Nine Holes on
the Island

A course for the summer colony

In the spring of 1914 Belvedere was still mostly a summer place. Each May the island's San Francisco families gave up their town apartments for a stay of several months in their houses above the bay, and the society pages tracked the migration family by family: the Blandings from the Fairmont, the John Ward Mailliards from Gough Street, the Wallachs, the Pages, the Pierre Moores, the Dimonds and the Edgar Wilsons.¹ That April the San Francisco Call told its readers that the island was getting ready for the season in a new way. Part of the preparation, it said, was "the laying out of a golf course and the erection of tennis courts on the north side of the island, that portion of it known as the 'Pasture lands.'"¹ With golf, tennis and squash added to its boating, swimming, fishing, motoring and riding, the Call concluded, Belvedere would be the perfect summer resort.¹

The pasture lands were the open northern end of the island, and the course would fill nearly all of it. In present-day terms, the Landmarks Society's history puts the course on about a quarter of a square mile north of Oak Avenue, running from San Rafael Avenue and the lagoon on the east to the crest of the island above Richardson Bay on the west.^2,3 Anyone who walks Tamalpais, North Point, Marin or Buckeye avenues, or the lower ends of Golden Gate and Bayview, is walking over it. Those streets were cut through the old fairways between the 1940s and the 1960s, and, as the Landmarks Society's Dave Gotz put it, they "probably all have lost golf balls buried beneath their asphalt."²

The land belonged to the Belvedere Land Company, which would remain the club's landlord to the end.² The Land Company also built the clubhouse. In mid-April 1914 it filed plans, specifications and a building permit with County Recorder Frank S. Holland for what the San Rafael Marin County Tocsin described as an attractive, thoroughly modern clubhouse for the Belvedere Golf Club, at a cost of about $3,500, with work to start at once.⁴ The recorder's list of documents filed that week names the builder: a contract between the Belvedere Land Company and George M. White for a $3,500 golf club building on lot 4, block 26, Belvedere.^5,6 That building still stands at 1 Britton Avenue, now a private house.²

Who laid out the nine holes in the pasture is a question the newspapers do not answer. No designer, greenkeeper or professional is named in any 1914 report found for this history.

Two opening days

The Belvedere Golf and Country Club has two birthdays, and the sources disagree about them. The Landmarks Society's histories, by Hillary Don (2011) and Dave Gotz (2018), say that the club opened on 23 May 1914 with 127 active and four junior members.^3,2 The newspapers say nothing about golf at Belvedere that May. They report the opening on Saturday, 1 August 1914.

On that morning the Tocsin wrote that society on the Marin shore was looking forward to the opening of the new club that day.⁷ "A golf club at Belvedere has long been a dream of that community," it went on; until that summer the island's golfers had to use the Marin Country Club's links or cross the bay to the Presidio or Ingleside.⁷ The day, it said, would be an introduction to the links, when the men and women who had sponsored the club would "have the first opportunity of playing there."⁷ The Call reported a formal opening and called the club "the latest and most important addition to the island." All day, it said, Belvedere residents and their guests from the city, Ross Valley and San Rafael tried out the new course.⁸ Its list of players included the Stillmans, Charles Crocker and his wife, the John Ward Mailliards, the Temple Bridgmans, Ward Mailliard, the Arthur Pages, the Charles L. Buckinghams, the Gordon Blandings, the Henry P. Dimonds, the Edgar Wilsons and the Marshall Wallachs.⁸ Two days later the San Rafael Clarion put it simply: "The links of the new Belvedere Golf Club were christened last Saturday."⁹

Both dates can be true. The clubhouse contract was let only in mid-April, and the Tocsin's report that the members' first chance to play came on 1 August suggests that the links were not ready before then.^4,7 The 23 May date is therefore probably the day the club was organized or opened its rolls to members, not the first day of golf; the Landmarks histories pair it with exact membership figures, which suggests it comes from the club's or the Land Company's own records. Neither newsletter says where the date comes from, so this cannot be settled from the sources in hand. A golf directory of 1923 muddied things further by listing the club as "Estd. 1915."¹⁰

The membership figures differ too, though not by much. A week after the opening the Sausalito News put the membership at close to one hundred.¹¹ The paper was impressed by the ground. It called Belvedere the third golf club in the county, set it alongside the Lagunitas and Marin County courses, and praised the "natural obstructions that seldom exist on links."¹¹ That afternoon, 8 August, the club gave an informal dansant in the new clubhouse, for the younger set of San Francisco, San Rafael, Ross, Sausalito and Mill Valley.^7,11

Dances, tennis and a sporty nine

For its first few years the club was as much a social center as a golf club, and the papers covered it mostly on the society pages. Its season followed the summer colony's. In June 1916 the Pacific Motor Boat Club put off its midsummer dance because it fell on the same evening as the opening of the Belvedere Golf Club, probably the start of the club's summer season, since the course had been open since 1914.¹² Hostesses gave some of the season's biggest parties there: in July 1915 Dr. Florence Ward and Mrs. James W. Edwards gave a dance at the club that the Call expected to be one of the largest of the summer, with Mrs. Burr W. Freer among the hostesses giving dinners beforehand.¹³ By the summer of 1916 the club held an informal dance every month.^14,15 The women of the house committee acted as hostesses, with Mrs. Ward Mailliard as chairman and Mesdames H. P. Dimond, Horace Hellman, C. Edward Holmes, Ferdinand Peterson, Edgar Wilson and Burr Freer serving with her.¹⁴

Golf was played, though the early record of it is thin. In 1915 the Western Golf Association added the "Belvedere Country Club, Belvedere, Cal." to its membership, along with the Marin Golf and Country Club and the Presidio, and by 1918 Spalding's annual guide listed the Belvedere Golf and Country Club among the association's clubs.^16,17 For the Fourth of July in 1916 the club offered handicap competitions for men and women "over the club's sporty nine-hole course," with an open tennis tournament alongside.¹⁸ That August the annual meeting, which also elected the year's officers, set the annual tournaments for early September. Match play would decide the championship, the lowest score would win a directors' trophy, and Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Moore gave two silver cups for a mixed foursome.¹⁹ In September the Sausalito News noted that three young members, among them Gordon Thompson and Jack Russell, were making names for themselves as golfers.²⁰ The papers found for this history do not name the club's officers in these years, or the winners of its first championships.

The war gave the club a cause. In the summer of 1917 the island turned its holiday into a Red Cross benefit, with a dance at the club on the evening of 3 July and tennis on the club courts the next day, all organized by Mrs. Pierre Moore.^21,22 The Call put the club on the Red Cross roll of honor, and the tennis entry list was a strong one for an island club: William Johnston, the 1915 national champion; Willis Davis, the national clay court champion; John Strachan, the state champion; Roland Roberts, the San Francisco champion; and George Flint, the Belvedere champion.²³ On the Fourth the final went to Byron "Babe" Batkin, who beat Davis in straight sets, 6–4 and 6–3. The Oakland Tribune thought the win had lifted Batkin a rung higher in the tennis world.^24,25 Islanders also played in the mixed doubles. In the semi-finals a Mrs. Preusser, partnered by Fred Bass, lost to Virgil Sheldon and Lily Hellman.²⁶

The giving went on off the court as well. When the Sausalito News printed the Belvedere–Tiburon list of subscriptions to the American Red Cross war fund that July, the island had raised nearly $6,500 against an allotment of $2,500, and the Belvedere Golf and Country Club itself was down for $100.²⁷ A few weeks later the young people of the colony staged a Red Cross cabaret dinner at the club, acting as their own entertainers.²⁸ By the end of August 1917 the war had reached the club's tennis players too: Charlie Sonntag, who held the Belvedere doubles championship with Fred Bass, had joined the officers' reserve at the Presidio.²⁹

A professional, grass greens and Mike Brady

The club's golf took a step forward in 1918. In early May the Tocsin reported that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Clark had moved to Belvedere, where Mr. Clark had been chosen as the club's instructor.³⁰ Bob Clark, R. C. Clark in the sports columns, is the first professional the papers name at the club.

A month later Clark's new club staged a big golf day. On Sunday, 16 June 1918, it held a Red Cross tournament open to members of any club around the bay, with tennis matches, an al fresco luncheon and a dance at the clubhouse the night before.^31,32 The star attraction was Mike Brady, the Boston professional, then in the Naval Reserve. He was to play an exhibition foursome with Willie Locke of Ingleside, John Black of Claremont and Clark himself.^32,33 In announcing the match, the Call gave a rare description of the course itself:

"The Belvedere course is said to be the smallest in the west. Par is sixty, but the fairways are narrow and trouble confronts the players on every hole."

