- Today we are pleased to introduce
June Melby as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In Lecture Series.
The opinions expressed today
are those of the presenter
and not necessarily those of the Wisconsin
Historical Society or the museum's employees.
June Melby grew up in Waupaca, Wisconsin
where her family owned the Tom Thumb Miniature Golf
for 30 years.
She received an MFA in creative writing from
the University of Iowa in 2009.
Her poetry, fiction, and essays
have appeared in many publications.
Melby wrote a memoir of her experiences
of the Tom Thumb Miniature Golf
entitled My Family and Other Hazards
published in 2014.
She became a New York Times bestseller.
It was recently optioned by Warner Brothers
for a TV drama.
To discuss the unexpected rise of miniature golf
in the 1920s and it's wavering popularity
in the decades that followed,
please join me in welcoming June Melby.
(audience applause)
- Thank you, Emily.
Welcome to History's Sandwiched In.
I was kind of hoping more people would be
eating actual sandwiches
(audience laughing)
during the talk.
'Cause that just sounds fun to me.
So if you have a sandwich with you,
go ahead; this is your chance
to eat during a presentation,
so why not take that opportunity.
I'm really happy to be here.
Emily gave away most of what I was just about to tell you,
but I will tell you again.
My name is June Melby.
When I was 10 years old,
my parents who were school teachers
purchased a miniature golf course in central Wisconsin
in the town of Waupaca,
which is about two hours north of Madison.
It was hand built in 1950s
and it basically changed our life.
By changed, I could say messed up,
but not necessarily all the time.
There were times that I hated it because we gave up
all our summer vacations thereafter and I had to work,
which as a kid is a dreadful experience.
Of course, later on, I had to write a memoir.
This is what you do when you have mixed feelings about
your childhood.
So this is my memoir.
My family and Other Hazards.
The memoir is in 18 chapters.
One for every hole.
Because I thought that would be fun.
Each chapter has a theme based on the hazard
at that hole, for example, chapter two is based on
the hazard at number two, which is a castle.
So that one is told in the form of a fairy tale.
And, chapter four is based on the hazard at number four,
which is the most complex.
So that chapter is about complexity.
And chapter five, the hazard there features an antique
rocking horse, literally as the hazard.
So, I decided a theme for chapter five is history.
Which gave me a great excuse to look up
what is the history of miniature golf.
So, some of this talk will be selections directly
from my book and some I'll just tell you
'cause I get too excited about it.
One of the wonderful things about doing historical research
is that you get to discover stories that people
have forgotten about.
Or lesson know, or just way too important
to have them missed.
And this is one of them.
Believe it or else.
There was a time when there was an estimated
30,000 miniature golf courses in the United States.
So here's your quiz question.
As I come from school teachers,
I have to throw in a pop quiz.
What year was it when there were 30,000 miniature
golf courses? Any guesses?
Yeah?
64? No. - [Voiceover] 58.
- 58? No. Anybody else?
- [Voiceover] I say 72. - 72? No.
- [Voiceover] 126. - Very close.
(audience chatter)
- 1930?
Curiouser and curiouser.
Miniature golf as we know it
was invented during the 1920s.
Which is appropriate I suppose
because it was a truly crazy time.
Called the Roaring 20s.
It was a time of extravagance and decadence
when women cut their long hair
and threw out their corsettes.
A time that saw the invention of goldfish swallowing,
dance marathons, and competitions for who would
hit the longest on the top of a pole.
A time of giddiness as people regrouped from the horrors
of the Great War and the restrictions and austerity
that the war effort required.
People moved enmass from rural areas to large cities.
One wild dance craze after another swept the country.
The Jitterbug and the Charleston.
The Shimmy and the Tango.
Alcohol was prohibited in the US,
but it did not go away and there were bootleggers,
speakeasies, and raised by the Feds.
Skirts were shortened, bustles abandoned
and women finally got the right to vote.
And I have to admit here that I'm a bit jealous
of the roaring 20s.
Perhaps because the decade of my decadence
or what should have been my decadence
because I turned 18 was known quite blandly
as the Reagan Era.
