About me and my writing ...
I remember my high school freshman English teacher,
a nun, who was as good a teacher as she was gentle (no raps on the knuckles from
her ruler). She taught grammar, sentence structure, and style. Despite her
influence, I had no desire to write, but I understood what bad grammar was.
A college English professor matter-of-factly explained that my writing was dreadfully lacking – somewhere in the C- or D+ range. He discouraged me from ever aspiring to write, maybe because he feared readers might become ill by reading my stuff. He was probably right. In those days I felt that I just didn’t “have it” – that skill of crafting a story that may come naturally to some. At least I knew where to put commas, how to spell, and what alliteration was. But I had to agree with him – I wasn’t a good writer.
Years drifted by and I chose dentistry for a career. After serving in the Navy for four years, I set up a private practice in Cincinnati in 1977, married, and began producing children. We stopped at five, thank goodness: life was busy back then. Don’t get me wrong – my wife and I enjoyed raising kids. Really.
I also loved dentistry and realized, being frustrated after treating a few terribly phobic patients, I was inadequately trained in this field. Dental schools ignored teaching ways to treat the phobic population: it represented a high level of stress. Rather than backing off from the challenge, I studied; read books; reviewed the literature, miniscule as it was in those days on this topic; and even took a three-day seminar to become a certified stress management consultant. As my skills improved, fearful patients trickled in, some emerging from decades of having avoided the dentist, and they liked my methods. And I found much satisfaction in restoring their mouths to health and enjoyed seeing their self-image soar. It was a good niche for me. Unlike many of today’s dentists, I did not use intravenous sedation. Instead, I designed a behavioral modification program, which, used with nitrous oxide sedation, worked well.
The next phase was a bit hazy. I’m not sure why I decided to write an article about my methods but something motivated me. Maybe it was the graduate assistant I had in a course on anthropology I took in my undergraduate days at Ohio State. It was a huge class. The head professor would lecture three times a week in a hall that seated hundreds. Two days a week we’d meet with a grad assistant – in small groups. I loved the professor and I loved learning about different world cultures.
In fact I was so infatuated with this course that one day I told my grad assistant how enthralled I was with anthropology, even though I had applied to dental school. I was probably about 20 at the time and she was in her late 20s, a pretty woman, intelligent, and pursuing her Ph.D. in this field. I’ll never forget what she told me and I doubt that she ever realized what an impact it would have on my life. “You see, Robert, I, too, used to be head-over-heels about anthropology and I wanted to learn as much as I could. But, at this stage of my life, it’s time to produce, you know, leave works behind: discover, write, produce.” She was serious.
Her maturity – she seemed mature to me at the time – made me take her words as the truth of all truths. According to her, it was fine to get excited and learn but at some point in our lives we must produce. We must leave behind a legacy for those who follow.
So maybe that, lodged in my subconscious, prompted me to contact an editor of a dental magazine that was published by PennWell, a Tulsa company primarily oriented towards the oil and gas industry. The editor liked my idea about a book on this topic since there weren’t many on treating fearful dental patients and he suggested writing an article in his magazine to test the water. After it was received well by dentists, he told me to write the book and his company would publish it. Being naïve, I wrote it without a contract. It took a year to finish: running a dental practice and raising little ones didn’t leave much free time. Golf was in the picture, too.
When I finished the book a bad thing happened: oil prices slid way, way down. Today, as I write this – November of 2014, the price of oil has fallen from $100 to $75 a barrel. Get ready for this: in 1986 the price per barrel fell from $27 to below $10. Ten dollars in 1986 equates to $22 in today’s dollars. Wow! The petroleum industry, including PennWell, was struggling. OPEC had decreased production to maintain high prices for several years and it finally backfired. It also cost me a publisher: PennWell had to trim back on all fronts. They couldn’t publish my book.
With a hungry audience of dentists and their staffs, I felt that it might sell. So I had the book printed locally and marketed it to my peers. It was a hit, winning an award and becoming a selection in a book-of-the-month club. Managing the Apprehensive Dental Patient sold out – all 2,000 copies – except for the four copies I’m saving for my grandchildren. It was not particularly well written – books by dentists and physicians don’t win Pulitzer Prizes. The information sold it, not the writing, which was still at the C- level. The year was 1987.
