Sand greens A dying breed still can be found in Kansas

BALDWIN CITY, Kan. -- The grass is damp here on a February morning. A group of six stands around the par-5, No. 3, the first hole visible along the gravel entrance just past the corner of Main and High streets.

Marvin Jardon, 72, one of only two charter members still active at Baldwin Golf Course, raises his right arm and points to the south.

"That's our clubhouse," he says. "It's an old horse barn. It's got restrooms."

Ted Brecheisen, Jardon's brother-in-law and known simply as Junior, injects:

"Not too many people can say that their clubhouse used to be an old horse barn," he says. "You don't believe me? We've still got hay bails up in the attic."

Baldwin Golf Course, a semiprivate course operated by the Baldwin Golf Association, is not your modern-day creation. It's nine holes and 2,229 yards. Par is 35. It originated in 1951 in this small Douglas County town (pop. 3,600), situated about 48 miles southwest of Kansas City.

And it's one of only a handful of its kind left in Kansas.

Finishing his putt, Jardon walks off the circular plot of sand. This is no bunker. That would be confusing. Baldwin Golf Course is a sand-greens golf course. No grass greens. Just sand mixed with oil.

There are only 15 known sand-greens courses left in the state, according to the Kansas Golf Association. At least eight more existed in recent years, a KGA official believes. Whether they continue to operate is unclear.

"This is kind of a dying thing," says Bruce Neuenswander, 46 and Baldwin Golf Course club president, "but we have a lot of fun."

Jardon, Neuenswander and Junior -- three of about 110 members at Baldwin GC -- each chip onto the No. 3 sand green. They approach it.

Hanging from a metal pole are two items: a drag and a rake. Jardon grabs the drag, two sections of iron pipe welded into a T shape. He likes to drag.

Jardon pulls it through the sand, smoothing a yard-wide passageway from beyond the farthest ball on the green to about a foot past the cup, which always is situated in the center of a sand green.

"That's our path," he says.

Everyone will putt along this lane. The other golfers gauge their distance from the hole and pick up their balls, which, upon their turn, they will move to the proper spot on the path.

After finishing, Junior reaches for the iron rake and smooths away the path and the tracks of footprints.

"You've got to rake it in a circle like this," Junior says, starting at the cup and winding around it until the entire green has been covered.

Jardon has been doing it from the beginning. Just out of high school, he and a friend joined roughly 50 others interested in starting a course in Baldwin City. The land would be leased from the Hobson family, who previously used it to farm.

Outside the clubhouse is a list of members. Only $100 per year for unlimited golf. Wife? $50. Kids? $25. Nonmembers? Drop five bucks in an envelope and deposit it in the mail slot. It's all on the honor system.

"Of course, there are people that turn their nose up at it. They're not wanting to have a good time, I guess," Junior says. "Some people say, 'I ain't playin' on them sand greens for nothing.' Well, go play somewhere else and spend $30. We all go other places and play, too, but we have a good time here."

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Sand-greens golf courses were said to have originated in the eastern United States during the late 1800s, before many could afford to grow real turf grass.

They spread to small Midwestern towns during the Dust Bowl years and lasted through the early 1960s, when, according to Golf World's Ron Whitten, federal Farmers Home Administration loans provided funding to sink wells and install pipe.

Saskatchewan still boasts about 60 sand-greens courses -- the most in Canada, if not North America -- but even its numbers are dwindling.

They're almost nonexistent in Missouri.

Ken Lanning, 81, remembers when sand greens covered the Show-Me State. Only St. Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson City and Joplin had luxurious grass greens.

"I was state sand-greens champ for years, when I had hair," says Lanning, now retired and living near the 17th green at Oak Meadow Country Club in Rolla, Mo. "That's all we had."

Lanning, inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 1996, first noticed a decline around 1949. Now it's difficult to find a sand-greens course in the state. Bill Wells, 16-year executive director of the Missouri Golf Association, has no recollection of any still operating. City Web sites indicate there is one in Harrisonville and one in Fayette -- a 43-acre course started in 1929.

"There couldn't be more than three or four in the state, or I'd know about it," Lanning says. "It was a dying breed. It was the way of the past. It was a poor man's game."

Many Kansas courses have made the conversion, too, like the one in Overbrook, just 20 miles west of Baldwin City on U.S. 56. But others, like Baldwin Golf Course, are going strong.

Cottonwood Falls Country Club, in the Flint Hills of Chase County, Kan., had more than 120 members last year. Nineteen high schools, mostly in the north-central portion of the state, still compete in the annual state sand-greens tournament. This year's event is May 23 at Tipton Oaks Golf Club in Tipton, about 80 miles northwest of Salina.

Upkeep of sand-greens courses is rather minimal, except for mowing the fairways and redoing the greens every two or three years.

Jardon buys about a ton of sand for each green at Baldwin Golf Course. It needs to be fine, finished masonry sand, with no big pebbles. He gets it from a rock quarry in Ottawa, Kan. Then he buys five 30-gallon barrels of oil -- it has to be new oil, he stresses -- from his neighbor, Jerry Seele, at the local co-op. A barrel will do two greens. It's $800 for the sand, $800 for the oil.

"Sixteen-hundred bucks," Jardon says. "That takes 16 members right there."

One weekend and about eight volunteers get the job done. Dump trucks unload the sand at each green, then workers shovel it on. The next day, buckets of oil are applied and raked in.

Life is simple here. Jardon, a retired postmaster of 28 years, does not know the speed of his sand greens. Stimpmeter tests? Never heard of them, but "if you get that oil and sand mixed just right, it's pretty fast."