[April 13, 2009] For 100 years, Valley Country Club golf course has managed to stay above par [Standard-Speaker, Hazleton, Pa.] Tweet (Standard-Speaker (Hazleton, PA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Apr. 12--Willard "Chip" Woodring approached the final hole with a 6-iron and a plan. "Don't stand over this ball forever. Just swing at it. Wind up and let it go," Woodring recalled. "It was the best shot I ever hit under pressure, (landing) about 10 feet from the hole." Woodring, who started following his father around golf courses when he was 6 and went to Marshall on a golfing scholarship, was chasing a record. It was 1964. Woodring, 21, was back at the Valley Country Club in Conyngham, where he had imagined how to master his home course. "I had thought about it -- not on that particular day -- I wondered: 'How can I shoot 63?'" Woodring said. On that day, Woodring only planned to hit a few practice shots. His father, Charles, a club champion who worked part time organizing tournaments, told him that some local pros needed a player to complete their foursome for a one-day competition. "Yeah, I'll play," Woodring recalled telling his father. He showed no flash at the start of the tournament. Through seven holes, he was only one stroke under par. Then he birdied three of the next four holes, and his game began unfolding as he imagined. "That's kind of what happened. I birdied the birdie holes and didn't mess up the others," Woodring said. Having shot successive birdies leading the final hole, he grooved the crucial tee shot, tapped in the putt for a final birdie and won the team tournament single-handedly with a 63. No member ever shot a better round at the club, which has been around for a century. Splayed out from the base of Conyngham Mountain, the Valley Country Club has a history as entertaining and frustrating as a round of golf. In 100 years, the club survived foreclosure, fire, three name changes, hurricane-speed winds and an international incident. Pro basketball's Julius Erving, Olympic skater Scott Hamilton, rock star Alice Cooper and golfing great Tom Kite have played the course. A club employee went on to become a Hollywood millionaire, only to die in a notorious murder. Businessmen and women have made deals on the links and in the clubhouse. Families have befriended one another at the club's pool, tennis courts and restaurants. For a half-century, young couples in tuxedos and evening gowns have celebrated the Christmas season at the club during the Mistletoe Ball. But the club owes its longevity to its golf course. "People who have seen it, have called it a jewel. A jewel in northeastern Pennsylvania. That's not going to change," WYLN television show host Don Pachence, a club president in 1987 and 1988, said. "Golf is the focus. Golf is the reason most people join." Golf drew 20 businessmen to initial meetings for the club. They incorporated in 1906, but didn't have a course to play until 1909. The first clubhouse, with wrap-around porches on the first and second floors, was built atop the mountain, where the Top of the 80s restaurant and Hampton Inn stand today. The trail pitched so steeply that golfers rode donkeys between the clubhouse and the course. Members then were as familiar with saddles as shifting levers. Original rules required them to tie horses at designated places and never around trees, whereas automobile drivers had to obey the speed limit on club property of 8 mph. Even today drivers -- and Alice Cooper's tour bus -- don't dare to go much faster on the paved road that replaced the donkey trail. The road drops a half-mile over a pair of speed bumps before the first of two hairpin turns. In winter, the road closes to all but tobogganers who stand on the shoulder past the second hairpin to slide onto the snowy course. The list of early club members includes surnames from Hazleton's coal-mining past -- Pardee and Markle -- and of families, such as Sharpless and Dryfoos, still in business today in the city. On April 21, 1924, the members transferred the property to the Valley Country Club through a deed. The next year they bought an adjoining farm to enlarge the course from its original nine holes and built a clubhouse of stucco and wood closer to the first tee, effectively putting the donkeys out to pasture. None of the members today researching the club's history can determine who designed the course. There is no difficulty, though, identifying who refined it. A.W. Tillinghast in 1927 expanded the course to 18 holes by reordering the original nine holes and plotting nine new holes on the recently purchased farmland. As a golfer, Tillinghast captained the first American team to compete in a match on foreign soil and played the historic courses of Scotland and England. As a journalist, he was golf editor of newspapers in Philadelphia and Golf Illustrated magazine. As a photographer, he won prizes. But he gained the