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One
morning in 1926, the small boy William Powell walked seven
miles down a railroad track. He found his future. Not that
he knew it. He knew only that he loved what he saw that
morning. He saw a golf course. My, my. What a thing.
He'd never seen so much green.
"Beautiful," he says now, seventy-five years later. Only he
says it better than that. He says it sweet, soft, slow. "Beeyoootifulll,"
he says
One
morning in 2001, the great-grandson of Alabama slaves sits
in a cart near the 1st tee of his very own course. He built
it with his hands, with money from his factory job, with
eighteen-hour days, with his wife and children working
alongside.
People
drove by on Ohio's U.S. Route 30 and saw William Powell on
his wild land yanking out tree stumps as if they were bad
teeth. They saw him hacking, tugging, burning, bulldozing,
pulling up fence posts and picking up stones, planting,
watering, mowing. He sweated rivers.
"We had
seventy-eight acres, a dilapidated barn, a milk parlor in
shambles, chickens in the weeds, no plumbing, no heat and a
big ol' white tomcat chasing rats as big as it was," Powell
says. "Whatever the 'pioneering spirit' is, we must've had
it."
His body
aches. Asked if he still plays golf, he laughs. "I fake
it."
He's five
inches shorter than the five-foot-nine Wilberforce
University fullback of his youth. "At 190, I looked 175."
He pats his windbreaker. "Got a stomach now for the first
time."
He can talk. My, my. He sits three hours, talking. He
drives a visitor on a tour of Clearview Golf Course, talking
great good sense: "I'd rather fail trying than be successful
doing nothing."
The way he tells his story, it's a lesson in American
history. He worked on his golf course not for months or
years. He worked for decades.
When he
started, late in 1946, the pro golf tour enforced a
Caucasians-only clause. Jackie Robinson hadn't joined the
Dodgers. As Powell worked, Rosa Parks was arrested, Emmett
Till beaten to death, Martin Luther King Jr. shot. Watts
burned. Four young girls died in a Birmingham, Alabama,
church. Bull Connor loosed the dogs of racial war.
William
Powell kept working. His daughter, Renee, a former LPGA
Tour player and now Clearview's club pro, asks, "How do you
stick to something for fifty years when you have obstacles
thrown in your path because your skin is the wrong color?
My father's story is, 'Never give up.' I got death threats
on tour, and I'd call home crying, and y'know what? My
parents never said, 'Come on home.'"
Bankers
wouldn't lend him money, not even a GI loan. An insurance
man told him to keep quiet about his plans or white folks
would build a course next door. Vandals plundered his meager
place. He kept working. "Even black people thought I was a
kook," Powell says. "Who wants to fight a racist, apartheid
society all the time? But I had golf in me. And I had to
bring it out."
Golf got
into him that morning in 1926. Willie Powell and his friend
George set out from their little town of Minerva, Ohio.
They followed the railroad tracks to see a golf course,
though they had no idea what a golf course was.
They
hurried through a quarter-mile tunnel before a train could
squeeze them against the side walls, those walls crumbling
with stone jiggled loose by locomotives rumbling through.
The boys
saw railroad construction done with giant steam shovels.
They heard dynamite blasts. "So exciting," Powell says.
"Like they were digging the Panama Canal."
Then they
saw the golf course ? beautiful - Edgewater Golf Course.
All day they hung around. Powell inspected a Model-T Ford
made into a tractor/mower with twelve-inch-wide steel rear
wheels and a chain drive with three-fourths- inch flat metal
studs. He saw golfers hit balls into the sky and he was
amazed how far those balls went and he wanted to try it
himself - if his mother ever would let him out of the house
again.
Night fell
before the boy retraced those seven railroad miles. He
tried to sneak into bed, only to hear his mother say,
"Willie! Go get me a switch!"
She wanted
a whippy switch off a willow tree in the front yard. She
used it to great effect. The boy, now a man
eighty-four-years old, William Powell yet squirms on the
seat of his golf cart and says, "That's a switchin' I'll
never forget."