More than 150 golfers played that Sunday, and the women of the club served the luncheon.³⁴ The San Anselmo Herald also counted close to 150 golfers and called it a big day on the Belvedere links.³⁵ In the professional foursome Brady scored 125, Black 127, Locke 131 and Clark 137.^34,36 These were thirty-six-hole totals, four trips around the nine, and the Sausalito News reported that Black and Clark beat Brady and Locke 2 up on the 36th hole.³⁷ It was Brady's first golf since enlisting, and the Call reported that after his 125 he was sure the navy had not hurt his game. It also noted that he was the first professional golfer of note to join the navy.^34,36

That year the club also replaced its greens with grass ones. The papers did not report the work at the time. It is known from the September 1919 report on the club's election, which said that "the grass greens installed last year are in fine shape."^38,39 What the greens had been made of before is not recorded in the sources found. In November 1918, as the war ended, Belvedere was one of thirteen bay-area clubs arranging golf tournaments for the United War Work Fund.⁴⁰

The 1919 season

In April 1919 the Belvedere Country Club was one of thirteen clubs entered in the Northern California Golf Association championship at Burlingame.⁴¹ In February the Call had reported that "Bob Black," the professional at the Belvedere Golf and Country Club, would also run the golf school at the Ellery Arms Company in the city while keeping his Belvedere post.⁴² The name is probably a slip for Bob Clark. Clark is named as the club's professional both the spring before and the summer after, and the only Black in the club's story so far is John Black of Claremont.^30,43

Clark was in the Call twice that June. First he arranged a tournament for thirty players to be played, as the Call put it, "in sort of Chinese fashion—backward," with a trophy for the winner.^43,44 The phrase was the paper's, typical of its time; it probably meant that the holes were to be played in reverse order. A week later Clark told the Call about a freak shot in a foursome the day before. At the ninth hole, he said, his caddie handed him a mashie instead of a midiron. Rather than hold up the game he played the mashie anyway, and his long drive "went into the cup, 287 yards away, came out and rolled within four inches of the hole." He added: "Couldn't do it again in a thousand years."⁴⁵ The Call did not name the course. If it was Belvedere, the distance is puzzling, because the club's card a few years later gave the ninth as 187 yards.⁴⁶

The club championship began on Saturday, 28 June 1919. The Call picked H. P. Braddock, one of the club's leading golfers, to win it, and named Charles F. Preusser, who had been playing well, as a possible dark horse.⁴⁷ The result has not been found. That September the members elected Burr W. Freer president, F. Somers Peterson vice president, Harrison Atwood secretary and M. Pierce Cook treasurer, and the report of the election also gave the course its best notice yet: "The Belvedere course is now looked upon as one of the best around the bay district."^38,39 The Freers were long-time members of the island's social circle: Mrs. Freer had given dinners before a club dance in 1915 and sat on the 1916 house committee, and both were on the island's 1917 Red Cross subscription list.^13,14,27

The year ended with a disappearance. On Sunday afternoon, 2 November 1919, Frank P. Simons finished a round on the Belvedere links and told his brother Stuart that he was going for a swim.^48,49 Simons was thirty, a broker with the San Francisco firm of Mailliard & Schmiedell and recently released from the Marine Corps as a lieutenant. He was well known on the island: five years earlier he had been an usher at the Belvedere wedding of Serena Bland and Charles Preusser.^48,50,51 His wife was away visiting in the East. When he failed to appear at his office on Monday morning, Stuart Simons and Ward Mailliard went searching and found his clothes, with his watch and money still in the pockets, near the Union Fish Company's wharf.^48,49,52 The Marin Journal said that Simons "was last seen as he left the links of the Belvedere Golf and Country club Sunday afternoon."⁴⁸ Boats dragged Richardson Bay without success, and his family offered a reward for the recovery of his body: $200 in the Call's report and $250 in the Sausalito News a few days later.^50,49 No body was found, and in time he was given up for drowned.⁵³ More than four years later, in January 1924, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and the Sausalito News reported that Frank Simons was alive and working in Seattle.^53,54

It was an unsettling close to the club's first five years. Even so, the club that had started as a summer amusement for the island's colony now had a professional, grass greens and a place in the Northern California Golf Association. In the spring of 1920 it challenged the new Mill Valley Country Club to a home-and-home match, the first of the inter-club matches that fill the next chapter of its story.⁵⁵

In the spring of 1920 the Belvedere Golf and Country Club did something it had not done before: it went looking for a fight. Early that April the Mill Valley Record told its readers that Belvedere had challenged the Mill Valley club to a home-and-home match, one meeting on each club's course, with Bob Clark, who had been the professional at Belvedere only the year before, picking the Mill Valley side^1,2. The challenge was for eight men a side. By the time Charles F. Preusser sent the Belvedere line-up up the valley, it had grown to fourteen, among them Preusser himself, Harry P. Braddock, J. W. Mailliard Jr. and Burr W. Freer, who had been elected the club's president in September 1919^3,4.

Mill Valley was the newcomer. The Record called its club the infant among southern Marin's three, and a year later it was still counting the club's age in two years^5,6. Belvedere had been playing its hill since 1914 and had a clubhouse at the top of it⁷. On Sunday, 11 April 1920, the infant won by 29 points to 4. "Many of the Belvedere team had never negotiated our scenery before," the Record explained, kindly enough⁸.

That season opened with a dinner-dance at the clubhouse on 8 May, the Sausalito News reporting that summer residents had booked tables for their weekend guests⁹. A week later the Mill Valley men came down for the return match, eighteen a side, and the Record's reporter noted that they arrived "in machines, including players, caddies and fragments of families"⁵. Mill Valley won again, ten matches to eight and 27 points to 18. The Sausalito News, loyal to the island, took the defeat in its stride: "The Belvedere course, which is the shortest and sportiest links on the coast, was in fine condition"¹⁰. Lunch was served, the afternoon went to friendly golf, and the visitors' correspondent signed off with a salute to his hosts⁵.

Preusser had launched a rivalry that would last the rest of the decade. Within a few weeks he was also the club's champion, having beaten Henry Q. Hawes over thirty-one holes on a scorching day, and by September the papers were calling him its president^11,12. Belvedere already had a seat at the regional table: F. Somers Peterson sat for the Belvedere Country Club on the executive committee of the Northern California Golf Association in March 1920, and Preusser himself later sat on that body's executive and tournament committees^13,14.

A Hole Named for a Swiss Peak

The most vivid picture of the course from these years comes from the Mill Valley man who wrote up the May 1920 match. He called it a mountainous course on the island's northeast flank. It lay above the lagoon and San Rafael Avenue, on ground that today carries Tamalpais, North Point, Marin and Buckeye avenues^5,15. His tour began badly for the nervous. At most courses, he wrote, there is relief in getting off the first tee, but at Belvedere "the green appears to be located several thousand feet below the edge of a steep precipice"⁵. The exaggeration was the point. The opening hole, which the club's card would later call "Lagoon," probably dropped from the high ground toward the water, as that name suggests, and according to the Landmarks Society's history its green did double duty for the eighth^16,7.

Then came the hole everyone remembered, "appropriately named after a famous Swiss peak," where the situation was reversed. Here, the Record explained, play backed up while the players ahead tried and failed to clear the dizzy height with one shot⁵. This was the Matterhorn, the sixth: a short, steeply uphill par three, according to the Landmarks Society's history, with a striking view of Mount Tamalpais from its green^7,15. The visitor admitted that a misplaced shot and a long search in the tall grass had spoiled what would otherwise have been a fine view of Richardson's Bay and Mount Tamalpais⁵.

The round finished with a climb. The ninth, "The Rifle Range," ran uphill to the clubhouse through a long corridor of trees, and the writer pictured the nervous golfer who "closes his eyes as he swings, and then shudders as the ball swishes around through the trees, or bounces from trunk to trunk"⁵. The clubhouse at the top of that corridor still stands, as a private house at 1 Britton Avenue⁷.

"Belvedere, we salute you."

The Matterhorn soon had its legend. In the March 1921 home-and-home, Mill Valley's Walter Young hit a long drive up the hill and an approach that went into the cup, a two on the mountain. "Now this is not a typographical error," the Record insisted, and spelled the figure out a second time, as on a bank check, to make sure¹⁷. Young's opponents, it added, eyed him warily for the rest of the match.

