Two Guest Speakers for the Top 100 Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

With the announcement of the two inductees to the Top 100 Hall of Fame, we are also pleased to reveal the two special speakers we will have with us during the ceremony on May, 4, 2015.

Richard Mandell, who will speak about the Top 100 Hall of Fame inductee Donald Ross, probably knows as much about him as anybody in Pinehurst, and he will give us enormous insight into the great man who created over 400 courses around the world including the famous Course No. 2 at Pinehurst.

Rich is one of those fortunate few who have had the chance to follow their dreams.  He set that dream in motion as a high schooler and has followed the path ever since as a golf course architect.  In 1992, after apprenticing under two former ASGCA Presidents, Richard started a golf architecture partnership with three civil engineers.  In 1999, that company emerged as Richard Mandell Golf Architecture, which does business out of Pinehurst, North Carolina.

Since then, Richard has worked on more than fifty golf course projects as large as a new 27-hole facility to a complete renovation of a 54-hole facility.  His work can be found in thirteen states and China and has won awards spanning three different decades. In 2011, Richard was named one of theFifteen Most Influential Golf Architects by GolfInc. Magazine.  In the fall of 2014, his Keller Golf Course outside St. Paul, Minnesota won Golf Magazine’s Municipal Renovation of the Year.  In early 2015, two of his South Carolina projects took two of the four Most Improved Golf Course (of the past ten years) honors from the South Carolina Golf Course Raters Panel.

Very few golf course architects can claim a direct professional lineage from Donald Ross himself like Richard Mandell. Richard possesses the very specific experience of learning about golf course architecture directly from Dan Maples, who learned directly from his father, Ellis Maples. Ellis Maples learned directly from Donald Ross. This lineage gives Richard Mandell a perspective to understand Mr. Ross’s design and construction philosophy and methodology that few other architects possess.

Richard Mandell has completed or is currently undertaking eight historically compassionate restorations of Donald Ross courses, maintaining the Donald Ross signature design as best as possible in considering modern golf course maintenance and playability issues. Past Ross projects include Raleigh Country Club, Highland Country Club, and Monroe Country Club.  Current clients include Southern Pines Golf Club, Pinecrest Country Club, and Myers Park Country Club, all in North Carolina.  Restoration of Ross’s Bacon Park Golf Course in Savannah is currently underway.

Richard Mandell’s seminal work, Pinehurst ~ Home of American Golf (The Evolution of a Legend) won the prestigious International Network of Golf Book of the Year Award (2007). Mr. Mandell’s book was a finalist for both Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Award and the United States Golf Association’s Herbert Warren Wind Book Award as well. This 384-page, four-color definitive history is a detailed account of the evolution of the playing fields of sandhills golf and how it directly affected the game of golf in America. Richard updated and re-designed the book in 2013, re-naming it The Legendary Evolution of Pinehurst.

Hard work and the ability to perform on time and on budget is why his firm, Richard Mandell Golf Architecture hasn’t slowed down, actually growing each year, over the past eight years in what many refer to as the “new economy”.  Since the early 1990’s, he has been at the forefront of affordable golf in his writings and his design work.  He is the creator of the Symposium on Affordable Golf, which is an annual conference focusing on the challenges of the golf business for the past five years.

Audrey Moriarty, Executive Director at Tufts Archives/Given Memorial LibraryPinehurst, North CarolinaLibraries will be our speaker about Richard Tufts.

On her first day of work at her new job in the Village of Pinehurst, Audrey Moriarty grabbed the keys and began opening drawers.  She then sat on the floor and commenced going through everything, piece by piece.

For the new Executive Director of the Tufts Archives, “everything” was the unique collection of historical material which had been gathered, donated, rescued and written in over 100 years since Pinehurst was founded in 1895 by the Tufts family.  The Tufts Foundation donated $450,000 to build the museum-type wing of the Given Memorial Library which is located in the heart of the Village across from the vintage New England-designed Holly Inn.

As in most great stories, there is a hero – or heroine, in this case.