But golf
had him. He caddied, thirty-five cents a loop. He became a
player who in a different time might have been a
professional: "I had the game. But like John Shippen and
Teddy Rhodes and many others, not the opportunity. We had
to pay the colored tax."
During
World War II, U.S. Army Tech Sergeant Powell organized truck
convoys in preparation for the D-Day invasion. He used
downtime to play golf throughout Great Britain. But at
war's end, back home, no golf.
"I had put
my life on the line for this country," he says. "I'd just
left a country where I was treated like a human being. Now
I was supposed to be satisfied to be treated like dirt? I
couldn't play any local events. I knew I ought to be
allowed to. But there was nothing I could do about it."
Nothing?
Powell had been captain of his college golf and football
teams. He led men in the army. He often quoted
grade-school principal R. R. Vaughn: "Billy, you know you
are a little colored boy, and you have to realize you can't
do things just as good as a white boy - you have to do them
better!"
He would
do something. "I couldn't stand being controlled by a
certain part of society - you know who I mean - when they
didn't come up to my standards."
What he'd
do is build his own golf course. "It was necessary," he
says. "I had to do it for my own pride. Necessary. I had
the right to exist."
All these
years later, William Powell knows why he wanted to build
Clearview.
But he doesn't know why he thought he could. He had no
money, no land and no idea how he'd get either. "Then,
miracles," he says.
He and his
wife, Marcella, had admired land they saw while driving from
East
Canton to Minerva. They soon saw that land for sale. He
made two doctors his partners; his stake came in a loan from
his brother.
Clearview
is now eighteen holes on 130 acres of rolling, verdant hills
decorated with dogwoods and sassafras, oaks and maple. A
cool breeze crosses the land transformed from wilderness
into parkland. At the 1st tee, a sign calls it "America's
Course." On February 16, 2001, Clearview was placed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
Jeff
Brown, an Ohio historian who finished the writing of
Clearview's register nomination, says, "It's an amazing
story, the only course in the history of America designed,
built and owned by an African American."
"The
lesson of Mr. Powell's life," says Dr. Obie Bender,
assistant to the president of Baldwin-Wallace College and a
Clearview player for thirty-five years, "is 'Never let other
people define you.'"
Powell's
wife, Marcella, died in 1996. His son, Larry, is course
superintendent. Daughter Renee runs the shop, teaches and,
like the rest of the family, is involved in the Clearview
Legacy Foundation, preserving the course's history.
The
Powells need a museum just for awards: An honorary doctorate
from
Baldwin-Wallace. The National Golf Foundation's Jack
Nicklaus Golf Family of the Year Award in 1992. A Tiger
Woods Foundation scholarship in the name of William and
Marcella Powell. A lifetime PGA of America membership.
All nice,
if late. "Those honors are beautiful," Powell says, there
by the 1st tee fifty-five years after he drove off U.S.
Route 30 and down a dirt lane to his life's work, "but
they're empty, because Marcella's not here. She'd never
say, 'This is not going to work.'"
He takes a
visitor around the property, the afternoon light golden, and
he talks about this tree stump, that creek, those flowers.
He drives
to a new tee on the 5th hole, where the PGA of America is
lending a hand in renovation, and he points out three maple
trees now in the fairway rather than beside it.
"We'll
take those down," he says.
"Might be
interesting," the visitor says, "if you left one to get in
the way."
Suddenly,
William Powell raises his chin. His eyes brighten. "Maybe
we could," he says, his old man's voice alive with a boy's
excitement.
______________________________
Reprinted with permission from Golf Digest,
July 2001 (c) 2001 The Golf Digest Companies which is a
subsidiary of Advance Magazine Publishers, Inc. Golf Digest
is a Registered Trademark of The Golf Digest Companies.
From Chicken Soup for the Golfer's Soul - The Second Round
by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Jeff Aubery and Mark &
Chrissy Donnelly. In order to protect the rights of the
copyright holder, no portion of this publication may be
reproduced without prior written consent. All rights
reserved.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May you be blessed today
Bob Johnston
Editor / Publisher
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