most renown from designing golf courses. "Tillinghast was one of the great architects, probably one of the three greatest," Clark Luis, the pro at Valley Country Club, said. Tillinghast's designs include Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y., the site of several major tournaments, most recently the 2006 U.S. Open, and Baltusrol in Springfield, N.J., where Jack Nicklaus bested Arnold Palmer on the final round to win the 1967 U.S. Open. Many of Tillinghast's courses are in Pennsylvania. He built Irem Temple in Dallas in 1922 and redesigned the Wyoming Valley Country Club in 1925. At Shawnee-on-Delaware in 1909, he started work on his first commission -- the design of Shawnee Country Club, which opened in 1911 and hosted the PGA Championship in 1938. He designed Williamsport Country Club in intervals, laying out the first nine holes early in his career and returning in 1923 to add the back nine. Hazleton is between Williamsport and Shawnee-on-Delaware, and Tillinghast passed through before he reworked the Valley Country Club's course. According to his biographer, Phil Young, Tillinghast used the pen name Hazard to write this in the December 1913 edition of American Golfer magazine: There exists a course of nine holes at Hazleton, Pennsylvania, which is remarkable. The club house is situated on the mountain-side and the first teeing-ground is considerably below it. When players drive off, they play over tree-tops into an orchard in the valley far below. After finishing the round in the valley, they are faced with the steep ascent to the first teeing-ground, but they do not walk -- not much. Small burros wait close by the ninth green and the players take to the saddle for the climb, while the caddies wait below until the balls again drop down into the orchard, apparently from the heavens. Young, who is also a historian for the Tillinghast Society, found another article that suggests Tillinghast might have redesigned the first nine holes of the Valley Country Club in 1918, a possibility of which club members weren't aware. They have no records of Tillinghast working on their course until 1927 when he added nine holes. Tillinghast didn't design holes so much as adapt them to terrain, deciding where to place the tees and greens and how to connect them, Young said. He plotted the approach to the green first, figured where golfers should land on the fairway to hit their approach shots and then built hazards around the spot. "He believed the courses needed to be difficult so those who played would learn to be better players," Young said. "Tilly created golf holes ... (so) that those who didn't have playing ability wouldn't be severely punished. What separates his courses, the better player you are, the tougher the hole is, whereas with most architects the greater the hole, the tougher the challenge for the everyday player." Jim DaGrosa was better than an everyday player after joining the Valley Country Club in 1971. "I won everything they had there except the club championship," said DaGrosa, who counts a senior championship among his titles. "I kind of gave it up a year ago. I'm pushing 80." When DaGrosa was just 8 or 9, however, he witnessed an example of how to hit the fairway at the club, which was near a house where he grew up. It was 1938 or 1939 when DaGrosa saw a biplane break through fog atop the Conyngham Mountain. "It was clear in the valley. I heard this plane circling," DaGrosa said. "... I go running across the golf course. As I get off the fairway, the plane came down and landed." A foursome that included brothers Palmer and Frank Correale and Frank Swabb was in the middle of play. Their caddy jumped in the cockpit and offered to navigate to the St. Johns airfield for the pilot, whom DaGrosa thinks was Clarence Chamberlin, a distance record holder who flew from New York to Germany two weeks after Charles Lindbergh made his more famous flight from New York to Paris in 1927. After the plane took off with the caddy aboard, the foursome resumed play. Playing at Valley Country Club grounds golfers in Tillinghast's philosophy, according to Luis, the club's pro since 1981. "On our course, if you miss the green right, left or long it's very hard to make par," he said. Even when golfers hit one of Tillinghast's greens, they have to work to avoid a three-putt. "He designed probably the most severe, contoured greens of any of the great designers. Of all the golf courses I've every played in my life, I think our course is the best example of that," Luis said. Members of the Valley Country Club didn't always stay true to Tillinghast's vision. Tillinghast's first nine holes served as the back nine for part of the club's history. The par-3, 18th hole where Woodring hit his pressure-packed tee shot to finish his record-setting round in 1964 is once again the ninth hole, as Tillinghast intended. Hurricane-speed winds called microbursts also helped restore