100 Years of at Pocono Manor: A Full Historical Timeline

1911: Plans completed for nine holes of golf for residents of the cottage community in Pocono Manor, as well as for guests of the Inn at Pocono Manor. It’s believed that Donald Ross used topographical maps to lay out these nine holes while at his home in Pinehurst, NC, and then relied on associates such as J.B. McGovern to implement construction from a satellite office located in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. Because no real earth-moving equipment existed at the time, Ross essentially painted the golf course onto the existing landscape, often using higher elevations for tees. A typical crew would build a course in three months, using two or three foremen, about 300 local laborers, 60 horses with plowing equipment, and perhaps one or two oxen to drag large rocks off the layout.

According to Michael Fay, Executive Director of the Donald Ross Society, "Ross worked from topographical maps and did not visit many of the sites of his golf courses." Then again, J.B. McGovern later supervised the building of a Ross layout at Buck Hill Falls (six miles from Pocono Manor) in 1920-1921, and a video clip from winter 1919 seems to show Donald Ross on the grounds of Pocono Manor, likely as he was heading to Buck Hill Falls. So perhaps Ross visited Pocono Manor at that time to see the final results of his design work years before.

1912: The first nine holes are opened for play at Pocono Manor. A few of the holes are built differently than originally drawn. Manor President Walter Smedley and prominent resident Samuel Allen likely directed this in order to accommodate cabin sites that are part of the master plan for the land (their own large cottages are very near former hole number 1). The course changes affected number 3 (present number 17), a never-built number 4 (alongside present number 17, but which would have used 17 green), and numbers 8 and 9 (presently numbers 3 and 4) which were first drawn as a single par-5 hole.

1920: William Flynn, designer of 11 courses on Golfweek’s list of the top 100 classic-era courses (including Shinnecock Hills, Merion East, and The Country Club of Brookline), completes drawings for 10 additional holes (present numbers 7 through 16). Flynn was one of the first designers to recognize the long-term impact of golf equipment on course design. He believed that this could eventually force golf courses to be 7,500 to even 8,000 yards in length. Flynn placed a strong importance on each hole having individual character, and he felt that problems should be developed on each hole: The order of importance was accuracy; carry; and length (carry plus roll). Among other elements, Flynn’s use of berms and hillocks in and around fairways and greens at Pocono Manor attest to his considerations of accuracy, carry, and length.

1924: Flynn’s holes are completed, a project overseen by Pocono Manor greenskeeper Edwin Hoopes. Says Flynn biographer Wayne Morrison: “The fact that so many of Flynn’s courses have remained mostly intact over time is a tribute to his greatest strengths: outstanding routings with hole design and construction guided by sustainability principles, enabling his courses to be maintained for reasonable cost over the long term.” And as for the quality of play, “there are very few level lies on Flynn’s fairways, so the ball-striking requirements are very high. Also, the offset angles of fairways and greens as opposed to straightaway holes help to stave off the effects of modern technology and physically stronger players.” Yet despite all this, Flynn’s participation in the layout of Pocono Manor was actually forgotten as the years went on.

1925: Jack Cuttle begins his 50-year career as head professional at Pocono Manor, residing from May until November in an apartment above a three-car garage next to what is today the golf shop. He is responsible for teaching lessons, plus course conditioning (overseeing a foreman and five laborers), making clubs with hickory shafts, and stocking the shop with clothing and equipment. His assistant is Alan Smith.

1927: The starting point of the course is changed—former hole number 5 becomes present hole number 1. The original practice green is preserved, and is used to this day. The original golf shop building becomes a halfway house and remains the ski center (in winter, former hole number 1 is also a popular ski hill and toboggan run). The golf shop itself is relocated to a building behind the clubhouse on Manor Road. The clubhouse contains the ladies’ locker room, but is used mostly for luncheons, banquets, and dances run by Josephine Jackson, who lives on the second floor. The clubhouse is the former cottage of the Strawbridge family, who were prominent clothiers.

Early 1930s: Pocono Manor opens a caddie camp below the hotel in the woods adjacent to Route 314. A caddie master oversaw 12 to 15 men for the season, feeding them breakfast and preparing a lunch for them to take away. With countless huckleberry bushes along the course, the men also enjoyed free snacks as they carried players’ bags.

1935: Jack Cuttle marries Josephine Jackson

1946: The first golf cart appears at Pocono Manor, purchased by the Whitten family. At first, the Whittens still use caddies to carry their bags while they ride the course.

Late 1940s: The caddie camp closes.

1950: Art Wall Jr. of nearby Honesdale joins the PGA Tour, and represents Pocono Manor as the course’s touring professional.

1953: Representing Pocono Manor, Art Wall Jr. wins his first of 14 PGA Tour events, the Fort Wayne Open.