But it shouldn't surprise us that mini golf,
which is inherently a little goofy
should hit the scene during this time.
Here's more about the.
Yes, women had a.
But first, let's talk about regular golf
because you can have miniature golf
you have to have what we call in my family,
maxi golf.
Maxi golf began in Scotland
back in the 1400s.
1400s.
It was so popular.
You hear about golfers being addicted to the sport today.
It was addictive back then as well.
So much so that in 1457,
the Scotish Parliament banned golf altogether
because they were worried about an impending invasion
from England and so many boys and men
were out there hitting rocks with sticks
instead of doing their military training.
The first golf course on record
was at Saint Andrews Scotland
and it had 18 holes.
And since then every golf course has 18 holes or nine
if there's just limited space.
We don't know why they had 18 holes,
although I have heard someone tell me a theory
that there's 18 shots of alcohol in a certain bottle of
whiskey, but that is in dispute.
Golf did not spread rapidly around the globe,
not until the Industrial Revolution made it
Golf courses generally are on the outskirts of towns
and so you need to get there
and once we had the railroad,
people could travel to the golf courses.
Also, golf equipment became less expensive
after the Industrial Revolution
because before hand, you had to make every golf
by hand and every stick or putter had to be crafted
by hand.
So, but the beginning of the 1920s,
golf had been in the US for just about 30 years.
It was getting hugely popular.
And because people were eager to play,
there were some smaller scale versions of golf.
You'll hear references to miniature golf
in the early 1920s, but it wasn't miniature golf
as we know it.
There were smaller scaled courses 'cause people
were just dying to practice and they couldn't get
to the outskirts of town until the weekend,
so there were smaller versions where people could practice
their putting, you know, say on the top of rooftops
and buildings in New York.
At this time, golf was still considered a wealthy man sport
and only a tiny portion of the population was really wealthy
in the 1920s.
But during this time, the middle class was growing
and it was a status hungry time,
so people wanted to at least appear rich
if they weren't actually rich
so they desired a form of golf,
which brings us to the place
where miniature golf is about to be born,
so let me introduce to you, Garnett Carter.
Garnett was a traveling salesman.
He peddled candy, souvenirs and novelties
in the southeast United States.
In 1924, he wanted to sell something bigger.
Real Estate.
So with a partner he bought 300 acres of cheap rocky land
that no one else wanted on a semi accessible hill
in northern Georgia.
It was known as Lookout Mountain.
It's about six miles from downtown Chattanooga.
It's really rocky bluff.
And he bought it with his partner super cheap,
but he was such a salesman.
With the skills of promotion, he sold the lots quickly.
He divided the land into numbered lots
and then he told people it was so popular
that if you want to buy a new lot in my development
you can't even pick which one you want.
You just give me your money and then you draw a number
and then I'll tell you which is your lot.
So people would, they fell for it, so they bought their lots
they do their number, and then scramble out to find out
where their home would be built.
His wife; there's Frieda Carter,
loved fairytales.
So we can presume that she's the one
who made a great addition to this development.
She was of German descent.
She ordered statues from Germany
of fairytale creatures.
I'm not sure they were intended for garden use or what,
but she brought in these statues and then put them out
on the streets of the new development.
And then, they were named accordingly.
So the streets are called Robin Hood Trail,
Gnome Trail, Cinderella Trail, and Tinker Bell Land.
All of which still exist today, by the way.
In 1928, her husband, Garnett, started building a resort
and golf course in the development
and they called their development Fairy Land.
The reason was there were a lot of strange rock formations
and they thought it looked kind of magical,
so they just went with that theme.
Garnett was the one who also,
oh, wait, I'm getting.
You heard of the Sea Rock City?
That was his plan, Rock City was the entire formation.
Frieda designed some walking trails through the rocks
and decorated them with gnomes and dwarves as well.
Okay,
at this point there are conflicting stories
as to how the first mini golf course was developed.
One story is that
the area was so rocky,
they were trying to put in a golf course,
but you can't really have a nice smooth grassy greens
on rock and it took them so long
that they made a mini golf course
in the meanwhile to keeping people entertained.