Tillinghast's plan by toppling about 150 trees at the course and the club's grounds in 1998. "The most wonderful thing that ever happened to us, in my estimation. It took out trees that shouldn't have been there," Luis said. The storm stripped the course back to Tillinghast's design and supplemented the goal of the club's master plan to retain Tillinghast's thoughts about shot values and obstacles while tailoring the course to current equipment. Young contrasts today's golf balls that fly longer and straighter with the equipment available when Tillinghast designed courses. Golf clubs were unbalanced. Golf balls weren't manufactured to uniform standards. "In Tilly's day, balls didn't fly as high, didn't have as much topspin. There was little backspin you could put on a ball so the way the ground was shaped entering the front portion of the green was important," Young said. On June 28, club members will experience what he described when they enter a vintage tournament. They will wear knickers, knee socks and caps, but they won't just look the part of golfers from a century ago. They will play the original nine holes using hickory shaft clubs and golf balls made to 1909 specifications. A few years after Tillinghast departed from the Valley Country Club, so did a flock of members who lost money during the Depression. With the club destitute, Stuart Engle, a charter member from a family that produced a line of inventors, jewelers and optometrists in Hazleton, offered a $50,000 loan that kept the club afloat through the Depression. Over the years, the club needed other benefactors when memberships dipped and bills came due, as a long-time manager wrote in his memoirs of the club. John "Chic" Sacco, a restaurateur and raconteur, was appreciated as much for his sense of humor as for the managerial skills he showed while guiding the club. Blackballed on his first try for membership, Sacco joined in 1942, won the club golf championship once and liked to tell about his temporary appointment as manager. After a manager was fired, Sacco agreed to fill in, but just until golf season ended. He kept the job about 30 years longer. In his memoirs, he wrote about working without a paycheck and reaching into his own wallet to pay for deliveries when suppliers stopped offering credit to the club. After the Depression, the club faced foreclosure when Engle called in his loan. A holding company that included some members re-grouped as the Sugarloaf Country Club, issued a $75,000 bond and bought the club at a public auction. They leased the club back to the Valley Country Club for $3,000 a month. In 1956, a pair of men golfing when the airplane landed two decades earlier, Fred Correale, who had become the club's president, and Frank Swabb, donated $25,000. Their gift purchased a tractor and helped remodel the club. A membership drive in the late 1950s helped nudge the club toward solvency, too. Plus, the Sugarloaf Country Club holding company (unrelated to the Sugarloaf Golf Club, an 18-hole course built eight miles west of the Valley Country Club in 1966) forgave $30,000 in back rent. A Japanese industrialist who bought a $500 bond as part of his obligation as a member of the club, which he joined while running a factory in Hazleton, sought a refund when the factory closed. Told that there was a three-year wait, he griped to the U.S. State Department and got back the money immediately, Sacco wrote. On Thanksgiving Day in 1959, the Valley Country Club still owed $30,000 to the holding company for the original bond. To enjoy the holiday, Sacco, Louis Schiavo and Victor Parente played a round of golf and were the last to leave the course. "We finished playing, take our shower and head home. All of a sudden the place was on fire. To see the place burn the way it did -- fire coming out of the windows," Parente said this spring. Fire leveled the 34-year-old clubhouse after 100 firefighters from Conyngham and Sugarloaf and Butler townships drained the swimming pool and a portable tank while trying to contain the flames. One firefighter carrying a hose that was turned on as he ascended a 12-foot ladder was blown off his perch. His chief caught him. An account in the next day's Standard Sentinel said unsolved fires had struck the Jeanesville School and the Weatherly Woodwork in the previous 15 days. Swabb, the club president then, said the clubhouse was a total loss, which he estimated at $150,000 to $200,000, and most of the members' belongings in the 135 lockers also were ruined, too. He said the fire might have started in the basement near an automatic coal furnace, according to the article. Parente said this spring that he never heard what definitely caused the fire. "I don't think they ever found out," but as a member of the last foursome to play that day he took some razzing. "They would kid us for starting the fire," Parente said. In his memoirs, Sacco wrote that the extra insurance