Buoyed by that success and wanting to help dentists treat these difficult patients, I wrote How to Overcome Fear of Dentistry, a book that flowed out of me in a month. My artist father did the illustrations and a local distributor directed me to companies in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area – short-run printers that use offset printing and produce beautiful books, many for university presses. I printed 5,000 and flew to the ABA (American Booksellers Association) annual convention in Los Angeles. I have a few copies left – destined for my grandkids. That was 1988.
A few years earlier a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry placed a copy of my journal article on the desk of Professor Tim Smith, a psychologist who taught in the dental school and in the psychology department. When he returned from sabbatical – one spent learning about phobic dental patients – he contacted me. After we met and he learned about my behavioral program, he wanted to conduct a two-year research study on my method, one involving other dental offices – from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia. His project got funded and turned into two years of training dental offices and collecting data. The results warranted our presenting them at an international research conference, held in Dublin, Ireland, in June of 1989. Thus began the golf writing phase of my life.
By 1989 we had five children and had joined a local club where I played golf. It was a good time in my life, but the words of the graduate assistant stuck in my mind – “produce, produce.” I knew writing took time but her advice had hooked me. And, being an avid golfer, I figured I might not get a chance again to play in Scotland. If I waited till I retired, I might not be physically able. Why not combine the trip to Dublin with a golfing trip to Scotland? I thought.
So I did – taking a retired patient, who also liked golf, along with me. We had a great time – playing most of the famous courses and some smaller ones, which showed me what fun there was in playing with members on a wee course, compared to playing on a famous one. Planning the trip took time, especially without the speed of email and websites. I could find only one book on playing these Scottish courses, a little one written by a Scot, Dr. David Hamilton. Why not write a golf guide for Americans going to Scotland? I mused.
Helped by advice from a local distributor (no E-books in those days), I wrote Complete Guide to the Golf Courses of Scotland, and used the Michigan printer again. It sold well but the distributor began to have financial difficulty and couldn’t make payments. So I have some of these books left. That came out in 1992 and listed all Scottish courses in existence at that time. The book described two trips that I took, one in 1989 and one in 1991 – when we played 18 courses in nine days. Since email hadn’t been born yet, the best way to get matches on Scottish courses was by writing letters to the clubs via snail mail. Yes, it was slow. But my friends and I loved those trips.
Despite its sluggish – no pun intended – nature, snail mail worked and got me in touch with Dr. David Hamilton whom I met on that second trip. David inspired the third phase of my writing career. A true-blue Scot from the central Highlands, David was a gifted surgeon who turned down a prestigious appointment in London, preferring to stay in his beloved Scotland and produce books on the history of golf. He admitted he wasn’t a good writer but he aimed at the market of golf book collectors and limited his editions to 400 copies. His forte was making them look old, which he did by using a printing press – circa 1910 – that he housed in his basement. He’d pick a subject, research it, write the book, have it edited, and have the type set in Edinburgh. Then he’d select an antique-looking paper, hand crank each sheet on his press, and hire a bookbinder for the final assembly. He took delight when his books sold for premium prices on the aftermarket. It was a good hobby for him and connected him with influential Scots who eventually nominated him for membership in the famous R&A. He encouraged me to follow his lead.
If David had been blunt – which Scots seldom are – he would have encouraged me to learn the craft of writing well. Instead, I continued to flounder, blandly publishing many articles in dental journals on the treatment of fearful patients – I now was an expert. The writing style didn’t matter; it was all content. And, in my spare time I retreated to my den to do research on an influential early golf figure, Old Tom Morris, who fascinated me.
Finally I published The Golf Courses of Old Tom Morris, a limited edition and the first book written on this great man’s life since 1908, the year he died. It did well and earned me a trip to the national golf course superintendents’ convention in Florida for a book signing. Donald Steel, an English international golf course architect and esteemed golf writer (Donald writes well), wrote the foreword and David Hamilton did the preface. My daughter, then a high school senior, did the calligraphy on the cover, embossed in gold foil on dark green boards. Yes, the book was handsome. Thomson-Shore of Michigan printed it, producing another high quality gem. I wanted to meet this talented team. So I drove a rented van to Dexter, Michigan, for a tour of their facility, loaded the umpteen heavy boxes of books, and drove home. That was 1995. I did not have a distributor and so I have some left. Golf history aficionados treasure this book – despite its pedestrian style. Leather-bound copies are hard to find but occasionally surface on the Internet, with sellers asking $250 and up. Ah, the free market.