For all its drama the course was tiny. Par for two trips around the nine was 60. When the members played for the Harry Lauder gold medal on 19 September 1920, in aid of Sir Harry Lauder's fund for wounded Scottish servicemen, Ernest C. Mailliard won with 76 gross and 59 net, one better than par^18,19. Visitors from the longer courses around the bay found it a different game. After a women's tournament in 1922 an Oakland writer warned that the Belvedere course, though "not as long as the present day championship courses, calls for deadly accuracy, or huge totals may easily be accumulated"²⁰. The club kept a teacher on hand: Ray Ball, formerly of the Olympic Club, was engaged in July 1920 to give lessons every Saturday and Sunday, and in March 1921 A. L. Longstaff of Chicago, lately at a club in Texas, was appointed professional instructor^21,22.

Ladies' Day on the Island

Belvedere's women made the club a destination as much as its men did. On Friday, 1 October 1920, the club's women members invited women from nearly every club around the bay to luncheon and an eighteen-hole competition for three silver trophies²³. Preusser had moved the date from the Thursday¹². Guests were urged to catch the 10:45 boat from San Francisco and were met at Tiburon²³. The society columns counted visitors from Burlingame, Claremont, the San Francisco Golf and Country Club, Menlo and the Presidio at a handsome luncheon in the Belvedere clubhouse²⁴. Mrs. Ezra T. Stimson took the cup with 90 less 16, a net 74. Mrs. A. B. Swinerton had the best gross score, 84, playing off a handicap of 4²⁵.

The invitation became a habit. In June 1921 the club announced that every Thursday until October would be ladies' day²⁶. That summer Mrs. Harry P. Braddock led a combined Mill Valley and Belvedere women's team against the California Golf Club. The last of their three matches was lost by a single point, though Miss Whipple of Belvedere shared the low net score of the day, 84^27,28. Mrs. Braddock was named women's captain early in 1922. That spring she and Mrs. Charles F. Preusser made up Belvedere's entry at the Mount Diablo invitational, and in May Mrs. Preusser, now captain, played host to visitors at a Belvedere invitational won on low gross by Mrs. Karl M. Anderson of the California Golf Club with 85^29,30,31. In July the guests came from Sequoyah and Claremont, and Mrs. Brent Potter of Lincoln Park went round in 76^32,20. In September Belvedere's women entertained golfers from Marin, Santa Rosa and Mill Valley and beat the Santa Rosa women on the island links^33,34.

The Marin County Cup

By 1921 Belvedere's golf ran to a printed calendar. A tournament committee under J. T. Sargeant drew up a schedule that opened in March with the Mill Valley home-and-home and closed with a Thanksgiving Day tourney on 24 November³⁵. The first of those matches, on 20 March, was played on both courses at once: Preusser captained one Belvedere team at Mill Valley while a second played on the island, and Mill Valley won the combined count 21 to 10^36,17. The Ritchie brothers, playing together at Mill Valley, posted a best ball of 60 and won their match¹⁷. When the return came round in September, Belvedere admitted it could not field two teams, and a single match on the island was played instead. Fourteen men a side played best-ball foursomes, and Mill Valley won by one point, 7 to 6^37,38.

In July 1921 the rivalry with Mill Valley grew into something larger. Belvedere, Mill Valley and the Marin Golf and Country Club of San Rafael agreed to meet three times a year, once on each course, for the championship of Marin County. Each club would send its eight best men, and the club with the lowest total gross score over the three courses would hold a new perpetual cup for a year³⁹. The three clubs had donated the trophy, valued at $100⁴⁰.

The series opened on the island on 10 July 1921, and Belvedere took the day: 620 strokes for its eight men, to Marin's 633 and Mill Valley's 636⁴¹. The day's golf was remarkable. Tom Patterson of Mill Valley went out in 32 and back in 33 for a 65, which the Record said "equals the amateur record of the Belvedere course." Minutes later Belvedere's J. A. "Babe" Ritchie came in with 29 out and 36 in. That also makes 65, so Patterson had to share the honor with him, although the paper's type printed Ritchie's total as 63⁴¹. Who had first set the 65 the two men equalled, the papers do not say.

The home advantage did not travel. On Mill Valley's course in August, Ritchie shot a 69 the Record thought would not soon be equalled by an amateur, but Mill Valley won the day comfortably. The Record had a theory: Marin's low, rolling hills and Belvedere's short holes had not prepared their men for the barrancas of Mill Valley's tricky little course⁴². The final round at San Rafael on 25 September went to Marin, which had strengthened its side with players from San Francisco. The final totals were Marin 2,042, Mill Valley 2,089 and Belvedere 2,126, and only the Ritchie brothers had played well for the islanders⁴³. The Landmarks Society's history reprints the totals with a dry note that in golf the winning tally is the lowest, adding that "the club boasted no Bobby Joneses but the players had fun"¹⁵.

The 1922 series began worse. At San Rafael in May, Belvedere's team played without the Ritchies and finished with 803 to Marin's 720 and Mill Valley's 740. It was, the Record said, a very bad day for the islanders^44,45. The second round was set for the Belvedere Country Club on 11 June⁴⁴. No account of that day has turned up in the papers searched for this history. By the end of July, Mill Valley had won the county championship at home, with Belvedere third⁴⁶.

In 1923 the series finished on the island. On 24 June Belvedere's eight had the best total of the day, 601, led by Eric Stewart's 71, against Marin's 611 and Mill Valley's 616. It was not enough to overcome the lead Marin had built at Mill Valley and San Rafael. Marin took back the cup on grand totals of 1,972, to Belvedere's 2,007 and Mill Valley's 2,067⁴⁷. George Ritchie was missing, away in Seattle for the Pacific Northwest amateur championship⁴⁷. The best card of the day belonged to a visitor, Du Val Moore of the Marin club, with 65, and Frank Walsh of Mill Valley had 66⁴⁷. The Sausalito News called Moore's round simply the best score of the day, but the Mill Valley Record wrote that he "made a record of 65"^47,48. Moore had probably only equalled the 65s of 1921. The record is murkier still, because the club's own page in The Green Book of Golf for 1923–24 credits the amateur record to Babe Ritchie, with a 58, a round no newspaper has yet been found to describe¹⁶.

Blues, Reds and the National Association

On 1 February 1922 the Belvedere Golf and Country Club was elected to the United States Golf Association. The association's Year Book listed Charles F. Preusser as president, Edgar M. Wilson as vice-president, M. Pierce Cook as treasurer and J. Ward Mailliard Jr. as secretary⁵⁵. Preusser did not stay to enjoy it. At the end of March the Call reported that he would leave shortly for Manila, where he had once lived, on an extended business trip⁵⁶. Ernest Mailliard of the tournament committee was already arranging the season's competitions²⁹.

That season was the busiest yet. Under captain M. Pierce Cook, Belvedere beat the Marin club eleven matches to one in foursomes on the island in April. The year before, Marin had won a team match there by 10 points to 4^57,58,59,60. A new rival appeared in Sonoma County. In June Cook's team went to Santa Rosa and won 6 to 4^61,53. On 13 August Santa Rosa paid the return visit and lost 11 to 3. One of its men, Roy O. Hurd, went round in what the Press Democrat called the lowest score on the Belvedere links that year. The smudged type probably reads 66. The paper liked the clubhouse even more than the golf: "a beautiful rustic structure overlooking the bay," where the visitors were given lunch with the water and hills spread beneath the windows⁶².

The club also played among itself, for fun. On 30 May 1922 its college graduates had a day of their own, and members were urged to wear their fraternity pins or varsity sweaters⁶³. The club championship of 4 July went to W. F. Stewart Jr., who beat P. S. Moulton when he holed out in par on the thirty-seventh green⁶⁴. At the end of July the members divided into two teams, and the "Blues" beat the "Reds" 8 to 2 over eighteen holes⁶⁵. A fortnight later the word turned up on a different stage. On 12 August the clubhouse put on the "Belvedere Blues," a musical burlesque of the club's own members, with music by Mark Gerstle Jr. and lines by Mrs. M. Pierce Cook and Miss Dolly Madison Payne^66,67. The papers do not say whether the show took its title from the golf team.

The rivalry with Mill Valley grew friendlier along the way. On 11 December 1921 the two clubs simply swapped courses for the day, and in October 1922 Mill Valley's members came down to play the island course as Belvedere's guests^68,69. Belvedere had won its home-and-home matches through the first part of 1922. That run ended on Mill Valley's links on 17 September, when the valley club won 9 to 5⁵⁴. The spring of 1923 began worse. At Santa Rosa on 8 April the Sonoma men turned the tables, 17 to 4⁷⁰.