he took out when becoming the manager years before the fire spared the club from a $40,000 loss. The insurance settlement allowed the club to repay a $30,000 bond to the Sugarloaf Country Club holding company, according to a brief history prepared for the club's 75th anniversary in 1981. Thirty years after the fire, a question about the cause of the fire arose in Hollywood where Erik and Lyle Menendez were accused of murdering their parents in 1989. While preparing a defense that they killed in retaliation for years of abuse from their father, Jose, the brothers made several accusations against him, including one that a reporter from the Los Angeles Times asked the Standard-Speaker's staff to check. The brothers claimed that Jose Menendez -- who once headed RCA Records and increased revenues at International Video Entertainment, a money-losing video company, to $400 million when he died -- burned down the Valley Country Club while a teenager. The claim now appears false, although some facts made it believable. Jose Menendez worked at the Valley Country Club after emigrating from Cuba. And he set a fire, but at a different country club -- in Havana, Cuba -- in 1954 when he was just a boy. He burned an ornate wooden dance floor used to cover a 50-meter swimming pool in Havana, and his parents paid $10,000 in damages, Ron Soble and John Johnson write in "Blood Brothers: The Inside Story of the Menendez Murders." The 1994 book said Jose didn't leave Cuba and arrive in Hazleton until Oct. 7, 1960, nearly a year after the fire at the Valley Country Club. When the Menendez brothers raised the claim, Sacco, in an unpublished interview with a reporter, said he thought an electrical problem triggered the fire. Sacco died in 2002. In 1960, following the fire, the members operated a country club without a clubhouse. They parked a portable building on the grounds to provide a temporary snack bar and shelter, hired an architect to design a new clubhouse and catered parties in the parking lot. Improvisation made for good parties then and later, such as on New Year's Eve 1972 when police and firefighters showed up uninvited. They received a bomb threat and ask the guests to leave. After police searched the premises, guests returned. Sacco turned back the clock an hour and said, "Welcome to New Year's Eve, Central Standard Time." "Everyone went to the bar and ate a cold dinner, but it still turned out to be one of the greatest New Year's Eve parties we ever had," he wrote. Luis, the club's long-time pro, shines not only on the links but in the banquet room. A sought-after performer who sings the national anthem to start NASCAR races at Pocono Raceway and hockey games of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, he entertains at the club, too. "I have a show that I do about two hours where I sing an eclectic mix, Broadway, popular songs, Sinatra, Nat Cole, opera. I tell jokes, and usually do that once a year at the club," Luis said. Ralph Hommas Jr., the club president in 1981 and 1982, remembers attending dinner dances every two weeks. "We used to run big parties back then," Hommas said. "One of them, a luau at the swimming pool, got so big the club couldn't handle the catering. We got a local caterer." The band played on a platform built over the kiddie pool, which unsettled the band leader. "He was scared to go to the baby pool with all the equipment. He thought he was going to get electrocuted," Hommas said. Swimming in the original pool wasn't for the fainthearted, either. "It wasn't a great big pool. You really had to want to go swimming to use the pool because it was spring-fed," Chip Woodring recalled. The current pool, larger and more temperate, helps draw in members, and Chic Sacco offered free clinics for children at the golf course, tennis courts and pool. "The pool was very important. I had a young family. For my three boys and my wife to be able to go to the pool while I was playing golf was a pretty big deal. A lot of people join even today because of the swimming pool," Pachence, the television host and a former club president, said. Pachence joined the club in 1964, but found it hard to line up golfing buddies because older members had established their foursomes. He left the club but rejoined in 1968 with other members his age who have remained friends. "For us that was our social life. At least in the early days, it was pretty much centered around the club," Pachence said. Friends from the club socialized together outside the club then and now. Earlier this spring, when interviewed while on vacation, Pachence was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he met up with Hugh Shamany, the club's president in 1991 and 1992. "We just got done playing golf," Shamany said when Pachence handed him the telephone. Shamany said he joined the club after meeting members through work. "They were all there, all my friends," he said. Likewise, Hommas, a