In The Evangelist of Golf; The Story of Charles Blair Macdonald, a book which Mac-Raynor enthusiasts ascribe almost biblical status, author and historian George Bahto, widely revered for his expertise on Macdonald and Raynor, gained permission from the Olympic Club to publish the only interview of Raynor on record.
“Raynor was commissioned to design a course in 1918 for the Olympic Club in San Francisco,” Bahto wrote. To document the commission Raynor had agreed to sit for a photo to be used on the cover of The Olympian, the club’s monthly magazine.
“As Raynor’s correspondences with clients were notoriously short and to the point, Olympian writer Theodore Bonnet thought this would be a perfect time to write about Raynor, who normally shunned interviews.” The interview was conducted after the photo shoot, a day after he viewed the property for his new project, and as seemingly was always the case, Raynor had an intercontinental train to catch.
The World’s Most Distinguished Golf-Course Designer Talks of Lakeside
By Theodore F. Bonnet
“He’s a good sitter.” This was the verdict of the
photographer who had made the picture for the cover of this month’s magazine.
Nobody had asked him for his judgment. Nobody cared what he thought of Mr. Seth J. Raynor’s quality as a poser in front of the camera. He was only a volunteer, this photographer, a man of more than three score years, whoi doubtless judges all men in terms of his profession.
He was not interested in Seth Raynor as a designer and builder of golf courses, but he appreciated the man’s patience and the ease with which he did precisely as requested. In truth he knew nothing of Mr. Raynor’s profession.
It never occurred to the photographer that Mr. Raynor has other marked characteristics as, for instance, reticence. Here is a man whom you might say if ever you knew Seth Raynor, that he could play golf all day with John D. Rockefeller without either of them provoking a foozle. He’s a good deal like John D. in temperament.
So while the photographer appreciated one salient quality of the man’s personality I lamented another; for fancy interviewing a man so reserved, that like a person with a passion for shut-in life, he seemed deliberately concealing the best part of himself lest I might get something out of him.
In truth I was eager to get something out of him, something about the Lakeside golf course which Mr. Raynor came to San Francisco to reconstruct. I was in a hurry too, for Mr. Raynor was on his way to a transcontinental train. This was to be a hurried interview, but I’d like to see the man able to hurry this designer and builder. One needs a corkscrew to penetrate Mr. Raynor’s shell.
“I suppose” said I by the way of inducing him to loosen up on a subject in which he was interested, “I suppose you play a lot of golf.” “No, not a good deal,” he said in a tone of indifference, and then he straightened up in his chair as though about to defy me to extract the slightest bit of information.
I paused, bewildered. But presently I suggested that doubtless he had had a world of experience at golf before becoming an expert designer and builder of links. As this observation involved no inquiry, Mr. Raynor by his manner gave me the impression he was not going to make a reply. In desperation I asked him bluntly how he came to take up the business.
“Well, you see,”he said,”I’m a civil engineer and Mr. C.B. Macdonald hired me to lay out a course at Southampton.” By dint of prodding I learned that sixty men joined a club and contributed a thousand dollars apiece to build a golf course.
After visiting (Macdonald) all over England and Scotland for suggestions and for opinions as to what were the best eighteen holes individually considered and getting quite a collection of models and maps and profiles, they selected a course (property) for the National Golf Club, which Mr. Raynor was hired to duplicate.
“Since then I have built about sixty courses,” he said. And then he volunteered the information that in recent years people’s ideals in golf have been revolutionized. Presently Mr. Raynor found himself discussing Lakeside, and he was quite eloquent for a little while.
“The beauty of Lakeside,” he said, “is that nature has done so much for it. Conditions lend themselves so, to the kind of improvements that may be made that the Olympic Club can get a great deal for very little.” “How does it compare ,” I asked, “to other courses you know of?” “In some respects,” he said, “it is like the Lido Club links chiefly in the matter of soil, and that course is considered an ideal golf course. In my opinion, Lakeside can be made the equal of any course that I know of anywhere, abroad or in this country.”