And the other theory is that the golf course was finished
and then Frieda was noticing that there were a lot of women
and children bored out of their mind,
draped on the furniture at the hotel
waiting for the fathers and husbands to come off the course.
And so she designed the mini golf course to entertain them.
We don't know which one is true and maybe portions
of both stories are true, but in any case,
now I'm going to go back to.
What we do know is,
Frieda and Garnett created a mini course
and then created obstacles from objects
they found around like rocks and car tires
and then Frieda moved some of these statues
from off of the streets onto the mini course
and then she named the holes after them.
This would be Angry Dwarf Hole perhaps.
I'm not quite sure.
He looks like he's about the club the guy who's putting.
She decorated the walkway with these gnomes.
She also developed the fairytale theme by.
She was untrained architect and yet she was so talented.
With draft equipment, she designed a gingerbread house
where they sold lemonade and gingerbread
and they decided to call the whole resort
the Fairy Land Club.
And because of that, they decided to call the mini course,
Tom Thumb Miniature Golf.
So we have to than Frieda Carter
because even today, miniature golf courses
have retained this sort of wonderland
fairytale kind of aspect, and it's because she was into it.
Bless her heart.
It was a success.
This first mini golf course was kind of an accident
and it was a huge, wonderful accident.
People were thronging to play it.
The men were leaving the regular golf course
and crowding the kids off the mini golf course.
People who were coming to play at the Fairy Land Inn
loved it so much they begged to Garnett to go and build
a similar course in their town.
Well, he's a salesman by nature so he wasn't going to turn
down that opportunity.
So, quite by accident, he was about to start
a Tom Thumb empire.
This was 1930.
You might have heard of some other event going on
in 1930.
Perhaps the Great Depression was going on?
But more importantly, okay maybe just to me,
it was the start of the mini golf boom.
In 1930, the first full year of the Great Depression,
Garnett Carter sold 5,000
Tom Thumb courses.
And they were plenty of imitators as well.
Mini golf courses popped up in hotel lobbies.
On the ground of sanitariums, next door to movie theaters,
and empty lots around the country.
These were copy cat courses
as well as his own franchised courses.
There was course built on a well known European oceanliner.
One at a prison and one for airplane passengers
at an airport near Chicago.
Celebrities built courses for themselves
and their guests on their estates in Beverly Hills.
This is from a Chattanooga paper,
Local Boy Makes Good.
No kidding.
Harold Loy had a difficult course with an artificial pump
driven steam and holes that criss crossed each other.
President Hoover
got a team of Marines to build him
a private mini golf course at his retreat in Maryland.
In London, there was a miniature golf course
at Charing Cross Station that was so popular
that guards were stationed to warn players
when their trains were departing because people
were forgetting to board.
I love this. (audience laughing)
I love this so much.
Play golf free while having your suit pressed.
(audience laughing)
This is September of 1930.
The Department of Commerce estimated
there were 30,000 miniature golf courses in United States.
Most of them were hand built.
This is a cartoon with a little mini golf course
on the dining table.
The numbers I have are, there were 60
in Kansas City, Missouri.
I don't think they're counting the table top one.
30 in Cleveland.
And there were noise complaints about mini golf
in more than 25 cities around the United States.
There were an estimated 300 courses in Los Angeles alone.
And more than 1,000
in 30 mile radius of New York City.
1,000 mini golf courses.
You understand in the 1920s
was a decade when fads themselves were fads
before that time,
fads didn't really have a meaning.
But suddenly in 1920s people had moved into city areas
and ideas could spread more rapidly.
And, people loved the idea of a brand new fad.
And they jumped on it, obviously.
The Our Gang actors played mini golf.
Recognize Shirley Temple in the front there.
It was called the Madness of 1930.
Harper's Magazine declared the rise of miniature golf
industry is a romance of American business
in the old and grand manner about the only success
story that has lightened this year of gloom.
There was thought that
miniature golf would pull the entire country
out of the depression.
And people had forgotten this.
The reason is there was no astro turf at the time.