telephone company executive, joined the club when he moved to Conyngham after getting acquainted with members through his job. CAN DO, the local economic development group, listed the Valley Country Club among the selling points of the Hazleton area when companies looked for a place to open. Business leaders gravitated to the club through CAN DO. "If you want to sum it all up, back then it was such an easy place to get involved. ... All my friends are originally from the club," Hommas said. Hommas didn't even play golf when he joined. He and his wife were tennis players, and their family joined as tennis members, one of several categories of membership that the club traditionally offered. "That meant we could use the pool and also the courts and play golf, maybe, three to four times a year," Hommas said. Originally, the club had two tennis courts with clay surfaces. The 1909 rules forbade members with heels on their shoes from playing. Four hard courts have replaced the clay courts, which have been used for club tournaments, high school matches and clinics for young players. Hommas was the first tennis member to become president of the club, but he had the backing of golfers. "Things were going well back then. We had no assessments. We went years without raising the dues, had money in the bank," Hommas said. He even took up golf so he could tee off in the President's Tournament, and still plays. Members learning the game at the Valley Country Club have taken instruction from a list of club professionals, who practiced what they taught. Hommas recalled a story of Buster Reed, who bet that from starting from inside the pro shop he could make par on a par-five hole. "In the pro shop, he putted out the door, and he did it. People still talk about it," Hommas said. Bob Ross, the pro from 1959 to 1961, still holds the Valley Country Club course record for a professional. He shot 62, one stroke better than Chip Woodring's record for members. "I just went out and played golf, putted everything out so it was nice. A Tillinghast green is never easy to putt, so I had to make some pretty nice putts," said Ross, who became pro at two other Tillinghast courses, The Philadelphia Cricket Club and Baltusrol, where he served 21 years and helped direct the U.S. Open in 1980 and 1993 and the U.S. Women's Open in 1985. Now 77, Ross can shoot his age at Hawk Pointe in Washington, N.J., where he is director of golf. While at the Valley Country Club, Ross began his day inside the pro shop. If he had a student employee to help him, he was free to give lessons when members walked in or called to make appointments. Days stretched into evenings because members asked for lessons after 5 p.m. when they finished work. "It was an interesting and busy time," Ross said. He remembers playing golf at the Valley Country Club with two PGA Tour winners, Art Wall Jr. of Honesdale, the 1959 Masters champ, and Berwick's Mike Souchak, whose 27 under par at the Texas Open in 1955 remained a tour record for 26 years. Ross considers the late Virginia Dyson, who holds the women's course record of 71 at the Valley Country Club, among his best students. Dyson, now deceased, won a state amateur championship and drove to Philadelphia weekly for league play. Dyson and Sonia Dessen shot well consistently at Valley Country Club. "I was amazed when I think about it. At Baltusrol we never had the quality of (women) players we did at the Valley Country Club. At Valley we had three to four women who shot in the low 80s and high 70s. It was pretty unusual then," Ross said. Single women had been eligible for membership since the club started in 1909, and wives and children of senior members were granted club privileges by the original rules. Martha Woodring was the wife of the one club champion, Charles Woodring, and mother of another, Chip Woodring. Yet she didn't pick up a golf club herself until she was about 50 years old. "I had some lady friends that played as well as I did so we would go out early so we wouldn't be in anybody's way. I do miss playing," said Woodring, 95. "The country club was a beautiful club and everybody liked to play ... the course with all the mountains around." Looking around the course while his uncles, including future club president Fred Correale, played golf led Victor Parente to take up the game. "My uncle said 'What do you think? Would you like to try golf?' I'm saying to myself, 'I could kill it. It looked so easy,'" Parente recalled. After Parente played in a tournament for professionals and amateurs, Chic Sacco gave him a small figurine at the awards ceremony. "He said that Vic Parente had the highest score. I was so green, I figured that's pretty good," Parente said. Parente had an excuse for not shooting lower scores his first year. He was left-handed, but his clubs weren't, in 1944. "You couldn't just pick up a set for a left-hander," said Parente, who added that his uncles