I continued my research, intending to write books on the courses of two Scots, James Braid and Willie Park, Jr., but they’re still on the drawing board. I had more energy then and took annual trips to the UK and Eire, playing two and sometimes three courses a day, taking notes and meeting club members. Those were action-packed years of my life.
I couldn’t interest my daughter in golf but I hooked my four sons, who played high school golf and occasionally played with me. I decided to include them in my literature, a term I admit I use loosely in referring to my books. When my oldest son Rob graduated from high school, I took him on one of my whirlwind tours of Scotland, playing 19 courses in 10 days – mostly in the Highlands. We met David Hamilton again. The year was 1999 and the Internet had been discovered – thanks to Al Gore. Rob was a computer genius but I was not. I had played on over 200 courses in the UK and Eire.
The next year I took Jon – after his graduation in June. We played 19 rounds in 10 days (half of them in high winds), met friends at Turnberry, Lundin Links, Cruden Bay, and played a match with David Hamilton and his son at Kilmacolm. I recorded all of them and spent the next year assembling a book on these two trips. To The 14th Tee came out in 2001, printed again by Thomson-Shore. That beautifully produced book was also a limited edition but didn’t attract the following that my book on Old Tom did. My writing had barely improved. It was 2001, a year after the high-tech stock market had crashed. My daughter had married and my two younger sons had begun high school. Our children were growing up. So was I – width-wise anyway: I was fat.
Even though I continued to research the work on Braid and Willie Park, Jr., I shifted my focus to writing travelogues, spurred by a strong desire to play all the links courses. So I enticed a golfing friend to come with me to Wales in 2001, the year of the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, which the British government failed to control, costing $16 billion in losses in agriculture and tourism. Tim and I practically had Wales to ourselves, playing 21 courses in nine days. The result was The Links of Wales, printed on demand by a pay-for-play publisher, XLibris, in 2002. I qualified for my first national championship, the USGA Senior Amateur, played at Timuquana Country Club in Jacksonville. My golf was better than my books.
My next book, published in 2006, Golf on the Links of Ireland, was another travelogue, featuring trips I took with my sons to Ireland: David after his graduation in June, 2004, and Michael, my youngest, in 2005. I had played on 300 courses in the UK and Eire and had qualified for my second USGA Senior Amateur, this one at the Virginian Golf Club. But all that didn’t matter when my wife was diagnosed with a terminal cancer.
Over the years I had played many of England’s links courses and wanted to write about them, giving my English hosts credit for their wonderful hospitality to my friends and me on our trips. The information collected, the book got published. Donald Steel, with whom I had played a match on Rye years earlier, wrote the foreword to Golf on the Links of England. That was in 2007, the year my wife died. With no heart for golf, I had no desire to write about it. Luckily another sport came into my life – marathon running.
There’s no doubt that running marathons saved my life. I had run two of them before my wife’s cancer diagnosis hit in October of 2005 and had lost about 30 pounds. My body was fit and able to withstand that stress: the fateful message of death came after we had been married for over 30 years. I continued running marathons during her final year, which helped to dull the pain of seeing her slowly fade into the sunset.
Shortly after she died in early 2007 I met another marathon runner, who taught me about longevity and nutrition. Mike Fremont changed my life. He set a world marathon record for a 90-year-old in 2012 and inspired me to write LifeNuts, my ninth book, also published by XLibris. My marketing plan was not so much to sell the book but rather to sell the LifeNuts program to cities and villages – in an effort to stem the rising epidemic of obesity and improve the lives of the elderly. I had hoped that, by presenting this free community-based vitality program to marathon runners, which I did at marathon expos, runners would start the program in their hometowns. We dreamers always hope. Anyway, the book fulfilled a quest of mine – to give back to a country that gave me the freedom to build a business and raise a family. That was enough.
My life changed once again when I remarried, which shocked some poor souls – poor because they had no idea how lonely life can be for widowers. For me a new marriage meant starting over. Those days were depressing: going from a bustling house filled with a wife and five children to one that was dreadfully empty. Sure, I had friends to play golf with but my nights were barren – just the house and me. I needed companionship and, thanks to the power of the Internet, I found a compatible partner. My life rebooted.