And real grass could not stand up to all this use
so there was an invention of, by a man,
a plantation owner in Mexico.
where he took the hulls from cotton seed
and ground them up and dyed them green
to make an artificial turf
and then Garnett Carter purchased this patent
and used it on his Tom Thumb courses.
They were using so much cotton hulls
that the cotton industry was hiring
and they were one of the few industries hiring in 1930,
so it was believed that perhaps
the cotton industry would be hiring so many people
just to provide artificial turf.
It could lift the entire country out of the depression.
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks
had their own course and I'm including this because
these pictures are just amazing.
This is their course in the Beverly Wilshire area
of Los Angeles.
It was a modernist design.
You can see the lovely art deco.
This is the opening gate.
This is the art deco tree.
I just love the design of it.
I really wish it was still there.
This is the snack stand.
All right, this is another course here.
There were other reasons why the mini golf was so popular.
Hard times are traditionally really good times
for entertainment because people need a diversion.
And the years of the depression were definitely hard times.
Millions of people in the US had wanted to play maxi golf,
but they hadn't been able to afford it,
but along came mini golf which was inexpensive.
It cost about 50 cents a round.
For comparison admission to a baseball game
was one dollar and at this time a movie cost about 25 cents.
Before prohibition, a glass of beer cost about five cents,
but during prohibitions, yes it was still available,
a glass of beer cost 50 cents.
So miniature golf became an affordable alternative
to buying a glass of beer.
In fact, some theorize that the reason miniature golf
became so popular was because alcohol
was less available and more expensive.
Also, another mini golf became popular was that men
and women could play it equally well.
Maxi golf requires more strength and stamina.
Mini golf, it's mostly aim.
Okay, sure luck.
So women could compete as well as men.
Here's a course full of school girls in their uniforms.
And they could play round after round
to improve their scores.
So, miniature golf was sweeping the nation.
Courses stayed open until one or two in the morning.
Some were open all night until proprietors
were dragged into court and ordered to close
by midnight.
Young boys built courses for their low incomed
neighborhoods by digging tin cans into weedy lots
and charging their customers a nickel a game.
Sheet music was published so people could play
and sing songs at home.
This is one, I've Gone Goofy Over Miniature Golf.
And I'm Put-Put-Puttin' On the Dinky Links All Day.
(laughter)
Magazines featured advice on what fashions to wear
for both men and women for a evening of miniature golf.
Major department stores offered clothing
specifically designed for the game.
Owners of baseball teams were concerned
because attendance was dropping.
And there was a worry that miniature golf
could actually be the end of baseball.
Not just because people were going to mini golf
instead of going to baseball games,
the boys were not playing it,
and the baseball owners were concerned.
Who is going to be
our professional baseball player years from now
because no one's practicing as kids.
Movie attendance was dropping.
Movie theaters were losing money.
The night that a new mini golf course opened
in Chicago, nearby cinemas found their ticket sales
dropped less than half the night before.
Some movie studios in Hollywood
began requiring their stars to sign a statement
that they would not play miniature golf
or be photographed on a Tom Thumb course.
The game of miniature golf and the people who played it
seemed out of control.
There was now bright lights and noise
and late night carousing
in otherwise really quiet residential neighborhoods.
In New Jersey, a minister tried to prevent
a mini golf course going up near his church
because he didn't want to hear people yelling profanity.
(audience laughing)
The number of small courses continued to grow
as did the number of players,
but by now the country was realizing the severity
of the depression and people needed to be cheered up.
In 1931, it was apparent that the more difficult courses
were the more popular ones.
So that business owners tried to compete
to make the more complicated and bizarre courses.
Guy Lombardo, the famous.
What was his instrument?
He was a band leader.
He built a course where hazard was a discarded
musical instrument.
In Los Angeles, there was a course with a bear chained up
on a green in front of a replica of the White House
and you had to put your ball passed the bear
before he grabbed your ball.
(audience laughing)
However, as the depression deepened
more people lost their jobs.
In 1933, unemployment made up 33% of the population.