got him clubs, cut them down for his height and then presented them. "I said, 'Those clubs are for a right-hander,'" he said, and his uncles told him to use them anyway. "I played 53 years left-handed and one year right-handed. I enjoyed it. I loved it," said Parente, who stayed with the game until 1997, when health reasons led him to pack away his clubs. Parente was already a veteran player when Ross surprised him with a personalized golf bag. Although the bag "wasn't much bigger than a wastebasket" to match Parente's stature, Ross said he called Parente "Big Klu" after power-hitting first baseman Ted Kluszewski of the Cincinnati Reds, so the nickname went on the bag. "You should have seen his face," Ross recalled. Parente reciprocated years later when Ross returned to the Valley Country Club to play in a tournament. Parente gave Ross some poems from his book, "Big Little Golfer." Another diminutive golfer, John Cook, made an impression on the club when his father, visiting from out of town, asked if his son could enter a tournament. The 11-year-old shot a 72 from the championship tees and won the tournament while paired with Frank Famalette, the reigning club champ. Chic Sacco spotted Cook on television 10 years later winning the U.S. Amateur, and his career winnings on the PGA and Champions tours now exceed $14 million. Other young golfers learned the game while spending time at an institution no longer found a the club: the caddy shack. They were teenage boys, schoolteachers picking up extra money during summers and more down-and-out men who didn't hold regular jobs. Whatever their situation, they hitchhiked, hopped a bus or even walked to the club down the old trail left by donkeys, which like the caddies themselves, became obsolete when golf carts started whirring along the fairways. Ross said young people don't seem interested in caddying any longer. "They think it's demeaning to carry a bag," he said. At Valley Country Club in the 1950s and '60s, caddies would arrive at 7:30 or so each morning, and draw numbers. No. 1 would accompany the first golfer to start play. No. 16 might wait hours for his job. "They were sitting around all day. They'd play checkers, cards. I think they had a basket up there to shoot some baskets to entertain them. They would get into mischief," Chip Woodring said. When their golfers approached an orchard alongside the course, caddies picked enough apples for everyone in their group. "The owner of the trees never protested," Woodring said. Caddies earned $2.50 for carrying a golf bag around 18 holes. Older boys and men carried two bags at a time to double their pay. Their tip usually was 50 cents in the 1950s and 1960s. "That was serious money," said Frank Victor, who paid his way through college by hefting bags around the course. Victor started caddying as a seventh-grader, walking to the corner of Washington Avenue and Route 93 with other boys from West Hazleton. "You would simply wait on the corner and anybody going to the country club would pick you up," he said. "The members were very nice about providing transportation to get kids down there." On the course, caddies learned when to be silent. They held the flag when their clients reached the greens. They memorized the course, which they were allowed to play for free on Mondays before 10 a.m. "Many times, members relied on the older caddies for advice, for club selection and even to the point of reading greens," Victor said. Thirty or 40 caddies might work on busy days, carrying bags for 18 holes in the morning, taking a break and then caddying for another group in the afternoon before hitching a ride back home. On slower days, Victor might look for golf balls and resell the valuable finds while waiting for his turn. As caddies gained experience and friends among the members, players could request a caddy. Their mentor, the caddy master, had discretion to assign caddies out of order. He would "give the high-rollers the best caddies because they play for money," Woodring said. The club had an off-again, on-again policy about gambling. "No member shall play any game for money on the Club property," the original house rules from 1909 said. When the Depression squeezed finances, however, the club installed slot machines. Slots kept the club solvent for years until authorities clamped down, and Engle had to call for repayment of his loan. Payout, however, might have dragged on longer. Sacco received two unsigned letters each containing $10 and an note saying the money was for the club. He surmised someone had figured how to trick the machines and repaid the funds to salve his conscience. The Valley Country Club has no plans to reinstate slots, even if the state Legislature approves a bill to expand their use beyond casinos. But the members of the club once welcomed a golfer who famously wagered and won a match for a bar of gold bullion. As secret agent James Bond, actor Sean