Not only was Laura my soulmate, she was also a writer and a reader. She belonged to book clubs and read voraciously, keeping abreast of daily news stories – necessary in her job as a communications executive for a community college. Her degree in journalism and her 30-plus years of working in public relations began to influence my reading and writing. I read The New Yorker and books by their staff writers. I read Zinsser and E.B. White. I vowed to learn to write well. And I kept running marathons, which by now had superseded golf as the joy of my competitive spirit.
A few years later my yearning for Scotland emerged from its hiatus. Two of my golfing friends, who had gone with me on previous trips, told me that they, too, were ready. So the three of us left for Scottish shores in May of 2011. It was trip number 23 for me and it was a bucket list thing this time: I had to play the Machrie. I learned about its legend on my first trip in 1989. Mr. Reggie Short, a dentist from Kilmarnock (British dentists are referred to as misters, not doctors, though they extract and fill teeth just like American dentists do), told me about a weekend trip he and his buddies took to Islay. They flew from Glasgow, stayed at the Machrie hotel, and for three days played golf, two rounds a day, in pouring rain and wind. I asked why. “We wore our waterproofs,” was all that Reggie said. It fascinated me and I vowed to play it. We also visited my friends at Turnberry and we played another gem, Blackwaterfoot on Arran – a course that graced the cover of my first golf book. But the Machrie was number one on the list.
I had no immediate plans for another golf book; the golf courses of Braid and Park were still buried in my file cabinets, where they may remain forever. I simply wanted to experience the Machrie and sample the Gaelic culture of the islanders – without any pressing need to play two or three courses a day. My friends and I were older, less flexible, less muscular, and less ambitious than we were two decades ago. And one of them was more interested in single malt whisky than he was in golf. So we chilled.
Our visit to Islay was memorable in several ways: discovering a course that had more blind shots than I had ever seen, savoring the smoky taste of peaty Islay single malt, and making a new dear friend, an Ileach, born and bred on the island. All this happened in less than 24 hours – since the gales had stopped the ferries and cut our trip in half. Brief as it was, the trip set my wheels spinning.
I kept hearing the words of that young graduate assistant: produce, produce. I also knew it was time for me to repay all the kindness and hospitality that had been shown to me by many club members at their courses – now numbering well over 300. And so I wrote my tenth book, The Secrets of Islay, but did not use XLibris this time since they were targeted in a class action suit for allegedly failing to properly report and pay royalties. I wanted half of the book proceeds to fund the Islay high school’s biannual mission trip, which might have been difficult with XLibris. Instead, I chose VirtualBookworm.com, a small press out of Texas.
I tried to improve my writing – it had nowhere to go but up – as I learned from Laura and from writers that I liked, whose books I read, hoping that their style and sentence structure would soak in. A Highlander Scot reviewed the manuscript and so did Laura. I drafted and drafted and drafted and then drafted once more, improving it each time. Hell, I probably could have kept going but I knew it wouldn’t win a Pulitzer Prize and I wanted to finish it before I turned 100.
I asked Laura how she would grade the writing of a lawyer she knows. He produces one or two novels a year. B-minus she said. I asked about mine. She paused and thought carefully, as any smart wife would do, and gave me an A-minus, which, like the lawyer’s grade, was slightly generous. Still, it made me feel good – since she reads a lot – and helped remove some of the scarring from the utter condemnation that I got from that college teacher 45 years ago. The book won’t be everybody’s cup of tea but maybe it will raise a few bucks for the high school and stimulate tourist business for the island. That would be enough. You can help by giving it a five-star review on Amazon. Please. Yes, I am begging.
For three years I researched Islay, its glorious history, and then weaved the tale, managing to incorporate golf, a marathon, and single malt whisky into the lives of seven very different people. You can label it creative non-fiction. The subthemes of obesity – not a popular topic to address – and searching for truth, also unpopular on our Capitol Hill, intertwined to add more confusion. Trying to be diplomatic, I used the British spelling for some words (woollen) and the American spelling for others (honor), in hopes of irritating readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, as long as golfers, single malt connoisseurs, and runners from around the world buy the book, their purchase will help fulfill my dream of giving back for the countless episodes of kindness I’ve experienced from the Scots.
In the meantime my writing will slow down – short pieces mostly – since I’ll be pursuing another bucket list thing. I plan to paint the barns of southern Ohio, not white or gray as my classmate rudely inferred – but pictures of barns, each with an essay on its history, a piece of Americana that’s beginning to fade as these old barns collapse from neglect and age. My father was an artist and, thanks to him and that damn grad student, here I go again.