1959: A new nine holes, called the West course, are cleared and built by George Fazio. But the cost of clearing the land of timber and rock is so expensive that the second nine holes are not built.

1959: Representing Pocono Manor, Art Wall Jr. comes from five strokes back with seven holes to play to win the , arguably the greatest final-round charge in golf history. ''Art Wall's finish of birdie, birdie, birdie, par, birdie, birdie has no parallel in a major American tournament, and probably in any major tournament,'' Herbert Warren Wind wrote in Sports Illustrated at the time. Wall is later named PGA Player of the Year.

1961: In August, a series of matches among top pros is played on the original course, renamed the East course, for a TV program called “All Star Golf.” Cameras are mounted on the tailgate of station wagons to hold them steady for filming. Art Wall Jr., Tommy Bolt, Jack Burke, Walter Burkemo, , and participate over five weeks. Bolt defeated each man until Wall Jr. beat him to earn $2,000. , a three-time Masters champion, was the on-course announcer for this match.

1961: Construction begins on Interstate 380 adjacent to Pocono Manor. In return for using a quarry on the property, the road builder agrees to clear land for the second nine holes of the West course. Timber and large rocks are removed by heavy equipment. Afterwards, families are hired to spend the day walking the layout and picking up smaller rocks.

1965: The second nine holes of the West course are opened.

1968: plays a match against Art Wall Jr. on the East course. Palmer hits his tee shot into the creek on the famous 77-yard 7th hole, and makes double bogey.

1968: The ski hill and toboggan run on present hole number 5 (former number 1) close down. Remnants of the ski lift can still be found in the woods to the right of the fairway, and the toboggan run remnants in the woods to the left.

1975: Art Wall Jr. wins the Greater Milwaukee Open at age 51, the second-oldest player ever to win a PGA Tour event. (Sam Snead, age 52).

1975: Jack Cuttle retires. Ted Johnson becomes head professional at Pocono Manor.

1977: The Pocono Northeast Classic, an LPGA Tour event, takes place on the West course. Debbie Austin wins the event by one stroke over Sandra Post.

1978: Art Wall Jr. wins the U.S. National Senior Open

1984: Greg Wall becomes head professional at Pocono Manor.

1986 - 1989: Greg Wall coordinates pro-am events each year on the East course. Participants include his father Art Wall Jr. and several major champions: Roberto DeVicenzo, , , Charles Coody, Jerry Barber, , plus others.

1988: Art Wall Jr. plays in the last of his 31 Masters tournaments. Greg Wall teams up with his father, as Art’s caddie.

2001: Files belonging to William Flynn are discovered in the barn of architect David Gordon, whose father William Gordon had worked for Flynn. Included in those files are both a routing map and individual hole drawings for present holes 7 through 16, apparently in Flynn’s own handwriting. The documents reveal that Flynn had designed more sand bunkers across those ten holes, but these disappeared from the course over time. The various irregular mounds and hillocks presently found in the fairways and around the greens, though, are in the original drawings.

Interestingly, present holes 8 through 16 were for decades attributed to Donald Ross—in fact, a Ross historian has said that this stretch of the course is “wonderful and seamlessly integrated” and strongly resembles Pine Needles, a heralded Ross layout in North Carolina. But with the discovery of the drawings, William Flynn’s name returns to the annals of Pocono Manor golf after 77 years.

2012: The East course at Pocono Manor turns 100 years old. Over the past 87 years, Pocono Manor has had exactly three head professionals: Jack Cuttle, Ted Johnson, and Greg Wall.

--

A Firsthand Account of Pocono Manor’s Golf and Recreation, Starting in 1929

Lawrie Jackson, stepson of Jack Cuttle and son of Josephine Jackson Cuttle, first came to Pocono Manor in summer 1929 at the age of six. He has spent 77 of his 89 summers at Pocono Manor. Here are his recollections, gathered in March 2012:

My mother, Josephine Jackson, tried to raise 3 kids on her own after she separated from my father in the mid 1920s. Back then, there were not many jobs for women, but she tried everything from school teaching to running a boarding house. We lived in Deland, Florida, but in early 1927 the manager of the hotel she worked at in Deland said that he was just made manager of a hotel in Pennsylvania, and that the management there needed someone to provide entertainment and recreation for the children staying with their parents at the hotel. He asked if she wanted to do that. So she took her oldest child, my sister, with her that first summer [1927], while my other sister and I stayed with relatives down south. The second year she took both of my sisters to Pocono Manor. Then the third year I started coming up too.

The Manor let Josephine live in the top floor of the clubhouse, which was originally built as a summer home by the Strawbridge family from Philadelphia. The hotel had hired her to try to give entertainment for the younger generation, who did not like going up to the Manor back then because there was not much to do in the mountains. The rules were strict for the kids--they didn’t even let them play cards. So Josephine started going up in 1927. She organized dances on Saturday nights and other activities.