By then the club's affairs were in new hands. Ralston Page now represented Belvedere at the Northern California Golf Association, and a national golf directory for 1923 listed Burr W. Freer as president again^71,72. The same entry described a nine-hole course of 1,957 yards with grass greens, reached by the Sausalito ferry, with a visitors' fee of a dollar a day⁷². Belvedere had become a club with a national affiliation, a county trophy to chase and a famous mountain of a hole. The cup itself would have to wait.

The Card of the Links

Some time in 1923 the club sent its particulars to The Green Book of Golf, the California golf annual, and the three pages it got back are the closest thing we have to a portrait of the club at its height.¹ Burr W. Freer was president, Edgar M. Wilson vice-president, M. Peirce Cook treasurer, George C. Stephens secretary and Talcott H. Camp a director.¹ E. F. Halloran chaired the green committee, with Harry Halliday beside him. Charles F. Preusser captained the men and Mrs. T. H. Camp the women, and the club's professional was J. W. Muirhead.¹

Then came the card. Nine holes, every one with a name, measured 1,736 yards in all. Par was 30 for men and 33 for women, so two trips round made an eighteen-hole par of 60, the same figure the Chronicle had given in 1918.^1,2 Another annual of the same year gave the course as 1,957 yards, also with a par of 60. The Green Book's hole-by-hole figures are the more detailed of the two, and the difference is unexplained.³ Today Britton, Tamalpais, North Point, Marin, Buckeye, lower Golden Gate and lower Bayview avenues run across this ground, which stretched north of Oak Avenue from San Rafael Avenue and the lagoon to the crest above Richardson Bay. As the Landmarks Society's history puts it, all of those streets probably have golf balls buried beneath their asphalt.⁴

Beneath the card the Green Book printed one line: "Amateur Record of 58 made by J. A. ('Babe') Ritchie," two under par for eighteen holes.¹ The newspapers never reported that round, and in June 1923 the Mill Valley Record had called Du Val Moore's 65 on these links "a record," so the 58 is best read as the club's own figure, probably from a friendly round rather than a match.⁶ In the 1923 club championship S. S. Brown beat W. A. Bredin at the 19th hole and then H. S. Henderson 2 and 1 in the final. Harry Halliday took the President's Cup and the eclectic, Dr. T. Addis the prize for the best five net scores, and F. Somers Peterson the annual handicap.¹ Addis had holed the second, Hillside, in one, and Bredin the fourth.¹

The handicap list ran to fifty-three men and twelve women. It went from scratch, held by George and J. A. Ritchie, up to 30, which was where Maurice A. Gale stood.¹ In its index of players the annual called Preusser, at 13, the "best home bred at Belvedere," probably meaning the best player the club had developed itself. The Ritchies had learned their golf on San Francisco's municipal links.^1,7,8 The professional did not stay. By January 1925 "T. J. Muirhead," a Scot whose career had taken in the Automobile Golf Club of Detroit, the Belvedere Country Club, Vancouver and the California Golf Club, was the professional at Fort Baker.⁹

"Alpine Golf"

In February 1924 E. Olmsted Jr., who wrote the golf notes for the Petaluma Argus-Courier, gave his readers a tip: anyone who loved "Alpine Golf" should take his clubs to Belvedere some Sunday.¹⁰ He said some of the greens sat high on the hills and others were "hanging over yawning chasms, giving the course the appearance of the Alps." Most holes were well trapped and bunkered, and the steepest fairways were terraced.¹⁰

"One would have to travel many miles before he would find a snappier or prettier nine-hole course."

From the higher greens and tees, he went on, a player looked over the bay, Sausalito, San Francisco and the Golden Gate, with Mount Tamalpais to the west. His geography slipped once (he put the island in "Drakes bay"), but his par did not: the par was 30, "not a difficult par and yet not so easy a par, either."¹⁰ He also admired the clubhouse, which he found pretty, well furnished and fairly large.¹⁰

That summer the course turned up in a less flattering report. In July 1924 the engineer of Mosquito Abatement District No. 1 wrote that in all the district's years Belvedere had never complained, until Halloran, the green chairman, reported "mosquitoes were swarming over the golf links on the northern end of the island."^11,12 The cause was a road job. The Belvedere Land Company had raised the road from Alto to Tiburon by about two feet with new rock. In doing so it had taken out an old wooden culvert and filled the hole, so the little marsh between the north end of the island and the bay could no longer drain into the lagoon and stood full of stagnant water.¹¹ A new culvert was sent for from West Berkeley and put in the next day, and the water soon drained away.¹¹

The women of the club kept a busy calendar of their own. In August 1923 they hosted women from the other Marin County clubs for a day of golf, bridge and Mah Jongg, the start of a round of visits in which each club would take its turn.¹³ That autumn an invitation tournament brought players from the East Bay. Mrs. C. F. Ford of Claremont had the best score, 76, and Mrs. Coussick of the home club was second.¹⁴ Late in May 1924 a Woman's Day luncheon at the club served eighty-six guests.¹⁵ When the season's last tournament was played in November 1924, Mrs. T. H. Camp, chairman of hospitality, was the members' hostess.¹⁶ Evenings at the clubhouse went on as well. There was a Halloween dinner dance in 1923, with the rooms done in black and orange, and the papers counted forty to fifty members from Belvedere and Sausalito.^17,18

Away Days and Home Games

With the Ritchie brothers on the team, the club also played well beyond Marin. Santa Rosa had beaten Belvedere 17 to 4 at Santa Rosa in April 1923.¹⁹ On 21 October 1923 the return match was played on the Belvedere links, and the home side won 10 to 2. Preusser and C. Duncan, Addis and W. F. Stewart, Fred Young and T. H. Camp, Halloran and M. Peirce Cook, and Rice and Powers all took their matches.²⁰ The clubs talked of a winter series, since "wet weather seldom interferes with the play on either course."²⁰

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat introduced the visitors of March 1924 by their star pair. "Babe" Ritchie was then the municipal champion of California, and George Ritchie a former northern California champion.²¹ Even so, Santa Rosa won that day; the headline made it 19 to 9, though a later report gave 15 to 9.^22,23 In April the club travelled to Stockton, where the Stockton Independent hailed the brothers as "two of the foremost amateurs in the state" (and placed the club, wrongly, in San Rafael).²⁴ Stockton won ten of the eleven matches, 28 points to 4. George Ritchie beat Sam Frankenheimer 4 and 3, but H. G. Ayres beat Babe 3 and 1.²⁵ At the end of June, Santa Rosa came to Marin, and this time the Press Democrat's headline conceded that Belvedere had beaten the locals. The rest of that page is too badly scanned to give the score.^23,26 That September George Ritchie reached the semi-finals of the state amateur at Pebble Beach, and he played Lauren Upson of Sacramento for the City of Oakland championship over thirty-six holes at Lake Chabot. Our clippings do not give the result.^27,28

The 1925 season opened in April with nine foursomes against the California Golf Club of San Francisco.²⁹ In June, Santa Rosa beat Belvedere 12 to 6 at home.³⁰ Before the return, the Press Democrat warned its readers about the course they were heading to. The Belvedere men had been "greatly handicapped by lack of local knowledge" at Santa Rosa, and now the visitors would face the same thing on Belvedere's hills.³¹ On 12 July 1925 the match finished level at 8 to 8, which gave Santa Rosa the series 20 to 14. George Ritchie and his partner took their match, and the deciding foursome was halved when Ben Steiger of Santa Rosa sank a 25-foot putt on the eighteenth green against Henderson and Halliday.³² On a nine-hole course that was the ninth green, the Rifle Range, on the second time round. The hosts laid on luncheon, refreshments at the nineteenth hole, and golf and tennis for the Santa Rosa women.³²

Against Mill Valley, 1925 went badly. On 23 August, at Belvedere, Mill Valley won 9 to 1 on greens the Record found excellent and very true.^33,34 The bright spot was a 66 by the man the Record called the club's champion, W. P. Stewart, which Stanley F. Helmore of Mill Valley matched.³⁴ He was almost certainly the W. F. Stewart who shot 69 for Belvedere in 1927.³⁵ A week later at Mill Valley the score was 19 to 4, and the series went to Mill Valley 28 points to 5.³⁶

