bottoms and grassy sides, most of them featured sand that flashed up the far side of the bunker so that players could gauge the proper distance to make the carry.

"I must see the sand, flash it up the face," Ross is quoted as telling the workers.

Other telltale signs of a Ross hand in the construction of Oyster Harbors include the false fronts of many greens which are elevated in such a way as to make an approach shot difficult to hold, the collection areas below many of these crowns, and the proportional shapes of these putting surfaces to the difficulty of the anticipated shot ~ meaning easy approach, small green, hard approach, forgiving green.

It is an over-used expression in design parlance to say a course is classic, but Oyster Harbors is a classic ~ from the strips cut into the rough between the tees and fairways to the windmill logo that dots every flag and dresses every scorecard, to the names they give the holes like Sahara, for the sand-filled No. 3, Thread Needle for the unforgiving drive on the 411-yard No. 15 and Waterloo, for the treacherous No. 17. "One of the spectacular holes situated on a high point with a majestic panorama,' it says of 17 in the club history book. "Once on the green the hole tends to be understanding, but the level is not flat and true. In fact, it is deceptive."

The tee shot from No. 3, the appropriately named 145-yard Sahara, must be accurate ~ which requires full carry over an all-sand fairway. Its island green is surrounded on front and both sides by deep bunkers with heavy rough on the backside. The fast green surface is flat, yet subtly deceptive. Missing the green is a cardinal sin ~ for the traps surrounding it will devour you.

The tee of No. 15 Threadneedle was extended under Joe Paterno's influence, and it requires a good drive to reach the fairway, with large bunkers midway on both left and right sides. The right bunker extends into the fairway, requiring a real accurate drive to avoid trouble. The wide-open remaining fairway leads to a narrow bottleneck approach with a large, well-guarded green surrounded with bunkers, front, left and right sides.

What some of the better players say about Oyster Harbors is that it's typical country club golf, gorgeous in its manicure, but cut and watered in such a way as to favor the mediocre player who should never have to worry about putting a ball off a slick green or driving a ball through a fast fairway.
"It's a good 18 holes of golf,' Keller said, "fun and fair to all golfers. It could be faster, but it's always in great condition."

On the entire course, I didn't see an unfixed ball mark or an unrepaired divot. There is some water, but nothing to worry about, and the grass was perfect from tee to green, with not a single patch of infestation or rot.
No, it isn't Kittansett, Eastward Ho!, New Seabury or the neighbors just east on Nantucket Sound, but it's a pretty perfect place to play golf, that's for sure. Do what you can to get invited on over. Then, just ring the bell.