A Golfer's Life Read Online Free

Jean, but everyone (except perhaps for me) in those days seemed to have a nickname. Exactly how my father got his nickname—“Deacon” or, more commonly, “Deke”—remains a bit of a family mystery. Sometime back when he was a young man, he apparently helped out a local black minister in some kind of trouble, and people took to calling him “Deacon.” Perhaps the name was bestowed in derision or jest. No one knows for sure, and my father certainly wasn’t going to discuss it. In his view, someone else’s troubles were their own business, not a proper subject for public discussion.
    While a deacon is an elder of the church who helps the minister caretake the flock, my father never felt comfortable going to the little Lutheran church in Youngstown where Cheech and I were sent every Sunday from the time we could walk until confirmation at around age thirteen. I eventuallycame to learn that, even though he wasn’t a church-going man, our father really was a caretaker to many people around town. A man who took care of people regardless of their background or race. A deacon with strong hands. So the name stuck, and it suited him. As I say, most people simply called him Deke.
    I called him Pap from the beginning.
    Pap was the only Palmer son with a physical disability, a deformed foot from a bout of infantile paralysis that in those times was popularly referred to as a “game foot.” I’m convinced this only made him tougher, doubled his determination to be independent and strong. As a boy, he lifted weights and practiced chin-ups with one arm in order to build his upper-body strength. He could chin himself with either arm at least ten times, and his hands and upper torso, as a result, were splendidly muscled while his hips remained slim, his legs fairly weak.
    At about age fifteen, he quit school and went to work at American Locomotive in Latrobe (now Standard Steel) as a mail runner, but he didn’t like being indoors and heard somebody planned to build a golf course a couple of miles from his parents’ house in Youngstown. He knew nothing about golf, even less about growing grass or shaping fairways and greens, but he went out to the site of the new Latrobe Country Club and applied for a job as a laborer. He began his long career at Latrobe Country Club by literally digging ditches on a three-man construction crew.
    When the nine-hole course was more or less finished, in 1921, my father, then just seventeen, was asked by Latrobe Steel—which owned most of the stock in the new club—to stay on and help maintain the course. But there was a catch: the job wasn’t a year-round opportunity, and he would be laid off when the golf season ended. After tearing down, cleaning, and repainting every piece of the club’s maintenanceequipment, he remedied this shortfall by finding a second job running the poolroom at the Youngstown Hotel, a pretty rough-and-tumble place where local workingmen, including several Polish and Slovak men who would eventually come to work for him at the golf course and become like surrogate uncles to me, relaxed and drank shots of whiskey with their beers, wagered on pool, and sometimes got into fistfights. Thanks to his weight lifting, Pap was a young bull nobody dared give much lip to.
    Pap’s personality and character, I see now, from the vantage point of many years, undoubtedly was shaped by those years struggling to teach himself to walk again, long before there were doctors and rehabilitation programs to help people manage the various difficulties associated with types of polio. His father drilled into him the importance of doing a job to the best of your abilities, never complaining about your lot, and always conducting yourself with as much dignity as possible. Early in his married life to my mother, for example, Pap worked a second job at night in the steel mill to bring in extra family income. According to Mother and others, he worked so hard (at a job he hated, no less) he sometimes