Mr. Raynor is a man with imagination who already has the new and finished Lakeside in his mind’s eye. Indeed when he left here he was prepared to sit down and make maps. The holes he sees precisely as a musician sees the notes as they are written in the sheet music though there is no sheet music before him.
“That first hole,” he said, “I’d leave as it is now with some alteration in bunkering. The second hole as I plan it will be like the sixth at the National Club (Short), a hole that Hilton says is the best short hole he ever played.” Not to know Hilton I suppose, is to be benighted or at least to be pitied for a lack of the knowledge that every man ought to possess.
Urging Mr. Raynor I extracted a dissertation on Lakeside and its potentials. “The third hole,” he said, “will be an Alps hole like the 17th at Prestwick, the most famous golf hole in the world. The fourth will be a drive and pitch across a ravine, similar to the 17th at the National course, the Leven hole.”
My education in golf was getting on. All through this discourse as it progressed was interlarded golf history. Mr. Raynor was always looking far into the distance at other links that he knew of, and of which he was reminded by the landscape at Lakeside which seems so restful to his mind’s eye.
I learned that on the Lido course at Long Beach (Island) is a hole that must be reproduced out here – they are so much alike. Now that is the prize hole; that is to say, it won a prize in a contest held under the auspices of England’s Country Life (magazine) in which the contestants submitted designs of what they regarded as the best golf holes.
As designed by Mr. Raynor the sixth is a short hole – 160 yards – an exact reproduction of the eleventh at St. Andrews (Eden), the most famous short hole in the world. The seventh is a 540 yard hole to be bunkered to the character of the ground (Long).
The eighth and ninth are drive and pitch holes of decided character; the tenth a 440 yard hole, a fine two-shot hole to carry from the tee taking you across the road that runs up to the Club House. The eleventh is a drive and pitch hole “like the thirteenth at Piping Rock – a Knoll Hole.” The twelfth is a two-shot hole right in front of the Club House. “This is one of the best two-shot holes I know of,” said the famous artist of the links.
Mr. Raynor became really ecstatic when he reached the fourteenth hole on the ocean bluff. “A punch-bowl with fine possibilities,” was the way he described it. “The fifteenth hole – a 220 yard hole – along the ocean bluff is a duplicate,” he said, “of the famous Biarritz hole in France. In order to get a similar hole the Lido Club went to great expense, paying as high as $160,000 for the land required.”
Again Mr. Raynor grew enthusiastic when discussing the seventeenth hole, a reversed Redan, which has been constructed on many courses. The eighteenth hole he told me is “one that lends itself in bunkering to the model of the eighteenth at Lido,” which was one of the prize holes of the Country Life contest.
The Lido course, by the way, which is what Lakeside will be like eventually, cost $1,350,000. But that is wholly an artificial course. The hills were imported on trains. Even the fairways were not native to the site, and the soil, which is the same as the soil the ocean swept into Lakeside in the course of centuries, was pumped out from the depths at Long Beach (Island).
No wonder the course cost more than a million. And now agreeable to learn that Lakeside may be made equal to the best courses at a cost not to exceed $25,000 which sum will be repaid at the end of two years if we conclude not to exercise our option.
Mr. Raynor made known to me at the wind-up of our interview by way of summary that we (will) have four short holes ranging from 130-220 yards; six drive and pitch holes ranging from 310 to 375 yards; eight full shot holes ranging 400 to 540 yards.
This division of a total of 6,200 yards is what Raynor pronounces an ideal arrangement; “especially so,” he said, “considering that both nines end at the Club House and there are three different ways of playing nine holes.”
The course as planned by Mr. Raynor would lend itself to the average golfer’s playing as well as to the expert’s. In its construction he plans to cut out all unnecessary climbing by following the contour of the ground, and also to eliminate all blind holes.