The Club in Print and on Film

In January 1925 the Mill Valley Record reported that the photographer A. D. Mills was preparing golf-course pictures for Pacific Golf and Motor and The Fairway. He was also working on pictures of the grounds of the Marin club and of the Belvedere Club.³⁷ According to the Landmarks Society's history, the 1925 photographs of the course in its collection are all by Arthur D. Mills.⁴ Neither magazine has been digitized, so we cannot check the Society's caption saying that his view of the third hole appeared in The Fairway.⁴ A national magazine certainly used one of his pictures. In June 1926 The American Golfer ran a spread called "Fairways That Lure," with views of Marin, Mill Valley, Beresford and Del Monte, and with "the third green on the Course of the Belvedere Golf and Country Club."³⁸

Closer to home, a student essay on Belvedere reprinted in the Record at New Year 1926 said the island's links were "owned and maintained by the people of Belvedere, and are considered some of the best in the Bay District." It added that many San Franciscans came over during the week to play.³⁹ Visitors brought a little glamour. The film actor Richard Barthelmess came up from Hollywood in his golf clothes and took a keen interest in the links.⁴⁰ The University of California football star Andy Miller, a weekend guest of Dick Merrill, said he hoped to play the course on his next visit.⁴¹

The winter of 1926 also brought the club's strangest night. In early February, while the resident custodian, L. C. U. Burt, was away, two young men broke in through a floor. When an employee named Angelo came to check on the building, they hit him and tied a sack over his head, then made off.⁴² The Oakland Tribune said he had found them cooking a meal at the fireplace. Quail feathers on the reception-room floor showed what the meal had been. Nothing was stolen, and Town Marshal Oldfield found no clues.^43,42 By May, Burt had left to go into business in San Francisco.⁴⁴

Two weeks after the break-in came better news. On Sunday, 21 February 1926, Maurice A. Gale, a director and the 30-handicapper of the Green Book list, holed the fourth in one stroke. In the Record's words it was "a clean pitch directly into the cup without any roll."^5,1 With witnesses to vouch for it, he qualified for the "Hole in One Club," an Eastern organization open only to those who had done the same.⁵

The directors had bigger plans as well. In March 1926 they were discussing a swimming tank near the clubhouse, 50 by 25 feet, at about $4,000. The papers never mention it again, and it was probably never built.⁴⁵ More modest work did go ahead. That summer the club enlarged its kitchen, and F. Crosby finished alterations and additions to the clubhouse (the building that still stands at 1 Britton Avenue) to give it better facilities for luncheons and dinners.^46,47

Those facilities were well used. Harry Halliday ran the men's tournament that opened on 17 April, and by late June Eric Stewart and Phil Moulton were in the semi-finals.^48,49 Mrs. George T. Davis captained the women's team.⁵⁰ On Thursdays in summer the club held its Ladies' Days, with golf, tennis and luncheon. One in early August drew 110 guests, and the last of the season, on 30 September, brought players from Mill Valley and guests from Angel Island and Corinthian Island.^51,52,53 The men did well too. In the first of the 1926 meetings with Mill Valley, played at Belvedere, the home team won a majority of the matches.⁵⁴ By November the Record found the links quiet for the winter, though the clubhouse still had its dances.⁵⁵

Eighteen Holes on the Lagoon

Behind the clubhouse lay the lagoon, the shallow slough between Belvedere and Tiburon. In 1925 and 1926 it became the setting of the most ambitious plan in the club's history. In November 1925 the San Francisco Daily News ran a page about an 18-hole course, a deep-water harbor and several thousand acres of reclaimed marsh. The Record answered that such plans were premature. The firm fact, it said, was that the San Francisco Yacht Club had bought property at Belvedere, including the long-abandoned Belvedere Hotel.⁵⁶

Golf Illustrated took up the story in January 1926. It reported that the Yacht Club's plans included an eighteen-hole course, to be built on eighty acres of the Tiburon Lagoon filled with sand pumped from the cove.⁵⁷ Oddly, the magazine said nothing about the existing nine-hole club. In April representatives of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, the Belvedere Land Company, the Corinthian Yacht Club and the Kashow estate prepared to meet over how to pay for dredging the waterfront and filling the lagoon.⁵⁰

In early June 1926 the San Francisco Yacht Club voted to move from Sausalito to Belvedere and pay its share of a $1,000,000 dredging project in Belvedere Cove. The mud would go into the slough, and part of the new land would be used to extend the golf links.⁵⁸ The Sausalito News was more specific. Under the agreement, it said, "the Belvedere Country club, which now has only nine greens, will be enlarged by another nine holes" on the new land, and the yacht club's new clubhouse would have the use of the links.⁵⁹ The Record said only that the golf club had reached some sort of agreement with the Yacht Club. It also pointed out that the 1,440,000 cubic yards to be dredged would not be enough to fill the whole lagoon, and that the dredging permit was still waiting for approval in Washington.⁶⁰

That summer the club got a different kind of publicity. On 22 August 1926 the San Francisco Chronicle printed four aerial rotogravures of Belvedere and Tiburon to mark the annual regatta, and one of them featured the golf links.⁶¹ We have not yet found a copy of that picture.

After that the newspapers go quiet. In February 1927 the county recorder's list showed the Yacht Club deeding tide-land lots at Belvedere to the Belvedere Land Company, and the papers did not say why.⁶² The nine extra holes were never built. The lagoon was filled in later, but the course got no new ground from it.⁴

New Greens and a New President

Belvedere started 1927 with its old rival again. The March match with Mill Valley was put off because Mill Valley's course was too wet.⁶³ When it was played at Belvedere on 20 March, with twenty-two men a side, Mill Valley won 16 points to 7, though "the weather was so superb it was worth talking about, after the long rains."⁶⁴ At Mill Valley on 3 April it was 16 to 3, and the Record noted that several good Belvedere players had not turned up.⁶⁵

The triangle matches for the county championship were closer. The first round was played at Belvedere on 8 May 1927, with eight-man teams. Mill Valley totalled 588, Belvedere 590 and Marin 599, and the Record found the course in splendid condition.³⁵ Stanley Helmore of Mill Valley was low with 65, ahead of George Ritchie and Mill Valley's T. Patterson on 68. Ritchie had just won the northern California title at Del Paso, and W. F. Stewart followed him on Belvedere's card with 69.³⁵ Two weeks later more than sixty guests had luncheon at the clubhouse and the links were crowded with players.⁶⁶ In June Mrs. Frederick G. Cooper used the clubhouse to announce her daughter's engagement, at a luncheon and tea for about a hundred guests.⁶⁷

At the annual meeting, called for Saturday, 30 July, the members chose Frank T. Bowers as president, Britton Rey as secretary and A. J. White as treasurer, with M. A. Gale and E. M. Wilson as directors.^68,69 That autumn workmen were relaying the green of the first and eighth holes, which had been remodeled and would be sown with new seed.⁷⁰ The Record wrote of a single "green," which fits the tradition that the two holes shared one; probably they did, but the article does not say so. So the club ended 1927 rebuilding the green of its opening hole, the Lagoon.

The brassie battlers

The spring of 1928 began the way so many Belvedere springs had begun, with a beating from Mill Valley. At the end of April the Belvedere men crossed to the Mill Valley links for the first leg of their annual home-and-home match and came back on the short end of 14 points to 7.¹ The return was set for the Belvedere course on Sunday, 13 May, and the Mill Valley Record announced in the same paragraph that the year's triangle matches with the Marin Golf Club of San Rafael and the Mill Valley Country Club would follow in three rounds ending on 10 June.²

This time the island held: Belvedere won the return match on its own course by 12 points to 5, and the Record printed the pairings, Bresnahan and Stewart, Preusser and Haislip, Halliday and Irland, the two Mitchells, Barter and Rey, Hyde and Bowers among them.³ Frank T. Bowers, playing in the last foursome, was the club's president, in the first of the two years he would serve.^4,5

The triangle was a different kind of contest. Each club sent eight men, every stroke counted, and the lowest total over three courses won the Marin County Cup. The first round, at Mill Valley on 20 May, went to the home side: Mill Valley 651, Belvedere 681, Marin 690.^3,6 Belvedere's two best cards belonged to the brothers George and James Ritchie, 71 and 72; after them the scores ran from 83 to 95.⁶ At San Rafael on 3 June the order flipped. "Belvedere's eight stars totaled 1341," the Record said, with Mill Valley at 1371 and Marin at 1390, and the Ritchies again led the way with 74 and 75.⁷