A college English professor matter-of-factly explained that my writing was dreadfully lacking – somewhere in the C- or D+ range. He discouraged me from ever aspiring to write, maybe because he feared readers might become ill by reading my stuff. He was probably right. In those days I felt that I just didn’t “have it” – that skill of crafting a story that may come naturally to some. At least I knew where to put commas, how to spell, and what alliteration was. But I had to agree with him – I wasn’t a good writer.
Years drifted by and I chose dentistry for a career. After serving in the Navy for four years, I set up a private practice in Cincinnati in 1977, married, and began producing children. We stopped at five, thank goodness: life was busy back then. Don’t get me wrong – my wife and I enjoyed raising kids. Really.
I also loved dentistry and realized, being frustrated after treating a few terribly phobic patients, I was inadequately trained in this field. Dental schools ignored teaching ways to treat the phobic population: it represented a high level of stress. Rather than backing off from the challenge, I studied; read books; reviewed the literature, miniscule as it was in those days on this topic; and even took a three-day seminar to become a certified stress management consultant. As my skills improved, fearful patients trickled in, some emerging from decades of having avoided the dentist, and they liked my methods. And I found much satisfaction in restoring their mouths to health and enjoyed seeing their self-image soar. It was a good niche for me. Unlike many of today’s dentists, I did not use intravenous sedation. Instead, I designed a behavioral modification program, which, used with nitrous oxide sedation, worked well.
The next phase was a bit hazy. I’m not sure why I decided to write an article about my methods but something motivated me. Maybe it was the graduate assistant I had in a course on anthropology I took in my undergraduate days at Ohio State. It was a huge class. The head professor would lecture three times a week in a hall that seated hundreds. Two days a week we’d meet with a grad assistant – in small groups. I loved the professor and I loved learning about different world cultures.
In fact I was so infatuated with this course that one day I told my grad assistant how enthralled I was with anthropology, even though I had applied to dental school. I was probably about 20 at the time and she was in her late 20s, a pretty woman, intelligent, and pursuing her Ph.D. in this field. I’ll never forget what she told me and I doubt that she ever realized what an impact it would have on my life. “You see, Robert, I, too, used to be head-over-heels about anthropology and I wanted to learn as much as I could. But, at this stage of my life, it’s time to produce, you know, leave works behind: discover, write, produce.” She was serious.
Her maturity – she seemed mature to me at the time – made me take her words as the truth of all truths. According to her, it was fine to get excited and learn but at some point in our lives we must produce. We must leave behind a legacy for those who follow.
So maybe that, lodged in my subconscious, prompted me to contact an editor of a dental magazine that was published by PennWell, a Tulsa company primarily oriented towards the oil and gas industry. The editor liked my idea about a book on this topic since there weren’t many on treating fearful dental patients and he suggested writing an article in his magazine to test the water. After it was received well by dentists, he told me to write the book and his company would publish it. Being naïve, I wrote it without a contract. It took a year to finish: running a dental practice and raising little ones didn’t leave much free time. Golf was in the picture, too.
When I finished the book a bad thing happened: oil prices slid way, way down. Today, as I write this – November of 2014, the price of oil has fallen from $100 to $75 a barrel. Get ready for this: in 1986 the price per barrel fell from $27 to below $10. Ten dollars in 1986 equates to $22 in today’s dollars. Wow! The petroleum industry, including PennWell, was struggling. OPEC had decreased production to maintain high prices for several years and it finally backfired. It also cost me a publisher: PennWell had to trim back on all fronts. They couldn’t publish my book.
With a hungry audience of dentists and their staffs, I felt that it might sell. So I had the book printed locally and marketed it to my peers. It was a hit, winning an award and becoming a selection in a book-of-the-month club. Managing the Apprehensive Dental Patient sold out – all 2,000 copies – except for the four copies I’m saving for my grandchildren. It was not particularly well written – books by dentists and physicians don’t win Pulitzer Prizes. The information sold it, not the writing, which was still at the C- level. The year was 1987.
Buoyed by that success and wanting to help dentists treat these difficult patients, I wrote How to Overcome Fear of Dentistry, a book that flowed out of me in a month. My artist father did the illustrations and a local distributor directed me to companies in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area – short-run printers that use offset printing and produce beautiful books, many for university presses. I printed 5,000 and flew to the ABA (American Booksellers Association) annual convention in Los Angeles. I have a few copies left – destined for my grandkids. That was 1988.
