You might be one who would dismiss the country club set as people who are shallow, privileged and snobby. As usual with broad generalizations you’d be partially right and mostly wrong.
A country club is typically a place centered around a golf course bordered by the tennis club and if it’s been recently updated there are plenty of pickle ball courts in the space where members used to play tennis. Pickle ball is a recent phenomenon much easier on aging knees.
If the golf course is the club’s heart, the club house is it’s arms. That’s where the welcoming is done. Though there’s plenty of socializing going on where sports are played, the serious business of meeting and greeting belongs to the clubhouse which is where the bar is located and the food is served.
If you go as a guest to a country club you’ll notice immediately the friendliness between members and staff. You might even cringe slightly when you first see it and think about how the country club familiarities resemble the ones portrayed in 1950’s period films when southern ladies showed a condescending affection for their “help”.
Yet to dismiss the relationship between server and those served is to sell it short. Both classes are children of God, all made in God’s image, and every one there, each in their own way devoted to God, or at the least not without faith.
Country Clubs, like Baby Boomers, are seasoned. The 1960s saw an uptick in golf enthusiasts and there grew more and more suburban country clubs.
By 2008 membership had long been declining, the Greatest Generation was in the throes of dying out without replacement. Few Gen-Xers had the time or interest for five hour rounds of golf, Millennials surely weren’t joining and the recession left many Baby Boomers unable to keep up with the steep dues.
That’s the setting where this story begins.
After hours, in the card room, at Saddlewood Country Club, in Willowbrook New Jersey, sat six men who were the elected leadership of Saddlewood. Under consideration was a proposal from neighboring Buena Vista Country Club...READ MORE