That left the final round to be played at home, on the nine short holes between the lagoon and the ridge, on 10 June. George Ritchie went round in 66, the best score of the day by three strokes. A player listed as H. Preusser (probably C. F. Preusser) and Harry Halliday each had 69, and Eric Stewart 74.⁸ Those were probably eighteen-hole totals, twice round the nine, since the Belvedere card added up to a par of 30 for nine holes.⁹ The 66 was not called a record, and it was not one: the Green Book of Golf already credited Babe Ritchie, George's brother, with a 58.⁹ It was enough. "Belvedere won the trophy with a score of 1929," the Record announced. "Mill Valley's count was 1969 and that of Marin 1988."⁸

That figure of 1929 is almost certainly a misprint. The eight Belvedere cards printed for the final round add up to 598, and 598 added to the 1341 Belvedere carried into the round makes 1939, not 1929. Mill Valley's numbers check exactly, to 1969.^7,8 The national press had it right. In its August issue The American Golfer told readers across the country that "Belvedere's brassie battlers won the Marin County Interclub golf championship with an aggregate score of 1939 points," with Mill Valley second and Marin third.¹⁰ In 1921, the first year the cup was played for, Belvedere had finished third of three, 84 strokes behind Marin. Now its name was on the trophy.¹¹

A painter on the ninth green

That summer brought a different kind of visitor to the links. J. Wisby, a San Rafael landscape painter whom the Record ranked with Thad Welch, came over to Belvedere one Sunday in May and decided to spend much of the summer on the island with his brushes.²¹ In early August fewer than twenty of his canvases were hung in the clubhouse. The Record's critic noticed at once where he had set up his easel: "Mt. Tamalpais from the ninth green of the golf grounds seems to have been his favorite subject."²² One picture had the long slope of the mountain behind an arm of Richardson Bay lying like a lake, and nearer still was the course itself: "a sloping hill of gold over which lie the magic shadows of eucalyptus leaves."²² Mrs. F. G. Cooper, summering in Belvedere from New York, bought two.²² Nobody has yet traced where those paintings went, or whether any survive.

"An artist may well spend a lifetime and more in Marin."

Behind the summer's good news there was business to attend to. More than fifty members came to a Thursday dinner in August and talked at length about the club's activities and progress. They then put off the election of officers until 1 October, and in the meantime the club would run a drive for new members.²³ It was the first of several such drives over the next three years.

Over the winter the members took the clubhouse in hand. In February 1929 the Record reported new electric fixtures and lamps, new upholstery and furnishings, paid for by members' subscriptions and by the proceeds of bridge dinners and parties. Mrs. T. K. Camp chaired the furnishings committee, helped by her daughter Emily.²⁴ The kitchen and the rooms were run by Mrs. A. B. Richardson, whom the Record called superintendent of the club's building and entertainment, and whose dinners the members praised.^25,24 In March the club staged an all-day ladies' tournament with luncheon, open to members and associate clubs and to guests from around the county and across the bay.²⁶

The women's game also travelled. Through the Northern California Women's Golf Association, a Belvedere team of three pairs played the big bay clubs, usually without much success. Claremont beat them 7½ to 1½ at Beresford in October 1928, and the California Club beat them by the same score a year later.^27,28 The steady exception was Mrs. J. Bruce Adams. In December 1928 she won low net, 87–7–80, in a field of fifty-eight at Claremont, and a year later the Oakland Tribune reported her as medalist at Sequoyah with a 95, the only score in the nineties that day.^29,30

Gale's club

In June 1929 the club hired F. H. Nagel (the Record first spelled him Naegle) as caddy master. He "will supervise the grounds to see that they are kept in perfect condition and will give instruction in golf playing," the announcement said, and lessons could be arranged.³¹ At the annual meeting in the clubhouse on Saturday, 27 July, Frank Bowers stood down after two years and Maurice A. Gale was elected president unanimously; A. J. White stayed on as treasurer and Ben Sewell as secretary.⁵ Gale told the members he wanted the golf and tennis tournaments to be worth entering, and he wanted the club's social life enlarged.⁵ A few days later the Belvedere town trustees gave the club permission to put up three signs pointing the way to the clubhouse.³²

Gale ran a sociable club. Forty people dined at the clubhouse one Saturday that September, the Thursday club dinners carried on with Gale presiding and a moving picture afterward, and on one Sunday sixteen men entered a members' tournament while the women watched.^15,33 A tournament that closed on 29 September went to B. Grant of San Francisco, with E. B. Sutton, almost certainly Effingham Sutton, second.³⁴ In November the Record admitted that "the golf links have been quiet during the football season," because so many members were following the games.³⁵

The great event of the summer took place across the county. On Saturday, 17 August 1929, the Meadow Club at Fairfax held the first all-Marin golf championship. All four clubs took part (Meadow, Belvedere, Mill Valley and Marin), and every entrant had to belong to the Northern California Golf Association.³⁶ About 118 players went out in the qualifying round. George Ritchie and the Meadow Club's Merritt Olds tied for the medal at 76, four over par on the Tamalpais links. In match play Ritchie "weathered a twenty hole match with Thomas Cuffe" of Marin and reached the semifinals.¹⁴ The Record's report ends there, and no account of the final has yet been found.

On the evening of 4 January 1930 Gale gave a party for a part of the club the papers usually ignored. He hosted a dinner in the clubhouse for the caddies, followed by a moving picture on the clubhouse screen. The guests were the club's eighteen caddies, "eighteen boys who come from the community."³⁷ According to the Landmarks Society's history, the club encouraged members to take caddies. A caddies made 30 cents an hour for nine holes and B caddies 25 cents, and when the boys were off duty they often played eight of the holes, keeping away from the one nearest the clubhouse.³⁸ The Landmarks history does not date those rates.

Hospitality days

The Gales planned a long trip abroad in the spring of 1930, and the members were expected to keep the club's luncheons, dinners and games going while they were away.³⁹ In the event their sailing was postponed, and the Gales did not leave for Europe until February 1931.^40,41 Early in March a club tournament chose the teams for the inter-club season, and Reinhart Engert of San Francisco won the perpetual silver cup, to keep for a year.⁴⁰ Two weeks later four old friends, Dr. C. J. Addis, Jerry Cramer, Eric Stewart and C. F. Preusser, played their regular foursome again while the members looked on.⁴²

The county cup now included the Meadow Club, and it ran on a points system. Mill Valley won the first round at home on 27 April and the second at Belvedere on 4 May. Belvedere finished third at Mill Valley, with George Ritchie and the captain, Preusser, on its team.^43,16,44 The Record found it remarkable that the four clubs ended the round one point apart.⁴⁴ The third round, at the Meadow Club, brought bad scores for everyone, which the paper put down to the weather.⁴⁵ Before any of this, on 18 April, Preusser, who was in the jewelry trade, had run a tournament for bay-region jewelers on the Belvedere links, with Nagel, now described as the club's golf specialist, seeing to the caddies.^46,47,48

The women had a hard year in the association's team series. Belvedere lost 9–0 to Crystal Springs in January and to Claremont in April.^49,50 It beat Orinda 6–3 at San Jose in March, though, and on the last day of the series, at Burlingame, its win over a strong San Francisco club team was the surprise of the day.^51,52,53 At home Mrs. C. F. Preusser directed the women's activities. They invited the association to an open-day sweepstakes on the Belvedere links on 28 May, and over the summer they held a series of special days with golf or tennis in the morning, luncheon in the clubhouse, and bridge in the afternoon.^45,54

The membership pages showed the same energy. In May 1930 the club began a thirty-day membership drive, bought new porch furniture and colored awnings, and offered summer memberships at low rates to visitors staying nearby.^45,48 A members' tournament that summer ended with two recent recruits, R. C. Ralston and R. F. Engert, in the final.⁵⁵ At the annual election on 9 August, Gale stood down and E. H. Belcher was elected president.⁵⁶ By October Belcher was directing work on a new first tee, which the Record said the members had wanted for a long time.⁵⁷ The club also took on a second teacher. Andrew Taylor White, "who acquired the art of golf in Scotland," gave lessons one day a week, and Nagel kept the weekends.⁵⁸ The year ended as usual with a flag tournament and turkey prizes in November and a New Year's Eve ball.^59,60

Not too strenuous

In February 1931 the hostess resigned after two years. The Record now called her Mrs. E. C. Reynvaan, and she left with her husband for a ranch near Madera. Her daughter was Jean Richardson, so she was almost certainly the Mrs. A. B. Richardson of 1929, who had remarried in the meantime. Mrs. Ethel Lauff of Stinson Beach took her place.^61,62 The club began offering family memberships. The Preussers signed up with their two sons, and at Christmas they played a family foursome, which Mrs. Preusser and her son Richard won.⁶³