There would likely be no archives at all were it not for the very determined, white-haired Mildred McIntosh, former secretary to Richard Tufts and loyal employee of the Tufts family.  Shortly after acquiring the Carolina Hotel from the Tufts family in the early 1970s, Diamondhead Corporation gave notice to “get rid of all that stuff,” the existing papers, files and notes. Unbeknownst to them, that “stuff” accounted for a historical record of roughly the first 70 years of the Village of Pinehurst.

Moriarty always thought the rest of the story was a “tale.”

“She had been at the Hotel since her early 20s and started as a telegraph operator, but she eventually became (Tufts grandson) Richard’s secretary,” added Moriarty.  “Someone at the Hotel called Mildred, and she rounded up some people with trucks.  They collected a great deal of the stuff we now have here.

“It was bound for the dump because Diamondhead thought all of that stuff was not really worth keeping.  Mildred told me this herself. There was a true need to keep the history of the Village, and that was the idea behind the Archives.”

McIntosh was part of an early committee which organized a plan to preserve, catalog and display the artifacts which found a bright 30 feet by 50 feet home in 1975.  High ceilings, sparkling brass candelabras and large Palladian windows now invite visitors to browse, ask questions and admire the museum-like surroundings.

Over 500 archive boxes methodically line the well-ordered shelves across the entire back wall, with each box containing at least a dozen numbered files, organized by content.  There are oak display cabinets with timeless treasures from the early Village days. The beauty of this orderliness isn’t lost on Moriarty.

“There were two folding tables, two desks, and AstroTurf green carpet in this space on my first day, and one computer with basically no internet,” recalled the former English/French teacher. “I thought, ‘I need to know what’s here,’ but the flaw in that plan was that I couldn’t remember everything I saw.”

Numerous people had spent many years cataloguing, generating five different data bases of information to scrutinize during Moriarty’s early days.  After selecting a museum software program (with the benefit of a working internet!) and many volunteer hours, the rescued “stuff” is now filed expertly and efficiently into four different catalogs: golf, photos, archives and objects.

“We have spent 18 months doing inventory, but searches are easier because it’s all in there, and we know what we have,” said Moriarty.  “I’m very pleased to have done this because it has made life so much easier.”

In general the archive boxes relate to Pinehurst and its early days, both historically and architecturally.  There are folders and files on a lot of original cottages and building. And the Tufts Archives also has many architectural plans.

One of the more interesting drawings is a vintage blueprint from 1911, perhaps one of the first models of the renowned Donald Ross-designed No. 2 golf course, site of the upcoming 2014 U.S. Opens.  Ross, from Scotland, was brought by the Tufts to Pinehurst to design golf courses.  But this drawing is interesting to Moriarty for a reason.

“One of the biggest surprises that visitors might find here is one of the largest collections of Ross material anywhere.  As time goes on, people find things, like rolled up papers in an attic five years ago which turned out to be drawings of a golf course he did,” she recalled. “There are hardly any drawings of No. 2 because Ross was here, and he didn’t need to do them (drawings).

“He could just say ‘I want this dirt pile moved,’ ‘make this six inches higher,’ or ‘dig this out deeper.’ We don’t have a layout of No. 2 except this early design from 1911.”

In 2010, the design firm of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw began the process of restoring the natural characteristics that were the heart of Ross’s original No. 2 design.  Armed with key aerials images, the two men spent a good amount of time at the Tufts Archives with Moriarty going through classic photographs of tournaments on No. 2 over the years.

“I would put the photos up on a screen and they could look at wire grasses and bunkering views from a certain time,” she said. “They were also able to see a map of the sprinkler system from the 1962 (U.S.) Amateur, one system right down the center from the early days.  Basically, what the sprinklers didn’t reach became the natural areas.”

Like history, the Archive is evolving constantly.  There are no more family records which tell the story of history on paper.  People don’t write detailed letters anymore and businesses do not donate their records.

Moriarty wonders about the future, “The big question for everyone is ‘what will we do with all this paper?’ ” she continued. “Do we keep it? We have about 85,000 images scanned but that’s only half of what we have.  And we scan constantly.  Scanning and inventorying is an assembly line process. These volunteers have done an incredible amount of work.”

Moriarty thinks that a lot of people are surprised at the depth of information that they find at this little place when they visit.  They don’t usually know that one family operated this village for over 75 years, but she will give us great insight into this stewardship.