Members Hope Next 90 Years Will Be as Good as the First 90

‘The opening of this San Diego Country Club marked the beginning of many good old days.’

There’s a story that’s been making the rounds at the San Diego Country Club for a quarter of a century, ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the venerable institution in October, 1960.

An avid golfer, Eisenhower wanted to play a round at the private club--reputed to be one of the most demanding courses around--after completing his official duties at a Rotary Club International meeting held there.

The story goes that an FBI agent in Eisenhower’s retinue approached a country club officer and asked him if he’d like to play golf with the President.

The club officer brusquely declined, according to the tale, explaining that “I already have a game.”

Chuck Talbott, SDCC manager for the last eight years, is no stranger to the story. He’s heard two club members named as the man who snubbed Ike.

Talbott has too much political savvy to identify those members, but acknowledges that he knows both men “and I wouldn’t put it past either one of them.”

Some members of “The Club” do justice to the anecdote’s image of a crusty old codger who puts his daily golf game before anything and anyone--even the President of the United States--conceded Mitchell Koteff, who has belonged to SDCC for 32 years.

Some play daily, usually with the same foursome, and use the rest of their time eating, sleeping and verbally replaying the round with their peers. These are avid golfers, Koteff admits, who wouldn’t miss a starting time or change a partner for any man.

But that’s not the way it happened back in 1960, Koteff says.

Eisenhower did indeed visit the prestigious country club to speak to assembled Rotarians from Tijuana and the San Diego area. When Ike finished the formalities, he got down to the basics, asking the local Rotary Club president, Dr. C. Brewer Casey, to accompany him on a brief golfing vacation, most likely to Palm Springs, Koteff recalled. Casey begged off, Koteff said, “because of other commitments.”

Casey, an SDCC member, couldn’t be reached for comment on the Eisenhower incident. Probably out on the golf course.

The San Diego Country Club has been home to the city’s doctors, lawyers, builders, bankers and king-makers for nearly 90 years--long enough to earn its reputation as an enclave for the rich and powerful, and, perhaps, to outgrow it.

Since its formation in the 1890s, it has been the place where power dwelt, where money and clout were taken for granted. Where golf came first and the ultimate achievement was a hole-in-one, and where generous members donate funds for revamping the 18th hole rather than the clubhouse.

The history of the club is laced with names familiar to generations of San Diegans: Klauber, Forward, Hamilton, Burnham, Fletcher, Marston, Sefton, Gilbert, Anderson Borthwick and Fred Rohr. But at the SDCC, these men were known by their first names and their handicaps instead of by their corporate titles and their bank balances.

To ask if a club member plays golf is to commit a social gaffe. The terms are interchangeable.

“Oh, we have some ladies here who don’t play golf. Wives of members. Some women come here and play bridge from 10 in the morning to 5 at night,” club manager Talbott said.

His tone indicated disapproval. Golf is the game, the only game at the club. No tennis courts or swimming pools pollute the 155 acres of fairways, greens, tees, sand traps and water hazards.

In the beginning, it was a couple who had never heard of the game of golf who planted the seed that became the San Diego Country Club.

Charles Douglas and his wife (recorded in the club’s history only as Mrs. Douglas) were out hunting for mushrooms one fall day in 1896 when they found a hard spherical object that they could not identify. On their way back, the couple stopped by the home of Dr. and Mrs. William Edwards, who had moved to San Diego from the East, to show them the strange little object “that might have been some petrified shrub fruit.”

The Edwardses “were highly amused” by the find. It was a golf ball, one of several they had lost while trying to play golf in the heavy brush on a University Heights mesa. The Easterners introduced the Douglases to golf and enrolled them in what became, in 1897, the San Diego Country Club.

A dozen or so charter club members and some hired men cleaned off the brush on the Balboa Park land loaned to them by the City of San Diego, and created a primitive 9-hole course with unimproved fairways and tamped-sand greens. A clubhouse, about the size of a two-car garage, served as the 19th hole.

Perhaps because there were as many women members as men in those early days, social activities were popular. There was a fireworks display on the Fourth of July in 1898 that cost the club $35.25 in incendiaries--an amount the parsimonious secretary-treasurer Robert Vroom questioned, the board of directors’ minutes show.

A mandolin and an upright piano--the latter later traded in for a player piano--were among the early club acquisitions. Tea was served promptly at 4 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays, a service later extended to every afternoon except Sundays. By the turn of the century, club membership was limited to 200.

Dances, picnics and table tennis tourneys were recorded in the minutes in 1900 and 1901, along with the acquisition of the nearby Silver Gate Gun Club for SDCC members’ enjoyment (and to deal with the danger of errant bullets dropping on the golf course.)

In the next decade, as clubhouse facilities became crowded, popular architect Irving Gill was hired on a $200 retainer to design a new, permanent clubhouse to be located on SDCC land on Upas Street.

Scanty club minutes record that Gill’s design was “unacceptable.” Gill was summarily dismissed in February, 1911, and a lesser-known architect was commissioned to design the building. By September, the $10,000, two-story clubhouse was completed. But before the membership could settle comfortably into the lavish new digs--complete with ballroom, cocktail lounge and grill--city officials notified the San Diego Country Club that it would need all of Balboa Park, including the golf course, for the Pan American Exposition in 1915.

