Golfing in the Park
[Ben Cowan-Dewar] also cited golf courses in national parks — including Highlands Links in Cape Breton, Green Gables in P.E.I., Fundy National in New Brunswick and Banff Springs in Alberta — as other examples of competing land uses.
“Is there a case where golf exists in parks? There are many in Canada and they are some of the hallmarks of the Canadian tourism Rolodex,” Cowan-Dewar said.—CBC interview, 12 January 2023
Funny thing, I was flipping through the Canadian tourism Rolodex myself just the other day (I keep it on a dolly in the corner of the office) and I noted something interesting about all those courses cited by Cowan-Dewar as precedents for his plan to put a golf course in the West Mabou Beach Provincial Park: all four were designed and built by the Canadian golf course architect Stanley Thompson, three during the Great Depression, none more recently than 1939.
Cowan-Dewar has no contemporary examples to hand because, as the Canadian Encyclopedia explains, where national parks once focused “on providing recreational facilities for leisure activities such as golf, tennis and downhill skiing,” today “the aim is to provide outdoor recreational opportunities consistent with the long-term protection of natural resources, requiring a minimum of facilities.” Hiking, cycling, canoeing, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing are listed as examples of activities “considered compatible with a park setting.”
So, it’s hard to imagine the federal government ever again countenancing the kind of projects Thompson got away with.
Stanley Thompson at work
Although even I have to admit, Thompson was a much more colorful character than the dishwater dull specimens who populate the design and operation side of the industry today. For one thing, he had talent beyond an ability to shoulder his way to the public trough—besides being a skilled golfer, Thompson was a gifted golf course architect and a talented painter. (Golf course architecture was the Thompson family business, but according to the Stanley Thompson Society, it was his sister Betty who performed the Cowan-Dewar/Mike Keiser role; she, according to the website, was its “money brains.”)
Thompson, who designed 200 golf courses, was a “bon vivant” and “raconteur” whose flamboyant lifestyle earned him the nickname the “Toronto Terror.” He won and lost more than one fortune in his lifetime but died—of an aneurysm, while lunching at the Royal York Hotel—$500,000 in debt. So fascinating a character is Thompson, people in modern-day golf publications continue to interview him, although he’s been dead since 1953. (It’s very weird, see here and here.)
Thompson pitched the construction of golf courses in national parks to the federal government as Depression-era make-work projects. Here in Cape Breton, he not only tapped into the pool of unemployed men to build the Highlands Links course (after promising the feds to use as little heavy equipment as possible to keep them busy), he bought land from struggling farmers to obtain the needed soil.
And that was nothing compared to what he’d done in Banff Springs, where he’d brought soil in by rail car from Saskatchewan and Alberta, helping to push construction costs on that course past $1 million; big money in 1928 when the course opened. (Lucky for him, the Canadian Pacific Railway was footing the bill.)
Cowan-Dewar citing these Depression-era courses as “precedents” for what he wants to do to the West Mabou Beach Provincial Park is so dishonest I can smell his trousers burning from here. He’d as well be proposing the government pay unemployed locals to build his course for him.
Scratch that, I don’t want to give him any ideas.
‘The Madness of 1930’
Speaking of golf, while searching for information about golf course construction during the Great Depression, I stumbled across the fact, unknown to me, that mini golf was one of the great fads of the era.
As this article from the Jacksonville Historical Society explains:
During the 1930s, Americans could choose from thirty thousand courses, with over 150 rooftop establishments in New York City alone.
Miniature golf proved so popular that observers called it “The Madness of 1930.” The game ranks as one of the great crazes of the Great Depression. You could even hit the little links in specially designed lines of mini-golf clothing.
Moviemakers wooed the public with their new talking pictures, but even the studios feared competition from “Rinkiedink” golf. They forbade their stars from playing, yet Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and numerous other luminaries putted in public anyway. Miniature golf attracted everyone from children & Civil War veterans to professors & Prohibition bootleggers. It drew players from both sexes and all ages.