She then opened up a restaurant in the clubhouse and made a very good success of it. In fact, many people at the hotel preferred eating with her at her place in the clubhouse rather than in the hotel.

By the late 1920s, Jack Cuttle had been at the Manor a couple of years, and they gave him an apartment above the three-car garage on the clubhouse’s property. So he and my mother lived near each other and became friendly over time.

Jack had an assistant named Alan Smith back then. When Jack first got there, everything to do with the golf course was under his belt--he was the greenskeeper, the pro, all of it. The building at today’s fifth tee was the original pro shop, back when hole number one was located there. It then became the office for the summer camp I used to go to, and they also used as the skiing center, because many people went skiing down the fairway of the original first hole each winter. The big practice green was over there too, and they had someone operating out of that building who was in charge of that green. There were two large rooms on the ground floor, which was actually basement level but it opened out onto the hillside behind the first tee. And up above there were two large rooms plus an outdoor deck to one side that provided a wonderful view across the course and beyond.

I don’t know what prompted the hotel to buy the Strawbridge home by the original fifth hole, but I assume that is when they wanted to change the numbering of the course. Then they built the golf shop behind that.

After Jack married my mother in 1935, he moved into the clubhouse with her. She had been working in the winters at a club in Lake Wales, FL, running its dining facilities, so Jack was able to work at that club as their pro in the winter. Anyway, The Manor gave them a few more years of living in the clubhouse, then gave them a cottage to use for one year. Then Josephine and Jack bought the cottage at 90 Oak Lane, which is still in our family. My mother retired in her early 70s. She kept working for a few more years after Jack retired at the end of 1974. Josephine died in 1993.

In those days, golf pros were not held in high standing, though Jack and mother did change that perception at the Manor—they were treated as equals. Jack worked six months up north and six months down south; he used to go to the course in south Florida from November to end of April.

At the Manor, Jack supervised all the mowing and other tasks, so he’d get up at the crack of dawn and go over to the maintenance shop at the halfway house behind what was then the first tee, and is today the fifth tee. For the six workers who came in, a foreman and five laborers, he’d spell out what he wanted them to do that day. They cut the fairways with a tractor that pulled a gang of tumbling blades. They used a hand mower for the greens, and for the rough I think they used sickles. Those tractors were used for mowing for many years.

Jack would then get his breakfast; he had a little kitchen in his apartment. After that, he would open the golf shop, and he had a locker room man whom he managed too. As part of his job, Jack had to stock the shop with clothing and clubs and other supplies. In the early days he also made clubs. He would buy hickory shafts and club heads, and fit the heads onto the shafts, shellac them, and then wrap a leather grip on them. There was a special type of strong string that was used to hold everything in place.

There was also a caddie master who took care of the caddies, most of whom were local men who walked two miles from Pocono Summit. Some of them would come up on weekends from Scranton too; they would carpool. In the early 1930s, the Manor opened up a caddie camp below the hotel in the woods off Route 314, and the caddie master was in charge of running that. There would be 12 or 15 of them for the summer and the caddie master would feed them breakfast and then prepare a lunch for them too. Many of them picked huckleberries as their other job. The caddies didn’t earn money every day because during the week, the course had maybe five or six foursomes at most. Cottagers were a large part of those golfers as were hotel guests, and people who lived in Lake Naomi, too. The Manor was an upscale golf course, and there just weren’t that many people who played golf in those days. It was expensive for its time.

When Jack played golf in those days, he wore a white shirt and tie and a jacket and knickers. He became noted as being an excellent teacher, and it reached a point where he would spend four or five hours a day teaching. His assistant ran the golf shop when he did that. They even had a soda fountain in the golf shop, to sell sodas and crackers to players and caddies. The clubhouse and golf shop were kept as two different buildings; the ladies locker room was the only golf-related thing in the clubhouse. The clubhouse was for making meals and serving them, and for entertaining. The men had their locker room in the golf shop.

There were also a lot of tournaments conducted between the Manor and other local clubs. The big ones were the four each year with Buck Hill, Skytop, and Northampton in Bethlehem. Their men’s groups would come to the Manor and play against us. We would feed them lunch at the clubhouse after playing the round, and then we would go to their place the next time and they would do the same for us. That was always a big thing. There were also croquet, lawn bowling, and indoor bowling tournaments; there were a few bowling lanes in what is now the Fireside building next to the Inn. The Manor also conducted golf and other tournaments among the cottagers. Back then, the cottagers heavily supported the golf course and the hotel.