Connery displays the bullion to increase the stakes and the interest of the villain in the 1964 film "Goldfinger." Making "Goldfinger" kindled a lifelong interest in golf for Connery, so when he filmed "The Molly Maguires" in the Hazleton area in 1968, Connery played at the Valley Country Club. "Sean Connery was just down there the one day. I was caddying. He was just out there putting on the green," Victor remembered. "The guy I was with asked (Connery) if he would like to join him for nine holes. I was just carrying one bag. I carried his too," Victor said. Victor told Connery a few things about the course and where to play the ball, and the game ended with an invitation. "He asked 'Can you be here tomorrow?'" Victor said. For the rest of Connery's stay in the area, Victor was his caddy. He didn't say much to the actor but listened as the golfers who played with, including Chic Sacco and Bob Sacco, walked the course. "The conversation was about filming the movie and the area. They would be talking about restaurants he went to," Victor said. At times, Victor matched the man with the character he had watched in the 007 movies. "I would try to visualize him being in those movies. It was a little different take. Is that the same guy?" Victor said. Like 007, Connery tipped well and played well, too. "He was a pretty good golfer. He certainly wasn't a novice," Victor said. At the Valley Country Club, Connery shot below 80 for the first time and left a divot in the clubhouse as a memento. Chic Sacco pointed to the ceiling as he told the story to Luis later. "See that chink? This is where we opened the bottle of champagne to celebrate," said Luis, adding that the ceiling has been remodeled since. Another celebrity and golf enthusiast who played the course is rocker Alice Cooper, who frequents the Valley Country Club when booked for concerts in the region. "He had one of these big buses. They couldn't come down from the Top of the 80s. They came the other way. They couldn't turn around. They had to back out," Judy Landis, the club's membership director, said. As the Valley Country Club enters its second century, the national economy is grim again as in the Depression when A.W. Tillinghast's golf magazine folded and a decline in construction pushed him out of course design. As when Chic Sacco arrived to restore financial stability, the club recently dismissed a manager. Executive Chef Dale Lent agreed to take on the general manager's job, too. At 35, Lent has served as a firearms instructor with the U.S. Marine Corps in Kuwait, Albania and Kosovo and also cooked at The Greenbriar resort in West Virginia, for members of the duPont family and at several country clubs. "I'm overseeing the entire food and beverage service, responsible for everything that happens with the bar, the dining room, the maintenance issues, capital issues such as new plates, glasses, silverware, new equipment," Lent said. Thomas Lagana, the club's current president, said having the chef act as manager saves money without sacrificing member satisfaction. A stockbroker, Lagana examined each expense while seeking to eliminate assessments that members pay to cover projects, such as the $250,000 renovation to the swimming pools in 2006. "We want to make sure it is affordable for our members and the general population of the area," Lagana said. Dues vary with types of memberships for families, juniors and adults. For example, a family with a golf membership pays $266 per month. Monthly dues for family social members are $137.50, and families with tennis memberships pay $181.50 per month. Golf members are required to spend $1,000 a year at the club's restaurants, whereas tennis and social members spend $500 yearly. Bob Ross, the pro from 1959 to 1961, said an economic downturn carries some advantages for country clubs. "Sometimes clubs do better. Members use the club more instead of going to the shore or going to the mountains. Member play will probably go up, but guest play probably will go down," Ross said. Don Pachence, a former president, said membership remains a good deal, offering golf, tennis, swimming and dining -- just as when his family joined in 1968. "But it's discretionary money. When you're talking about belonging to a country club, you're thinking about where you want to spend your dollars," Pachence said. Chris Pittinger, an attorney who learned to swim at the club, where his family has belonged for decades, still thinks of the club as a great facility. "It will survive," Pittinger said. "I think they're doing a great job managing costs and pursuing membership." Area residents have an once-in-a-century chance to join the club now. During the 100th anniversary celebration, the club temporarily reduced the initiation fee to $100. The special offer will last until the centennial gala on May 23 and possibly through June, Lagana said. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]