Read the beginning of "The Founding Father, Part I" from Brassies, Mashies, and Bootleg Scotch: Growing Up on America's First Heroic Golf Course by Bill Kilpatrick:

"I called him dad, Daddy when I was younger, and more often than not as the years went by I called him Pop. He called me Willie. I referred to him as my father, my dad, and the Old Man. His name was William, known as Bill, and he remains indelible in my consciousness.

He was a greenkeeper, a term he preferred to “golf course superintendent,” deeming the latter a bit pretentious. Several of golf’s Olympians—Old Tom Morris, being one—had been known primarily as greenkeepers, and thus it was deemed a profession to which there was some cachet. It meant “keeper of the green,” the man in charge, management, someone who, depending upon the extent of that for which he was responsible, was likely to hold sway over a crew of laborers. Originally the “green” referred to the village or town green, perhaps a park of some sort; only later did it refer to a golf course.

Although born in Dumfries in western Scotland, my father did most of his growing up in St. Andrews—the mecca of golf, hard by the North Sea—where his stepfather, a Victorian semi-monster known wryly to my father and his younger sister as “Gentleman Charles,” was a master lithographer employed by a firm called W. C. Henderson & Son, at the time (around 1900) one of the largest printing firms in North Britain. Gentleman Charles, apart from his familial heavy-handedness, was a member of a “historic Fife Golf Club” called the St. Andrews Golf Club and in fact won club handicap medals in 1905 and 1908.

As a boy my father loved and played well the game Americans call soccer, but of course he also played golf, as did just about all of his St. Andrews peers and pals, among them 1921 British Open Champion Jock Hutchison. To them the ability to play this most demanding of games was deemed nothing special, not unlike American kids playing baseball. Some were better than others, surely, but playing golf was a thing boys (and a few girls) did as naturally and as routinely as breathing. Accordingly, a prevailing contention in the St. Andrews of the time was that any layabout could play golf whereas a greenkeeper, a figure of management in a golf course operation, mind you, was someone to be looked up to. Unlike today’s pecking order in golf, at that time and place being a greenkeeper rather than a mere golf professional was the more desirable, exalted position.

For one thing, a greenkeeper in the Scotland of a hundred years ago only occasionally encountered the golfers who played his course and thus was not obliged, as was routinely done by the resident professional, to tip his cap to those who deemed such mild obsequiousness their due. Walter Hagen, the flashy American superstar who, among other things, is credited with introducing black-and-white golf shoes to 1920s Great Britain, blithely ignored such convention; “The Haig” rubbed elbows with princes. Referring to the lot of British golf professionals before and even after the advent of Hagen, humorist Stephen Potter, in his book Golfmanship, wrote truthfully, “We liked our professionals to be quiet and quietly clothed, salt-of-the-earth and with a way of calling you ‘sir’ which meant that we were all free men but shared a sense of degree, priority and place.” That was a mind set of which my father would have none, either for himself or for me and my one and only brother, older by nine years."

Bill Kilpatrick has written articles for magazines such as Parade, Popular Mechanics, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Field & Stream, Esquire, Fly Fishing, and True. Before “retiring” he was a general features writer, columnist, and golf writer for the Fort Myers News-Press.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Brassies, Mashies, and Bootleg Scotch, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Brassies-Mashies-and-Bootleg-Scotch,674891.aspx.