A few years earlier a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry placed a copy of my journal article on the desk of Professor Tim Smith, a psychologist who taught in the dental school and in the psychology department. When he returned from sabbatical – one spent learning about phobic dental patients – he contacted me. After we met and he learned about my behavioral program, he wanted to conduct a two-year research study on my method, one involving other dental offices – from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia. His project got funded and turned into two years of training dental offices and collecting data. The results warranted our presenting them at an international research conference, held in Dublin, Ireland, in June of 1989. Thus began the golf writing phase of my life.
By 1989 we had five children and had joined a local club where I played golf. It was a good time in my life, but the words of the graduate assistant stuck in my mind – “produce, produce.” I knew writing took time but her advice had hooked me. And, being an avid golfer, I figured I might not get a chance again to play in Scotland. If I waited till I retired, I might not be physically able. Why not combine the trip to Dublin with a golfing trip to Scotland? I thought.
So I did – taking a retired patient, who also liked golf, along with me. We had a great time – playing most of the famous courses and some smaller ones, which showed me what fun there was in playing with members on a wee course, compared to playing on a famous one. Planning the trip took time, especially without the speed of email and websites. I could find only one book on playing these Scottish courses, a little one written by a Scot, Dr. David Hamilton. Why not write a golf guide for Americans going to Scotland? I mused.
Helped by advice from a local distributor (no E-books in those days), I wrote Complete Guide to the Golf Courses of Scotland, and used the Michigan printer again. It sold well but the distributor began to have financial difficulty and couldn’t make payments. So I have some of these books left. That came out in 1992 and listed all Scottish courses in existence at that time. The book described two trips that I took, one in 1989 and one in 1991 – when we played 18 courses in nine days. Since email hadn’t been born yet, the best way to get matches on Scottish courses was by writing letters to the clubs via snail mail. Yes, it was slow. But my friends and I loved those trips.
Despite its sluggish – no pun intended – nature, snail mail worked and got me in touch with Dr. David Hamilton whom I met on that second trip. David inspired the third phase of my writing career. A true-blue Scot from the central Highlands, David was a gifted surgeon who turned down a prestigious appointment in London, preferring to stay in his beloved Scotland and produce books on the history of golf. He admitted he wasn’t a good writer but he aimed at the market of golf book collectors and limited his editions to 400 copies. His forte was making them look old, which he did by using a printing press – circa 1910 – that he housed in his basement. He’d pick a subject, research it, write the book, have it edited, and have the type set in Edinburgh. Then he’d select an antique-looking paper, hand crank each sheet on his press, and hire a bookbinder for the final assembly. He took delight when his books sold for premium prices on the aftermarket. It was a good hobby for him and connected him with influential Scots who eventually nominated him for membership in the famous R&A. He encouraged me to follow his lead.
If David had been blunt – which Scots seldom are – he would have encouraged me to learn the craft of writing well. Instead, I continued to flounder, blandly publishing many articles in dental journals on the treatment of fearful patients – I now was an expert. The writing style didn’t matter; it was all content. And, in my spare time I retreated to my den to do research on an influential early golf figure, Old Tom Morris, who fascinated me.
Finally I published The Golf Courses of Old Tom Morris, a limited edition and the first book written on this great man’s life since 1908, the year he died. It did well and earned me a trip to the national golf course superintendents’ convention in Florida for a book signing. Donald Steel, an English international golf course architect and esteemed golf writer (Donald writes well), wrote the foreword and David Hamilton did the preface. My daughter, then a high school senior, did the calligraphy on the cover, embossed in gold foil on dark green boards. Yes, the book was handsome. Thomson-Shore of Michigan printed it, producing another high quality gem. I wanted to meet this talented team. So I drove a rented van to Dexter, Michigan, for a tour of their facility, loaded the umpteen heavy boxes of books, and drove home. That was 1995. I did not have a distributor and so I have some left. Golf history aficionados treasure this book – despite its pedestrian style. Leather-bound copies are hard to find but occasionally surface on the Internet, with sellers asking $250 and up. Ah, the free market.
