When Babe Was in Boy Land of Golfing -- San Gabriel

In the winter of 1904, several rich men etched a nine-hole golf course into the scrubby oak- and cactus-studded terrain near Mission San Gabriel.

One hundred years and 99 tournaments later, the San Gabriel Country Club is Los Angeles and Orange counties’ oldest golf club still in its original location. (The Los Angeles Country Club opened its first course in 1897 near Pico Boulevard and Alvarado Terrace, but has moved a few times.)

Since its formation, the San Gabriel club has been the place where power took its recreation, where money could be found teeing up. So, on occasion, could a few members of the artist community living alongside the Rubio Wash, which bisects the golf course. One of those artists, Norman Rockwell, painted a mural of club members -- seated in a jury box.

This early golf course, nine primitive holes, was laid out on 50 acres with nine tin cans sunk into the ground and several buckets of oily sand in lieu of grass around the holes. The first hole was played through an opening cut into a magnificent 200-year-old cactus hedge, where pheasants took refuge as golf balls went flying by. Some of the balls landed in the Rubio Wash, to be recovered in dry seasons and abandoned in wet ones.

Membership cost $25, plus dues of $2.50 per month. Caddies, who earned 15 cents for the first hour and 10 cents for each subsequent hour, used pieces of carpet to smooth the “greens” of oiled sand.

The enterprise was bankrolled by Los Angeles’ upper crust, including industrialist Henry Huntington, whose Red Car trolley line dropped off golfers at the club’s front door. Prominent attorney Henry W. O’Melveny was involved too, along with a few hundred others of the area’s monied and influential. Membership was by invitation only and conferred a kind of social cachet, dividing the game of golf between the ultra-haves and the not-so-luckies.

The roster of charter members is filled with names familiar to generations of Angelenos: Huntington, O’Melveny, Pillsbury, Patton, Lankershim. But at the country club, they were known by their first names and their handicaps, not their corporate titles and bank balances. Even celebrity players like Johnny Weissmuller, former Ram Merlin Olsen and former welterweight champion Jimmy McLarnin were acknowledged only by their golf games.

When the San Gabriel course opened -- about 500 years after the Scots laid out the St. Andrews course in 1414 -- the character of golf courses was dictated almost entirely by existing terrain. Most in California were on windswept sand dunes where the only grass grew in hollows. If the grass needed clipping, grazing sheep did the job.

Los Angeles’ first golf course was a private one, built by a onetime Herald editor, Gen. John M. Baldwin, at Rancho Los Feliz, now Griffith Park. It was soon washed away, along with Baldwin’s mansion, by the Los Angeles River in the great 1884 flood.

Although no golfers were reported swept away in the sometimes wild and swampy Rubio Wash, the San Gabriel course could be treacherous. Dry for most of the year, the waters of the Rubio would swell during rainstorms and could flood several hundred acres in a flash.

When the Los Angeles Times announced the club’s formation on the front page, it predicted dryly: “The wives of the members are somewhat disturbed over the long hours that their spouses devote to this new game and doubt that the game is played by lantern-light, which is the excuse given for the late arrivals at home on Sunday mornings.”

Unlike some other golf courses, San Gabriel permitted women to play and join the club within a year of its opening. But men weren’t necessarily polite to them on the fairways.

During a women’s tournament in 1914, The Times wrote, men violated “all golfing etiquette by playing through the women players,” a breach regarded as “unthinkable.” The headline read: “Naughty Men Defy Women.”

In 1911, the club bought more acreage and expanded to a full 18 holes. Each hole is named after one of California’s 21 missions -- the third hole is the San Juan Capistrano, the seventh is the San Luis Obispo. “The mission bell became the club’s insignia,” wrote Digby Diehl, author of “San Gabriel Country Club: One Hundred Years of History and Tradition,” published this month.

The enthusiasm The Times had predicted did develop. In August 1919, Army Lt. Blake R. McGinnis was stationed at Ross Field in Arcadia, where artillerymen were trained to ascend in balloons and drop bombs. But McGinnis headed to San Gabriel and played golf instead. He was court-martialed for going AWOL, sentenced to remain on the base for six months and fined $300. In a bit of historical irony, today the former base is part of a county park -- which includes a golf course.

On a cold, early December morning in 1933, the original clubhouse went up in flames. The club’s accountant, LeGrand Betts, 83, rushed inside to retrieve some important papers. Part of the burning building collapsed, killing him. The cause of the fire was believed to have been an overturned electric heater.

(Betts wasn’t the first to die at the club. Seven years earlier, in 1926, local businessman Isaac Boyd, 50, suffered a heart attack and died on the 10th hole.)

When a fancy new $35,000 clubhouse rose on the same site in 1934, a plaque dedicated to Betts’ memory was placed under the oldest oak, near the first hole. That oak died of a fungus; a new plaque pays tribute both to Betts and the oak.

Celebrities soon found their way to the course, which wasn’t far from Santa Anita racetrack. In January 1941, sports-page stars Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias and Patty Berg gave 2,500 spectators their money’s worth when they teamed up with duffers Bob Hope and Bing Crosby for a game of “scratch” golf. The tournament was in memory of sportsman and humorist Frank Condon.

Hope and Crosby played to the crowd, wisecracking all the way, while Didrikson and Berg played for keeps. But it was Babe who bagged an unusual shot that Hope or Crosby would have relished. At the sixth tee, she hit a ball that whacked a diamond ring worn by a female spectator. The stone tumbled out of the ring, the ball rolled onto the green, and Babe sank an 8-foot putt. The diamond was found afterward. And The Times called the shot a “birdie diamond.”

Didrikson won the tournament with a score of 74. Berg shot 79. Hope and Crosby had to settle for laughs, playing in the low 80s.

Over the years, the artist colony on the west bank of the wash included Norman Rockwell, Western artists Frank Tenney Johnson, Charles M. Russell and Ed Borein, illustrator Dean Cromwell, sculptors Eli Harvey and Hughlette “Tex” Wheeler, and painters Jack Wilkinson Smith and Clyde “Vic” Forsythe. The artists often worked and drank together by moonlight, wearing miners’ helmets for illumination.

In 1942, the Saturday Evening Post commissioned Rockwell to create an illustration for a short story about a man on trial for murder whose lawyer used the man’s wife and children to play upon the jury’s sympathies.

Using the faces of club members, and his own, Rockwell populated the jury box. But the Post didn’t like his colorful characters. Editors insisted that he redo the drawing using somber faces with averted eyes. He gave the club the original 6-foot drawing, which hangs in the card room.

The early and ardent golfer John Smith Cravens, director of Security First National Bank and Southern California Edison and owner of a huge Gothic house on Pasadena’s Millionaire’s Row, founded a tournament bearing his name in 1925, at a different course. He moved the event to San Gabriel in 1943.

The Scotch foursome tournament, now going on 80 years old, shows no signs of expiring. More than 400 amateur golfers, in two-man teams, still participate. This year it will be played May 12-16.

Over the years, the club has offered refuge, not only to golfers, but to wildlife. Today’s critter gallery includes a hard-to-ignore flock of feral parrots. They sometimes nest near the 15th green, squawking their raucous commentary.