First Class Then and now
By Tim Cronin
This article appeared in the February 2020 edition of Chicago District Golfer.
Winter at many midwestern country clubs means snow-covered courses, a Christmas sale in the golf shop and little else.
Not at Butterfield Country Club. Yes, there’s the inevitable snow and a holiday rush in the shop, but there’s a lot more. The thwack of golf balls being struck and then slamming into the padded screens of golf simulators. The back-and-forth of paddle tennis most every day. The camaraderie of members having fun, even as the mercury urges they go South.
After a major renovation of its 27 holes in 2008–10 and other facilities in 2013–14 and last winter, Butter-field always is a happening place. Last summer, the club’s 730 members and their guests played 24,000 rounds of golf. The water in the pool was rarely placid and forward-thinkers wisely called ahead to get a dinner reservation in The Pub, or in the adjacent outdoor dining areas.
In other words, the Oak Brook outpost is looking pretty nimble for a club that will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding this year.
One paragraph in the Chicago Daily News in July of 1920 let the world know a new country club was being formed “far out” in the city’s western suburbs. That bare announcement noted that 130 golfers already had shelled out $500 each for the privilege of charter membership.
The founders were from Oak Park and vicinity. Chief among them were the Rev. John J. Code, founder of St. Edmund’s (Catholic) Church on Oak Park Avenue, and his two similarly golf-besotted brothers. Some of the original group, including Code, were members at the now-long-closed Westward Ho in Austin on Chicago’s West Side, which was going to lose its lease. None belonged to Oak Park Country Club, which back then had adopted an informal Protestant-only policy soon after its founding.
The 195 acres the founders scouted and acquired were atypical of the flat prairie near Chicago. Formed when the glaciers melted away at the end of the Ice Age, the ground heaved and rolled like a great ocean. A creek ran through it and fed a pair of lakes. And the property, on Canfield Road south of Butterfield Road, was just close enough to the Villa Park railroad station to make travel reasonable in the era before widespread automobile ownership.
They chose someone they knew to design the holes — William B. Langford — unaware that Langford someday would be regarded as one of America’s premier golf course architects. Langford happened to be a fellow Westward Ho member, but this wasn’t the old boy network in action.
Langford was an architectural prodigy. Westward Ho pro David McIntosh had apprenticed for Old Tom Morris at St. Andrews and Langford soaked up everything he could about golf from McIntosh.
Langford went on to earn degrees from Yale — where he was a three-time member of the school’s national championship golf team — and Columbia. Post-graduation he was hired at Chicago-based American Park Builders, where he quickly moved from mining engineering to landscape architecture.
In 1915, Langford authored a series on golf architecture in the Evening Post, establishing his philosophy that the course should adhere “to the greatest possible extent [to] the natural features of the tract of land on which it is to be built, natural hazards having a much better appearance than artificial ones.”
Butterfield would be a prime example of Langford’s belief. He opened his own shop in 1918, took engineer Theodore J. Moreau with him, and gave Butterfield his plan for the 27 holes in 1920. Nine holes were open with temporary greens in the summer of 1921, 18 holes with permanent greens by spring of 1922, and the third nine — White, to go with Red and Blue — finally opened in 1930.
From the start, people have made Butterfield’s reputation as much as the courses. Among them was Ted Wooley, the member who created the Butterfield Invitational, a best-ball tournament, in 1951, which quickly grew to be a must-play tournament for Chicago’s golf elite. Even today, 69 years later, an invitation is as coveted as ever.
The Invitational opens with a special Skins Game and gets serious the next morning, as nine flights of teams scrap across three nines over three days. The excitement of Saturday’s finale is rivaled in fun by three evenings of spirited dining and entertainment.
The Invitational’s high quality was there from the start. Art Hoff of Edgewood Valley Country Club sank a 16-foot putt on the first sudden-death hole, enabling him and teammate Charles Becka of Calumet Country Club to beat Harold Foreman of Lake Shore Country Club and Taylorville native Jim Frisina, who would combine to win eight Illinois State Amateur Championships.
Perhaps the best player in club history was Lucia Mida, known in the newspapers as Mrs. Lee Mida.
Lucia won four straight women’s titles at Butterfield and was a constant contender in amateur tournaments throughout the Midwest in the 1920s. Twice she won the qualifying medal in the Women’s Western Amateur.
In 1930 she captured the inaugural Women’s Western Open, the women’s major championship that set the foundation for the LPGA Tour and was the first purse-paying event in women’s golf. Despite being discontinued after 1967, past iterations are still recognized as major championships by the LPGA.
The most notable name on the roster of men’s champions is George Blanda. The stalwart quarterback/placekicker for the Bears, Houston Oilers and Oakland Raiders twice won the club championship after a record 26-season career in the NFL and AFL. Old-timers say the Pro Football Hall of Famer was just as ornery on the course as he was on the gridiron.
Butterfield has also had its share of top golf professionals, including John Cleland, who spent 14 years at the helm after Paul Lemke’s 16-year stint. Notably, Jack Grout, best known as Jack Nicklaus’ teacher thanks to his tenure at Scioto Country Club during Nicklaus’ formative years in Columbus, Ohio, spent 1944 at Butterfield. He was succeeded by his brother Dick for a dozen years. Chuck Johnson took over for Dick Grout, and was so revered, the members feted him with a testimonial dinner upon his retirement in 1976. One of Johnson’s assistants, John Paul Jones, won on the Senior PGA Tour.
While people came and went, the course remained largely the same Langford and Moreau layout through the first decade of this century. After much discussion, Steve Smyers was selected to update the 27 holes. He found no need to adjust the routing, but beginning in the fall of 2008, greens were reshaped, bunkers moved, tees extended, and 18 months later, the club reopened in the spring of 2010.
The care taken in the updating of the course and all the other details at the club to this day brings to mind another of Langford’s axioms: “It should be first class or not at all.” Butterfield is most certainly the former. ●
Tim Cronin is the author of nine books on golf.