I continued my research, intending to write books on the courses of two Scots, James Braid and Willie Park, Jr., but they’re still on the drawing board. I had more energy then and took annual trips to the UK and Eire, playing two and sometimes three courses a day, taking notes and meeting club members. Those were action-packed years of my life.
I couldn’t interest my daughter in golf but I hooked my four sons, who played high school golf and occasionally played with me. I decided to include them in my literature, a term I admit I use loosely in referring to my books. When my oldest son Rob graduated from high school, I took him on one of my whirlwind tours of Scotland, playing 19 courses in 10 days – mostly in the Highlands. We met David Hamilton again. The year was 1999 and the Internet had been discovered – thanks to Al Gore. Rob was a computer genius but I was not. I had played on over 200 courses in the UK and Eire.
The next year I took Jon – after his graduation in June. We played 19 rounds in 10 days (half of them in high winds), met friends at Turnberry, Lundin Links, Cruden Bay, and played a match with David Hamilton and his son at Kilmacolm. I recorded all of them and spent the next year assembling a book on these two trips. To The 14th Tee came out in 2001, printed again by Thomson-Shore. That beautifully produced book was also a limited edition but didn’t attract the following that my book on Old Tom did. My writing had barely improved. It was 2001, a year after the high-tech stock market had crashed. My daughter had married and my two younger sons had begun high school. Our children were growing up. So was I – width-wise anyway: I was fat.
Even though I continued to research the work on Braid and Willie Park, Jr., I shifted my focus to writing travelogues, spurred by a strong desire to play all the links courses. So I enticed a golfing friend to come with me to Wales in 2001, the year of the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, which the British government failed to control, costing $16 billion in losses in agriculture and tourism. Tim and I practically had Wales to ourselves, playing 21 courses in nine days. The result was The Links of Wales, printed on demand by a pay-for-play publisher, XLibris, in 2002. I qualified for my first national championship, the USGA Senior Amateur, played at Timuquana Country Club in Jacksonville. My golf was better than my books.
My next book, published in 2006, Golf on the Links of Ireland, was another travelogue, featuring trips I took with my sons to Ireland: David after his graduation in June, 2004, and Michael, my youngest, in 2005. I had played on 300 courses in the UK and Eire and had qualified for my second USGA Senior Amateur, this one at the Virginian Golf Club. But all that didn’t matter when my wife was diagnosed with a terminal cancer.
Over the years I had played many of England’s links courses and wanted to write about them, giving my English hosts credit for their wonderful hospitality to my friends and me on our trips. The information collected, the book got published. Donald Steel, with whom I had played a match on Rye years earlier, wrote the foreword to Golf on the Links of England. That was in 2007, the year my wife died. With no heart for golf, I had no desire to write about it. Luckily another sport came into my life – marathon running.
There’s no doubt that running marathons saved my life. I had run two of them before my wife’s cancer diagnosis hit in October of 2005 and had lost about 30 pounds. My body was fit and able to withstand that stress: the fateful message of death came after we had been married for over 30 years. I continued running marathons during her final year, which helped to dull the pain of seeing her slowly fade into the sunset.
Shortly after she died in early 2007 I met another marathon runner, who taught me about longevity and nutrition. Mike Fremont changed my life. He set a world marathon record for a 90-year-old in 2012 and inspired me to write LifeNuts, my ninth book, also published by XLibris. My marketing plan was not so much to sell the book but rather to sell the LifeNuts program to cities and villages – in an effort to stem the rising epidemic of obesity and improve the lives of the elderly. I had hoped that, by presenting this free community-based vitality program to marathon runners, which I did at marathon expos, runners would start the program in their hometowns. We dreamers always hope. Anyway, the book fulfilled a quest of mine – to give back to a country that gave me the freedom to build a business and raise a family. That was enough.
My life changed once again when I remarried, which shocked some poor souls – poor because they had no idea how lonely life can be for widowers. For me a new marriage meant starting over. Those days were depressing: going from a bustling house filled with a wife and five children to one that was dreadfully empty. Sure, I had friends to play golf with but my nights were barren – just the house and me. I needed companionship and, thanks to the power of the Internet, I found a compatible partner. My life rebooted.
Not only was Laura my soulmate, she was also a writer and a reader. She belonged to book clubs and read voraciously, keeping abreast of daily news stories – necessary in her job as a communications executive for a community college. Her degree in journalism and her 30-plus years of working in public relations began to influence my reading and writing. I read The New Yorker and books by their staff writers. I read Zinsser and E.B. White. I vowed to learn to write well. And I kept running marathons, which by now had superseded golf as the joy of my competitive spirit.
