I’m sitting in my backyard right now, tapping away at a laptop connected wirelessly to the Internet, with a mobile phone, regular wireless phone and a PDA sitting next to me. It’s a gorgeous Memorial Day in Cleveland – a very rare thing indeed – so I decided to take my corporate operations outside to enjoy a little sun.
The ability to work on my patio table – or anywhere for that matter – thanks to these various gadgets got me thinking about how technology and change have impacted the golf industry throughout the years. So, in honor of Memorial Day and our World War II generation, let’s turn back the clock for a moment and think about what’s new in golf course maintenance in the intervening 60 years since that momentous spring of 1945.
Improved grasses: It was 50 years ago that Penncross came on the market and introduced the novel idea that you could manipulate Agrostis or damn near any other species to perform under demanding circumstances. No longer did courses have to live and die with Poa, seed from existing grasses or whatever else happened to grow decently in the area. Thanks to Dr. Joe Duich (a vet) and the folks at Penn State, all that changed, and our industry hasn’t been the same since. By the way, Bill Rose (another vet) of Tee-2-Green took the species and made it a standard for courses worldwide.
Chemicals: Many of the staple products we’ve relied on for more than half a century were developed originally as part of the defense effort in WWII.
Turfgrass research: Although there were many who pioneered the study of improved turf before, the idea of creating runways for the military using dense, fast-growing grass really jump-started much of the basic research that got us to where we are today.
Fairway irrigation: Before the 1950s, center-row irrigation was a novelty at best. The post-war era – fueled by the GI Bill and the Baby Boom desire to have lush, green surroundings – popularized the notion of actually providing more water to a course than Mother Nature happened to drop.
Mechanization: The industrial machine that drove the war effort also resulted in improved engines for mowing equipment, tractors and hand tools.
Computerization: The earliest predecessors of this confounded thing I’m typing on right now were code-breaking machines built to defeat the Nazis. Today, they run our irrigation systems, keep our records and allow us to communicate with everyone, everywhere about our practices.
So, my little sojourn outdoors on a lovely afternoon turned into a trip down nostalgia lane on this Memorial Day in 2005. Let me end with two ideas. First, make sure to thank all the veterans out there who’ve given so much to keep America safe. Second, don’t forget our own profession’s veterans who made us what we are today. The teachers, the thinkers, the tinkerers, the scientists and the good old grassgrowers who reinvented this business throughout the past sixty years deserve, in their own way, a memorial day as well.
