Copyright © John Coyne. Used with permission.
WITH ALL THIS TALK OF MILLENNIALS not taking up the game, and golf courses closing for lack of membership, I am saddened to think of what will be lost, in terms of tradition, architecture and history if there is a death knell to country club life.
Private country clubs have been a mixed bag in terms of popular acceptance, social strata and shifts in attitudes of our society. Richard J. Moss in his excellent 2001 book Golf and the American Country Club, a cultural history of American life and the connection of the game, details how the early country clubs sought to counter the nationalization and standardization of American life by creating closed, controlled communities that reminded them of the villages that were being snuffed out by industrialization.