A few years later my yearning for Scotland emerged from its hiatus. Two of my golfing friends, who had gone with me on previous trips, told me that they, too, were ready. So the three of us left for Scottish shores in May of 2011. It was trip number 23 for me and it was a bucket list thing this time: I had to play the Machrie. I learned about its legend on my first trip in 1989. Mr. Reggie Short, a dentist from Kilmarnock (British dentists are referred to as misters, not doctors, though they extract and fill teeth just like American dentists do), told me about a weekend trip he and his buddies took to Islay. They flew from Glasgow, stayed at the Machrie hotel, and for three days played golf, two rounds a day, in pouring rain and wind. I asked why. “We wore our waterproofs,” was all that Reggie said. It fascinated me and I vowed to play it. We also visited my friends at Turnberry and we played another gem, Blackwaterfoot on Arran – a course that graced the cover of my first golf book. But the Machrie was number one on the list.
I had no immediate plans for another golf book; the golf courses of Braid and Park were still buried in my file cabinets, where they may remain forever. I simply wanted to experience the Machrie and sample the Gaelic culture of the islanders – without any pressing need to play two or three courses a day. My friends and I were older, less flexible, less muscular, and less ambitious than we were two decades ago. And one of them was more interested in single malt whisky than he was in golf. So we chilled.
Our visit to Islay was memorable in several ways: discovering a course that had more blind shots than I had ever seen, savoring the smoky taste of peaty Islay single malt, and making a new dear friend, an Ileach, born and bred on the island. All this happened in less than 24 hours – since the gales had stopped the ferries and cut our trip in half. Brief as it was, the trip set my wheels spinning.
I kept hearing the words of that young graduate assistant: produce, produce. I also knew it was time for me to repay all the kindness and hospitality that had been shown to me by many club members at their courses – now numbering well over 300. And so I wrote my tenth book, The Secrets of Islay, but did not use XLibris this time since they were targeted in a class action suit for allegedly failing to properly report and pay royalties. I wanted half of the book proceeds to fund the Islay high school’s biannual mission trip, which might have been difficult with XLibris. Instead, I chose VirtualBookworm.com, a small press out of Texas.
I tried to improve my writing – it had nowhere to go but up – as I learned from Laura and from writers that I liked, whose books I read, hoping that their style and sentence structure would soak in. A Highlander Scot reviewed the manuscript and so did Laura. I drafted and drafted and drafted and then drafted once more, improving it each time. Hell, I probably could have kept going but I knew it wouldn’t win a Pulitzer Prize and I wanted to finish it before I turned 100.
I asked Laura how she would grade the writing of a lawyer she knows. He produces one or two novels a year. B-minus she said. I asked about mine. She paused and thought carefully, as any smart wife would do, and gave me an A-minus, which, like the lawyer’s grade, was slightly generous. Still, it made me feel good – since she reads a lot – and helped remove some of the scarring from the utter condemnation that I got from that college teacher 45 years ago. The book won’t be everybody’s cup of tea but maybe it will raise a few bucks for the high school and stimulate tourist business for the island. That would be enough. You can help by giving it a five-star review on Amazon. Please. Yes, I am begging.
For three years I researched Islay, its glorious history, and then weaved the tale, managing to incorporate golf, a marathon, and single malt whisky into the lives of seven very different people. You can label it creative non-fiction. The subthemes of obesity – not a popular topic to address – and searching for truth, also unpopular on our Capitol Hill, intertwined to add more confusion. Trying to be diplomatic, I used the British spelling for some words (woollen) and the American spelling for others (honor), in hopes of irritating readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, as long as golfers, single malt connoisseurs, and runners from around the world buy the book, their purchase will help fulfill my dream of giving back for the countless episodes of kindness I’ve experienced from the Scots.
In the meantime my writing will slow down – short pieces mostly – since I’ll be pursuing another bucket list thing. I plan to paint the barns of southern Ohio, not white or gray as my classmate rudely inferred – but pictures of barns, each with an essay on its history, a piece of Americana that’s beginning to fade as these old barns collapse from neglect and age. My father was an artist and, thanks to him and that damn grad student, here I go again.