The spring season opened in March with a member-guest tournament for men. Twenty teams entered, the biggest turnout in months, and Britton Rey and President Belcher took first prize.⁶⁴ The same report described the course in words that later writers have repeated: "Belvedere links have a reputation for being desirable because not too strenuous."⁶⁴ The Landmarks Society's history dates the line to 1925, but it comes from this March 1931 recruiting notice.³⁸ The notice also announced a drive for new members, with a reduced initiation fee as the inducement.⁶⁴ Over the next few weeks the Record invited readers who were not members to come and talk to Belcher or the secretary, Ben Sewell. It reported that the drive had brought in some new members and found more prospects, and in May it said the family drive was still open.^65,66,67

There were small signs of strain. A bridge luncheon planned for April drew no replies at all and was postponed indefinitely, and the Record expected the women's program to be mostly confined to a monthly Hospitality Day.⁶⁸ The housekeeper served a one-dollar lunch to members who booked by the Monday before.⁶⁹ In May the Record claimed that Belvedere was the only club in the county belonging to the Northern California Golf Association, so its scores and handicaps were published everywhere. That is doubtful, since every player in the 1929 county championship had to be an association member, and the paper probably meant the women's association, whose open day Belvedere had just hosted.^70,36

That open day, on 6 May, was the best moment of the women's season. Players came from Claremont, the California Club and Sequoyah, and Mrs. J. Bruce Adams won first honors for Belvedere with 79 strokes.⁶⁹ A photographer for the Chronicle's photogravure page was there, and he was so struck by the island that the club expected to see itself in print.⁶⁹ The men did less well. All six Belvedere pairs went out in the first round of the county team championship. Meadow beat Belvedere 10–2 in the opening round of the quadrangle, Mill Valley beat it at San Rafael in May, and Marin took the series at the Meadow Club at the end of June.^71,72,17 A week later George Ritchie was dead.¹⁸

At home the summer was quiet but not discouraging. A mixed tournament in July drew more than thirty players, and in August the Record reported that members had mostly played their own matches. The summer had also brought several new members.^20,73 Twenty Belvedere men took on Marin in a home-and-home series, and Belcher called the annual meeting for 12 September.⁷³ At the end of the month, during the Nights in Venice carnival, the club opened its gates for the first time. Non-members could play the course on payment of a green fee, and the clubhouse entertained visitors.^74,75 In 1928 Belvedere had won the county's championship cup, and three years later it was inviting the public onto its links.

Memberships Made Attractive

By the autumn of 1931 the Belvedere Golf and Country Club still looked, from the outside, like the club it had been for seventeen years. At the annual meeting on 12 September the members re-elected every officer: E. Howard Belcher as president, Edgar M. Wilson as vice president, Carleton Hyde and Ben Sewell as the two secretaries, and Henry Kirchman Jr. as a director. The same week an insurance man, Arthur Bancroft, brought two dozen of his San Francisco colleagues over for a tournament and dinner at the clubhouse.¹ The rivalry with San Rafael went on as before. Rain washed out the return match against Marin Country Club in late October, and when the two dozen men finally met on the Belvedere links on 8 November, the visitors took the honors and everyone had lunch in the clubhouse.^2,3 That month Belvedere was also named among the clubs organizing a new North Bay Counties Golf Association, whose first get-together was planned for the Sonoma Mission Inn.⁴

Read closely, though, the Belvedere page of the Mill Valley Record had begun to sound like an advertisement. In December it announced a mixed two-ball foursome and told readers that the club was making its memberships attractive, praising the links, the scenery and the climate, and inviting inquiries to President Belcher.⁵ In January 1932 a committee of Henry Kirchman Jr., Maurice A. Gale and A. Bolton was set to work on a season of tournaments and parties.⁶ A week later came the plainest sign of trouble: the club declared a moratorium on initiation fees to bring in new members. The notice promised links in good condition and never crowded, as the city courses so often were, and it named R. C. Ralston to draw up the tournament schedule.⁷

The offer, still described in March as a membership with special inducements, did bring in some new names: Mr. and Mrs. Craig E. Sears, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver C. Wassell, C. D. Gresham and G. L. Zimmerman.⁸ Outside groups were welcomed as well. More than twenty-one men from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco came for a guest day in their honor, and the men of the neighbouring Corinthian Yacht Club were invited over for an informal match.^9,8

A Last Good Season

On the course, 1932 was a better year than the notices suggested. Sixteen men started a spring elimination series in April, and it ended with Russ Ralston and C. F. Preusser, the club's old champion, level after 36 holes. They had to play again for the medal. A 72-hole handicap championship followed, and the Record added that the clubhouse grounds were heavy with roses.^10,11,12

The county team series was harder going. On 8 May the four Marin clubs met at Belvedere, and the home team beat Mill Valley.^13,14 It was the club's last good afternoon of the series. Marin shut Belvedere out 12 to 0 at Mill Valley, the Meadow Club beat it 10 to 2, and Belvedere, with Ralston as captain, finished fourth of four, while Marin took the county title for the fourth year running.^15,16 In August Ralston, Craig Sears, Oliver Wassell, W. S. Warner and Harold Connolly carried the club's colors into the Marin County championship at the Meadow Club.¹⁷

The women gave the club its finest day of the year. In early 1932 Belvedere was one of nine founding members of a Women's North Bay Counties Golf Association, and it was given a date in the association's summer series.^18,19 Mrs. C. F. Preusser chaired the arrangements.²⁰ On 14 July more than sixty women came from Santa Rosa, Healdsburg, Sonoma, Napa, Vallejo, Petaluma, Mare Island, Mill Valley and San Rafael. Mrs. E. P. Halloran captained the home team, Mrs. M. A. Gale helped with the luncheon, and Miss Kay Lawler of Marin won the low gross with 76.^21,22,23 The Santa Rosa women went home that evening telling their paper it had been the pleasantest event of the whole inter-club series.²³

Through that summer the Record kept noting how much of the life of the club was happening away from the competitive golf. Free play on the home links was popular, the men played informal matches through the vacation months, and the tennis courts were at the height of their popularity, with Mayor and Mrs. F. W. Boole, the Carleton Hydes and the Britton Reys among the regulars.^20,22

At the annual meeting on 27 August 1932, Belcher, president for the two years since August 1930, declined to stand again.²⁴ The members elected Effingham Sutton president, with Carleton Hyde as vice president, Harold Connolly as secretary, Ben T. Sewell as treasurer and Britton Rey as director. The report spoke of new members, a well-run clubhouse and a much-admired garden.²⁵

Reorganizing

Four months later something had changed. Just before Christmas 1932 the Record announced that the golf club was reorganizing and had made C. F. Preusser its president. Preusser was a past president and one of the county's best players.²⁶ A few days later the Oakland Tribune reported that Preusser had been elected president of the Belvedere Country Club, which it described as newly organized.²⁷ In January the committees were said to be hoping to bring back the old enthusiasm, and in February the Record was still calling Preusser the club's president.^28,29 By September 1933, though, the Record again listed Sutton as president, and that month he was re-elected.^30,31 The papers never explain why Sutton, elected in August 1932, gave way to Preusser, or how he came back.

Preusser's answer was to open the gates. In January 1933 he extended the courtesies of the course to the golf teams of Tamalpais High School, Marin Junior College and San Rafael High School. Until then, the paper explained, students had found the game almost impossible to take up because of club restrictions and the cost of membership.³² At a meeting of the North Bay association in Sonoma he described a second arrangement, made with the local Work Council: boys of high-school age who could not find jobs could play the course on weekdays in return for work under the greenkeeper. The delegates from other clubs liked the idea and said they would take it home to their own members.²⁹

The students came. On 26 February the Marin Junior College coach, "Scoop" Carlson, held tryouts for the college's first golf team at Belvedere, and the club issued permits that served the team as green fees.^33,34 In April the Tamalpais High coach, Scotty Hall, planned to take his squad to Belvedere to choose the team.³⁵ Grown-up newcomers turned up too. A golf professional, Jack Nielson, and two men from the San Rafael Spalding agency played the course for the first time in January and were counted as likely members.³⁶

In March came the biggest offer. The Belvedere Golf and Country Club and the San Francisco Yacht Club, a few blocks away on Belvedere Cove, agreed to exchange full privileges, so that a member of either could use the greens, courts and clubhouse of the other. The golf club created non-resident memberships and waived the initiation fee until further notice. A playing family membership was now $5 a month, a playing membership for a man $3 and for a woman $2.50, and social memberships cost half as much. The announcement admitted that the nine holes were short, but called them very sporty, and copies of a new prospectus were available from Preusser.³⁷

The club's own household was changing. In February Mrs. E. H. Gamble of San Francisco took over the dining room from Mrs. Ethel Lauff.³⁸ In April Ben Sewell left for Saratoga to manage a branch of the American Trust Company. He had lived in Belvedere for six years and lately been the club's secretary, and for the past year he and his mother had lived at the clubhouse.³⁹ In May the team finished a distant last in the county series with 14 points, beaten almost to a whitewash by Mill Valley.⁴⁰

Voluntary Players

The summer of 1933 shows what the club had become. The Women's North Bay association had again put Belvedere on its calendar for July.⁴¹ On 13 July, the morning of the event, the Santa Rosa paper reported that the Belvedere members had postponed the tournament indefinitely, after Santa Rosa had already picked its team.^42,43 The next day the Record told its readers that the weekend's attraction at the club would be a tennis tournament, and gave this account of the golf:

"The golf links are frequented this season mostly by voluntary players in individual games."