The 99% Invisible blog offers the additional information that mini golf was also known as “pee wee” golf, then quotes from the same Jacksonville Historical Society Article I found to describe the courses:
The goofy game offered a plethora of crazy courses. The links tried to outdo each other with their outrageousness. Players navigated through a maze of traps & contraptions and putted past pools, geysers, castles, sunken gardens, petrified forests, Taj Mahals, White Houses, Great Walls of China, fairytale characters, Wild West icons, and Rube Goldberg-like devices. One course even boasted a trained monkey which grabbed the ball from unsuspecting players!
In a 2016 Medium article, Eric Rogers attributes mini-golf’s growth in popularity in part to the invention of artificial turf but still marvels at how it managed to thrive during times of economic devastation:
Urban courses would pop up…beside brightly illuminated billboards and other sources of ambient urban light, where players could play long into the night, making the most of the light pollution spilling down from their various sources. Vacant lots and halted construction sites were a favorite location for the adventurous peewee golfer, who could tap his or her ball into half-completed drainage pipes or along slantedsteel structural elements as part of the game.
Rogers describes upscale restaurants converting half their floor space into mini-golf courses (and provides photographic evidence—see below—of the same).
If only Cowan-Dewar were a pee-wee golf baron! We could let him set up shop on the roof of the new Marconi Campus and maybe he’d leave our provincial parks alone.
My Bloody Valentine
No plans for Valentine’s Day this year? Why not spend it in the Canadian mining town of Valentine Bluffs with a crazed (and murderous) miner?
The invitation comes from Kenny Caperton, a man so enamored of horror films he lives in “a life-size replica of Michael Myers’ house from John Carpenter’s original Halloween.” Caperton has created an ongoing film series called On Set Cinema which “takes fandom a step further with rare movie screenings of cult favorites and horror classics at their actual filming locations.”
On Valentine’s Day, he’ll be in Sydney Mines, which played the role of Valentine Bluffs in the 1981 cult horror classic “My Bloody Valentine.” The film tells the story of a group of young people who decide to throw a Valentine’s Day party, “only to incur the vengeful wrath of a maniac in mining gear who begins a killing spree.”
Caperton is bringing along actor Peter Cowper, who played Harry Warden (“The Miner”) but who has not returned to Sydney Mines since filming the movie in 1980. On Set Cinema will be hosting two events:
…one event on Saturday, February 11th and one event on Tuesday, February 14th. Both events will be held at the Royal Canadian Legion building in the heart of Valentine Bluffs! The Legion is located exactly where the Valentines Dance banner was hung across the street in the movie and where all the downtown scenes with Valentines decorations were filmed.
Saturday (February 11th) is Valentines Dance night—there will be music, a special Bloody Valentines drink menu at the bar, snacks, an autograph signing, movie introduction and Q&A with Peter Cowper and a screening of “My Bloody Valentine.”
Tuesday (February 14th) is dinner and a movie night—there will be music, a special Bloody Valentines drink menu at the bar, an option for dinner (including a heart shaped box filled with assorted chocolates signed by Peter Cowper for dessert) and a screening of “My Bloody Valentine”.
You can find out more (and purchase tickets) by visiting the Myers House NC website.
I could have waited a week with this item, but publishing it on Friday the 13th seemed so appropriate, how could I resist?
Damn statistics
A reader contacted me this week to let me know that my dismissal of Stantec’s survey of CBRM voters’ opinions on council size as “statistically invalid” was incorrect. They write:
I have a background in market research and wanted to point out that a sample size of 1,245, based on a population of 81,000 voters, would provide a statistically reliable sample that could be expected to garner the exact same result within plus or minus 2.76% in 19 of 20 repeated studies.
I always get into trouble when I play with numbers, and I appreciate this correction.
Interestingly, though, my reader does not conclude that this particular survey was necessarily of value. They note that the foregoing assumes the “sample” is “random and representative of the population under study,” and while they were not privy to the details of Stantec’s study methodology, they suspect it was:
…a “convenience sample” where a link was posted on social media and people could self select to participate. If that were the case, you can’t scientifically make a representative projection from the data to the population and it’s about as useful as the number of opinions they had from the public meetings.
So I was not totally wrong in questioning it.
And I am going to take that and run like I’m being chased by a murderous coal miner. Happy weekend, all!