I played a lot of golf myself. When I first went up there, they had a sports and day camp for the kids of the cottagers and hotel guests. A lot of the hotel guests would come for a month at a time or more. So with the sports camp, we went on one long hike every week, and we drank the stream water way down the hill because it was the purest water in the whole region. We also had tennis lessons, and we had stables with lots of horses to ride, and Jack taught the kids golf as well as teaching their parents. I got started with golf in 1929, when I was 6; Jack taught us campers once or twice a week. At first, I started on the course by playing four or five holes, and then nine holes, until I could play all 18.

The caddie camp ended in the late 1940s, when the Whitten family bought the first golf cart among the cottagers at the manor. At first, they would ride in it as they played the course, but they still had caddies alongside them to carry the bags! Mr. Whitten was the manager of the famous Burdine’s store in Miami.

Regarding the landscape of the Manor: When the Quakers first bought that land around 1900, it was fairly ugly. Back then, there were forest fires almost every year. It was suspected that the locals used to burn the woods to open up the land so the huckleberries would grow better. Even as we played golf in the 1930s and 1940s, it was always a big thing to pick and eat huckleberries as you played--the bushes were all along the golf course. There are still some bushes left on the course, but the trees have mostly grown up around them. In the early days, there weren’t any trees taller than a person on the whole course. The logging companies had come in years before and taken a lot of timber, in addition to the fires.

There is a plaque near the green of the first hole for another man who was involved with shaping the golf course: Cliff McCormick. He was chairman of the greens committee in the 1930s and 1940s. He had the green rebuilt on today’s hole number one, because originally it followed the contour of the land—it started going down the mountain, sloping away from the fairway, and it was really hard to play. That was the biggest project undertaken after the first 18 holes were built. They flattened it out and made the green a bit larger. Cliff spent a lot of time working with Jack on maintaining the course back then.

When the Second World War came along, Jack’s assistant was put into the army--so I became Jack’s assistant, running the pro shop. A bit later on, Art Wall, who lived in Honesdale, would come over and play golf, and he knew Jack really well. He and I graduated from school at the same time; he attended Duke University. And when Art graduated, he had a lot of respect for Jack so he’d come over here to see Jack. One day he said, ‘I have had some good offers to go into business, but I also love playing golf. I’d love to try the pro circuit.’ Art’s dad was a state politician, so there was a bit of a financial cushion in his family. Jack said to Art, ‘You will regret it the rest of your life if you don’t give it a try on the pro circuit.’ In those days, you could go onto the pro circuit right out of school, as there was no qualifying school. So Art went out and did it. He probably would have done that anyway, but Jack might have helped him decide to go in that direction too.

Once Art was on the pro circuit, in 1950 or 1951, he came back to Jack and said, ‘I don’t really have a course to call my own.’ Art grew up playing in Honesdale but I think that was on a little nine-holer. So Art asked if Jack could set it up so that Art would represent Pocono Manor while he was out on tour. Jack talked to management and they said yes. I managed to play with Art at Pocono Manor a few times over the years.

As for the 1961 “All Star Golf” matches at the Manor hosted by Art, that was one of the first times they filmed competitive golf to any extent. Jack was involved in getting some of the logistics worked out, because they had to use station wagons to mount the cameras at some spots on the course. It was really a point of pride that the Manor was among the first places where they filmed pro golf for mass viewing. In fact, I even did some filming with my own camera, and that film is at our family cottage at the Manor.

Even when they started to build the third nine holes in the mid 1950s, the land on that side of the property didn’t have many tall trees because of the burn-offs from years before. Then again, once they built those nine holes they didn’t complete a full 18 because there was lot more wood and rock to clear than they anticipated, and it was too costly. I am pretty sure that it was George Fazio who designed the first nine holes.

When Interstate 380 was being built starting in 1961, the contractor needed lots of fill for the highway, so we created a quarry on the property for that. But we made a deal with him: When you have your heavy equipment in here, use it to clear us another nine holes of golf. But they only scraped the land of the wood and the big rocks; the smaller rocks stayed behind. So for a few years after the last nine holes were built, not many of us wanted to play them because it was rocky in the fairways, and sometimes you’d swing and get an unpleasant surprise. The Manor eventually hired rock pickers—whole families and all—to walk the course and pick up the smaller rocks.

Come the 1980s, when Art got to be on the senior golf circuit, they started hosting pro-ams at Pocono Manor. Art and his son Greg, the head pro, would get other senior pros to come in.

As for winters at the Manor, I did spend two winters there, when they started a private school on the property. The school wasn’t run by the Manor--they leased it out. I was able to go skiing down that big hill on the original first hole, and they had a tow rope and then a lift to bring you back up. And later on they built a wooden toboggan chute down the fairway to the left of that. I was one of the first to go down it. It was a very popular thing—and it was so fast that it would scare you! But you had to walk back up the hill carrying your toboggan afterwards, which took a while.