The tennis tournament ran for three weeks.⁴⁵ In early September the Record said outright that while plenty of casual golf had been played, tennis had been the game of the season, and the club's best young players were going to a tournament at the Menlo Circus Club. The annual election, put off from the summer, was set for 17 September.³⁰ When it came, all the officers were returned, with Effingham Sutton as president, Carleton Hyde as vice president, Harold Connolly as secretary and treasurer and Britton Rey as director.³¹

It was the club's last recorded election. On 13 October the Belvedere page mentioned, in one line among the other local news, that Mr. and Mrs. A. J. White, who had looked after the grounds and clubhouse for several months, had moved to San Francisco.⁴⁶ The paper printed the initials A. J., but in June it had reported that "Mr. and Mrs. Andy White" were now in charge at the club, so these were probably the golf instructor Andy White and his wife rather than Alfred J. White, the town treasurer.⁴⁷ The same column reported that the Preussers had spent a day golfing at the Marin Golf Club in San Rafael.⁴⁶

The end itself is not in the newspapers. It survives in the records of the Belvedere Land Company, the landowner, as summarized by the Landmarks Society. On 18 October 1933 the company announced that it would take over the abandoned clubhouse and put in a caretaker. Four months later it voted to sell the club's personal property to cover $7,950 in unpaid rent.^48,49 The Landmarks Society's historian, Hillary Don, wrote the club's death notice: "Born on May 23rd, 1914, deceased on October 18, 1933."⁴⁹ She added that it had fallen five days and seven months short of its twentieth birthday.⁴⁹ The Record had reported the club's tournaments and teas week after week for more than a decade, but no notice of the closing has turned up in its pages.

Tennis, Dances and a Water Bill

The clubhouse did not stay dark for long. In about May 1934 a new Belvedere Beach Club was formed, with Balzar Peterson, one of the 1933 tennis stars, as president, and Britton Rey, Fred W. Boole and Carleton Hyde as the other officers. By July it was using the old club's property, which the Record described as closed for the time being. Its members cared most about tennis: they planned to improve the old court and eventually build more, they played interclub matches with the Mill Valley Tennis Club on Tuesdays, and they were preparing for a dinner dance for fifty to a hundred guests.⁵¹ This fits the Landmarks Society's account that the clubhouse was used for social events for a time before being converted into a rented residence.⁴⁹

The old name hung on. In April 1935 the Tamalpais News reported that the junior members of the Belvedere Country Club were planning a series of Saturday-night dances at the club.⁵² Whether this was the Beach Club under the familiar name, or what remained of the old membership, the paper doesn't say.

One last bill turned up. When the newly elected board of the Marin Municipal Water District published an audit covering July 1931 to September 1934, it showed the Belvedere Golf Club owing $329.63 for water. That was modest beside Mill Valley Golf Club's $794.03 and tiny beside the Meadow Club's, which had paid nothing on its $5,000-a-year lease since November 1931.⁵³ The Depression had caught every club in the county.

Epilogue: What Became of the Course

The waterfront below the old course had troubles of its own. In November 1937 Mr. and Mrs. George H. Hotaling and Mrs. Albert Swinerton went to court to get rid of the Casper, a waterlogged 175-foot vessel that had been towed in 1935 onto the tideland west of the Belvedere Golf and Country Club and left sitting in twelve feet of water. They asked for $405 in damages. The complaint described the property as owned by the plaintiffs. The sentence can be read as meaning the tideland or the old club ground. It most probably means the tideland, since the clubhouse land was still the Land Company's as far as the sources show.⁵⁴

The Land Company already had plans for its own ground. In February 1937 the civil engineers Punnett, Parez & Hutchinson drew a nine-sheet map resubdividing part of the City of Belvedere. On the sheets that cover the north end of the island, the former fairways have become Blocks F to L, ranging from about 3 acres to nearly 15. They are wrapped by new curves of Golden Gate, Tamalpais and Bay View avenues, Marin Avenue and a looping Richardson Avenue, with San Rafael Avenue along the lagoon and Richardson Bay at the foot.^55,56 Not every line matches today's streets, and North Point and Buckeye do not appear on these sheets at all, but the plan was clear: the links were to become homesites. According to the Landmarks Society, that is what they became. Tamalpais, North Point, Marin, Buckeye, lower Golden Gate and lower Bayview avenues were cut through the course from the 1940s to the 1960s, and both of the Society's historians suggest that lost golf balls probably lie under their asphalt.^48,49

Before long the club's old members began to appear in the obituary columns. When Charles Frederick Preusser died in November 1941, aged 63, a few days after suffering a stroke at his home on Corinthian Island, his obituary noted that he had come to Belvedere in 1916 and that he had done much to build the golf club into an active organization in the 1920s, serving as its president.⁵⁷ Six months earlier, the obituary of Frank Merrill, a Belvedere resident for about eighteen years, had also recalled that he was an active member of the golf club.⁵⁸

By then the club was a memory in other people's histories. In 1946 a member of the Mill Valley Tennis Club, writing that club's history, listed the Belvedere Golf Club among the thriving Marin clubs of 1929, and noted with some pride that only the tennis club and the Lagunitas Club were still privately owned.⁵⁹ A 1957 wire story on golf in the North Bay listed the Belvedere Golf Club, with the old Marin Golf and Country Club, Sleepy Hollow and Fort Baker, among the courses lost to the Depression and the building boom that followed.^60,61 The game the club had taught still turned up now and then. In 1954, as the Marin County Amateur championship began at the Mill Valley course, both local papers mentioned that the defending champion, John Campagna of Mill Valley, had learned his smooth game at the old Belvedere Golf Club.^62,63

The clubhouse survived. In May 1965 St. Stephen's Guild put the home of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Fleming Jr. on its Belvedere house tour, as a house that had once been the Belvedere Golf and Country Club. The papers described a beamed living room with a huge fireplace, a tennis court, a pool and gardens, and a recent kitchen-and-family-room remodel by the architect Clifford Conly. A photograph showed tour-goers on the trellised walk to the door, with a caption that remembered the place as the old golf and tennis club.^64,65,66,67 In 1974 the same house, then the John Clark home, held a party for the sponsors of the Belvedere-Tiburon doubles tennis championships. The Record's note remembered the club as thirty acres of Belvedere Island, active until the Depression and then sold to a private party, and the grounds as now two acres with a tennis court and pool. It also said the clubhouse dated from 1908. That is almost certainly a slip: the Land Company filed plans and a permit for the clubhouse in April 1914.^68,69

In 1978 the Record's street-name column took up the short cul-de-sac that leaves the junction of Golden Gate Avenue, Belvedere Avenue, Oak Avenue and Pelican Point. Britton Avenue, it said, "crosses the ridge of the old Belvedere golf course." The street was named for Joseph Britton, the lithographer who helped found the Belvedere Land Company in 1890 and served as its president. The column also named his great-nephew Britton Rey, who had been a director of the club in its final years and became Belvedere's first city manager.^70,31 The Landmarks Society gives the clubhouse's address as 1 Britton Avenue, where it still stands as a private home.⁴⁸

Today the course survives mostly in the archives. The Landmarks Society holds A. D. Mills's 1925 photographs, aerial views, and a 1925 photograph album of the club given by a donor in 2011, and in 2011 its Walk Your History day led walkers past the site of the Belvedere Golf Club and its course.⁴⁹ Hillary Don ended her history of the club with an invitation to imagine it. The holes are gone under houses and gardens, but the porch where the bridge foursomes sat, and where the caddies once turned a fire hose on the luncheon crowd, still belongs to the house at 1 Britton Avenue.⁴⁸