Here’s an archive photo of what Chicago-area public courses looked like in 1921.
By Phil Kosin Chicagoland Golf editor
In 1922, the Cook County Forest Preserve District was on a roll. Formed in 1913, the district had been given by state statute carte blanche to acquire open lands for public use. The Forest Preserve Act of 1913 read in part the county should:
“acquire ... and hold lands ... containing one or more natural forests or lands connecting such forests or parts thereof, for the purpose of protecting and preserving the flora, fauna and scenic beauties within such district, and to restore, restock, protect, and preserve the natural forests and said lands together with their flora and fauna, as nearly as may be, in their natural state and condition, for the purpose of the education, pleasure, and recreation of the public.”
The move showed an immense amount of foresight; today the district owns 68,000 acres, or one-fifth of the county.
Palos Park GC seen in a 1938 aerial photograph. The course’s rough boundaries on this view are 107th St. to the south, and yellow lines east and west. Also shown is the future site of Saganaskee Slough, which at the time was still farmland. The location where the U.S. government moved the world’s first nuclear reactor is west of the golf course, although the entire triangle of land was under heavy guard during WWII. Wolf Road no longer goes through to 107th. (Chicagoland Golf graphic)
Several old-timers claimed Babe Ruth played at Palos Park GC several times when the Yankees had an off-day in town. Other notables said to have been regulars at Palos Park were Joe Louis, Machine Gun Jack McGurn and Al Capone. (Photos: Library of Congress)
As a testament
to the burgeoning first golf boom in the 1920s, that year the district
earmarked 50 sites on district land in Cook County as suitable for
building golf courses. Half of them were nearby existing surface
transportation – in addition to the major railroads with passenger
service, there were a host of electric lines and trolleys reaching out
from the city in all directions. The farthest course from Downtown
Chicago was Palos Park Golf Course on 107th Street west of 104th Street
(Willow Springs Road), which opened in 1921. The trolley ran along
nearby Archer Avenue.
But the district did not want to go into
the business of constructing golf courses, so it agreed to lend the use
of the land to any community or responsible group of persons who wanted
a golf course.
However, the district did build several on its
own, and one of them, Palos Park GC, debuted with much fanfare. One
article in a 1922 issue of American Golfer excitedly claimed it “can
become the Pine Valley course of the middle west.”
Very little
written information exists on this course; same for any photographic
record. I’ve searched my personal resources and have used the
information gleaned there and through conversations with eyewitnesses
(one is the late Joe Jemsek, who before he worked at and later owned
Cog Hill caddied a few times at Palos Park GC). So this account is the
result of what a persistent, ink-stained wretch could cobble together
with accuracy.
The course was designed by legendary golf course
architect Tom Bendelow, who was based for a time in Chicago and did
over 800 courses in his career. He inherited a marvelous, if not wild
site, thick with forests and diving ravines high on the unglaciated
hills southwest of Chicago between the DesPlaines River and Saganaskee
Slough wetland areas.
Chick Evans was the top amateur in the country when he played Palos Park GC in a grand opening exhibition match.
Other local Bendelow courses include three
at Medinah and Olympia Fields, both of which have hosted U.S. Opens. He
also designed East Lake in Atlanta, recent home of the Tour
Championship.
From an inspection of the site, it appears
Bendelow moved very little dirt in building the course; most likely, he
carefully assessed the land and its elevations, did a routing and let
the district remove the trees.
Palos Park opened early for
public play after 12 holes were finished in spring, 1921. By fall, all
18 holes were complete, playing to par 70 over 6,220 yards. The course
featured the typical scruffy fairways, dirt tees, one water hazard and
“seeded greens” – considered quite the rage in those days. The
difficulty of the course came from the hilly nature of the land; very
seldom did a golfer find his ball on a flat lie. There was a clubhouse
at the end of a winding drive off 107th St., and in 1933 it cost 50
cents to play 18 holes; you could play all day for 75 cents (which is
the true meaning of the term “daily fee”). Caddies were paid 75 cents a
loop.
As part of a grand opening in the fall of 1921, the course
hosted a public exhibition featuring a pro versus and amateur: Charles
“Chick” Evans, Jr. and Jock Hutchinson.
A transplanted Scotsman,
like most golf professionals at that time, Hutchinson was head pro at
Glen View Club for thirty-five years from 1918 to 1953. For many of
those years, he held the professional course record of 64. He won the
1920 and 1923 Western Opens, the 1920 PGA Championship at Flossmoor,
and, returning to his birthplace, the 1921 British Open at St. Andrews.
Jock Hutchinson was a golf professional at the Glen View Club for 35 years; he set the pro record of level par at Palos Park GC.
Evans, of course, was the outstanding amateur of his time, the first golfer to win the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur championships in the same year – in 1916. Only Bobby Jones has done so since. Evans won a second U.S. Amateur in 1920, the Western Open in 1910 and the French Amateur in 1911. He also captured eight Western Amateur titles, including four in a row from 1920 to 1923. Chick’s biggest contribution to the game, however, was his establishment of the caddie-scholar fund named in his honor. Since 1930, when two caddies enrolled at Northwestern, over 7,400 caddies, male and female, have graduated from universities in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest with the help of the Evans Scholarships.
Playing at Palos Park GC before a crowd estimated at over 4,000, Hutchinson shot even par 70 for the pro record; Evans was a stroke behind at 71 for the amateur mark. Both course records were never broken.
Public players were able to enjoy playing Palos Park GC for 22 seasons. But suddenly, mysteriously, without any explanation or warning, the course simply never opened for the 1943 season. Nor did it ever host another round of golf again. And here’s why:
The golf course and the land surrounding it became one of the most top-secret and well-guarded sites in the world.
That’s because Enrico Fermi and 50 colleagues from the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory created the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction on Dec. 2, 1942 in a squash court under Stagg Field. Not only could the research be directed toward civilian purposes like cheap electricity, but it also triggered the U.S. atomic bomb program, the Manhattan Project.
The government knew it needed to move Fermi and his nuclear research quickly for two main reasons: no one knew the extent of any possible collateral damage from a failed experiment, and due to the military importance the reactor and scientists needed to be secure from enemy spies and saboteurs.
So the perfect place for both security and safety was in the uninhabited, thickly-wooded hills of the Palos forest preserves. The world’s first reactor – known as Chicago Pile One (CP-1) – and the UC’s Met Lab were moved in February, 1943 to an newly-built maximum-security facility first named “Site A” and later changed to Argonne Laboratory. It remained there until the late 1940s; no atomic bomb research was conducted at Argonne Woods – the U.S. government built two top-secret facilities for that purpose, in Los Alamos, NM, and Oak Ridge, TN.
The nuclear waste material from the Argonne project was buried near the old Palos Park GC site. Reports say leakage from the dump area has since poisoned the area’s groundwater.