The final eviction notice was served in June, 1913, and club officials swiftly accepted an offer from sporting goods mogul A.G. Spalding to merge with his Point Loma Golf Club, which included a white, castle-like building and an 18-hole golf course that Spalding built as part of his real estate developments in Loma Portal.

World War I came along to put a crimp in SDCC’s golf game. Mobilization and creation of the Navy and Marine training centers along the peninsula ate up nine holes of the 18-hole course, sending members out to scout for a permanent site far from military installations or international expositions. In 1920, they found that spot--gently rolling farmland and lemon groves south of Chula Vista and about a mile east of San Diego Bay.

Oscar Cotton, an SDCC member and self-described real estate man, recorded in his memoirs the momentous opening day of the new golf course on Sept. 3, 1921:

“The opening of this San Diego Country Club marked the beginning of many good old days. Golf in the daytime and parties at night. The club had a good chef; and we always had good dance music--the new tunes of the day made just about everybody want to dance--which we did, week after week, for many years.”

On that first day, Cotton was paired with Walter Whitcomb, vice president of First National Trust and Savings Bank, for his initial try at the tough new course and its innovative grass greens. He shot a horrendous 141, which “was exactly my weight in pounds on the day I was married,” he reported.

In infrequent columns for the SDCC’s “Golf Partner,” Cotton blithely poked fun at the more staid members of the club. One column was devoted to “the Millionaire Foursome,” composed of Julius Wagenheim, George W. Marston, Milton A. McRae and M.F. Heller. Cotton reported that, in 1930, he was invited to fill in for an absent member of the group and quickly accepted.

“There are several reasons why I accepted,” he said. “In the first place, a prospector only strikes it rich when he prospects where the gold is, and while . . . no real estate man would take advantage of a good friend on the golf course, unless he got the chance, it seemed a good bet, at least.

“Then there is the advertising. Other club members and prospective investors will say, ‘I knew Oscar Cotton when he weighed only 140 pounds and now look at him. Tips the scales at a 10th of a ton and plays golf with millionaires; there must be money in real estate.’

“My bankers have not called me on a single loan since I have been playing with this foursome, and several times club members have introduced me as ‘Mister.’ ”

With tongue firmly in cheek, Cotton continued his mild joshing of the membership in a follow-up column, reporting that “certain members of our club have severely criticized me for selecting one special group of members and advertising them as millionaires, thereby embarrassing the other members who were not included . . . “

So, Cotton reported, he stationed himself by the first tee and, as the club members stepped up to tee off, he “asked each a simple question: ‘Are you a millionaire?’ ”

“I was surprised at how few answered ‘yes’ without hesitation,” he reported. “It was interesting to see the expression on their faces.”

Cotton promised to publish the names and answers of the startled club members to his fictitious survey in an upcoming column to help “would-be millionaires,” whom he defined as “fellows who would like to be millionaires but could not think just how to go about doing it.”

More seriously, he wrote with nostalgia of the ‘20s and ‘30s at the club: “Those were ‘Good Old Days.’ I played rotten golf, but I enjoyed immensely the companionship and the thrill of an occasional good shot. We enjoyed the sociability of the evening parties and the dancing. We almost forgot there had been a war, and a Depression. The future looked bright indeed--not a cloud on the horizon.”

But World War II put the country club into near-bankruptcy as its members went off to war or found that gas rationing precluded long trips to the South Bay club. Membership and receipts dipped precipitously, and club officers pondered how to keep up the mortgage payments.

Financier Anderson Borthwick, SDCC president at the time, and industrialist Fred Rohr concocted the happy salvation. The club mortgage was refinanced, and the exclusive golf course was leased to Rohr’s 9,000 wartime employees as a recreation center. After two years of this unusual arrangement, during which members retained their playing privileges, the club again was solvent. Again, it went private.

After the war, SDCC slowly came back to life, regaining its stature in regional men’s and women’s golf tourneys, serving as the site for the San Diego Open in 1952 and 1953. It gained national notoriety when its pro, Fred Sherman, played a golf ball cross-country for nine miles in 78 strokes.

But, although the golf course has grown old gracefully with its manicured greens and its towering eucalyptus, the clubhouse has not. At 65 years of age, the building shows its former beauty only dimly. Many of the architectural lines that at one time put the old building on a historic register have been camouflaged with additions and remodeling. The driftwood beams still gleam in the ballroom where Oscar Cotton and his wife danced the nights away, but the room now carries a funereal air. The tile roof shows signs of frequent leaks, and the kitchen floor is sagging and filled with potholes.

“It’s a constant struggle to keep that kitchen going,” Talbott said, shaking his head at the ancient and crowded fixtures. “Serving 400 dinners out of here is a real challenge.”

A healthy majority of the nearly 400 club members agree with club plans to start its second 90 years afresh by razing the modest tile-roofed structure and replacing it with a more impressive two-story clubhouse.

But Mayor Kile Morgan of National City, a club member since 1957, voices the minority viewpoint that the clubhouse “is too historic to destroy.”

San Diego County “has too few beautiful old buildings left to just throw one like that away,” Morgan said. “They want to spend $4 million or $5 million and build a brand new one on the same site. I want them to spend $1 million or $2 million to restore that clubhouse back as beautiful as it once was in the old days, the good old days.

“There are a lot of memories in that old clubhouse, too many good memories to destroy.”