The rate was more than 50% in Chicago alone,
so while miniature golf was always one of the more
inexpensive entertainments,
any form of entertainment became out of range.
So attendance began to drop.
There was also new competition in the 1930s.
In 1937, 1938, swing dancing hit the scene.
And teenaged boys
would rather dance with teenaged girls
than do just about anything else.
So in the 1930s,
the attendance was really rapidly dropping
in miniature golf, but it was still gaining popularity
in Europe.
But it did not disappear altogether.
During World War two when Americans
were stationed abroad, the service men built
miniature golf course outside their barracks.
Usually whatever they could find
to remind them of home,
which is kind of sweet.
But the service men had an even bigger impact
on mini golf when they came back.
Does anyone know why?
US service men had a big impact in miniature golf
when the came back from the war
because they had babies.
And this with the era of the baby boom, the late 1940s.
Suddenly there were throngs of children
in the United States that needed to be entertained.
Souvenir shops, snack stands, motels, and drive in
movie theaters all sprouted up along the road sides.
During the 1950s, automobile companies advertised
that getting your family into a car and driving around
was the American thing to do and so people did.
In the spirit of patriotism,
it was the birth of what we call now,
car culture.
At this time, miniature golf courses were built,
but now they're built up along roadsides
with big crazy hazards to grab your attention.
1950s.
However, there were some people who
hated the innovations.
One of these people was Donald Clayton.
I'm missing the "T" up there. Donald Clayon.
Donald Clayton, I'm sorry about that.
He invented Putt-Putt.
Have you guys heard of Putt-Putt?
It's different from miniature golf.
It's actually a copy written name.
Donald Clayton
wanted miniature golf to be taken seriously
and so he designed a rather spartan course
without any big hazards just straight flat greens.
Maybe an angle.
You've seen these kinds of courses.
He franchised and sold his plan under the name Putt-Putt,
so that it could gain popularity as a competitive sport,
so every course would be identical to the next one.
And indeed Putt-Putt tournaments did follow
in the simplified game did spread.
In 1960, Putt-Putt opened locations
in Australia, Japan, and South Africa
and they created fun centers by adding arcades,
batting cages and go-karts.
Putt-Putt became an intermational operation
and they also released a record album.
Putt-Putt golf courses in America represent
Gee Gee Shinan and His Band.
I just love this picture.
This is back in the 1950s again.
Others took the opposite stance
because now the mini golf courses were being built
along popular road ways and they needed to grab
your attention as you drove past.
Ralph Lomma of Lomma Enterprises
was a big advocate of bigger, bigger, bigger.
His golf courses featured pre-fabricated giant obstacles
and he sold them under the Lomma Enterprises
and he eventually sold more than 5,000.
And I believe, and don't quote me on this
but I'm pretty sure he's the one that the US
Department of Defense hired to manufacture
a number of mini golf courses pre-fabricated
shipped to Vietnam to entertain the service troops there.
However, not all the mini golf courses.
Well, let's see. We got some more.
Paul Bunyan.
Not all the mini golf courses that popped up
like daisies during the 1950s were pre-fabricated
or franchised.
Just as in the 1920s, mini courses built during this time
were handmade by their owners.
They were creations of love and folk art
made from available materials like concrete, tin cans,
and imagination.
Each was designed according to the builder's vision
and like all other forms of creative expression,
they were expressions of each one's idea of perfection.
Or in this case, the idea of the perfect game.
Just like our own Tom Thumb.
So this is my parents in front of our mini golf course.
This was taken
early 2000s I would guess.
I'll tell you a little bit about our Tom Thumb.
This was taken early 1960s.
It was built in 1959
by a school teacher from New London
named Greg Childsworth.
He was also a child of depression.
His parents died and he was orphaned,
and his brother was orphaned as well, obviously
and his brother ran off to the circus
and became a snake charmer.
It's true.
Greg was taken in by his aunt
who was married to a bootlegger.
Now a bootlegger makes pretty good money.
And so he bought land on Chain O' Lakes
and there was a little cottage there.
When his aunt and uncle died,
Greg inherited this little cottage.
It was located on the peninsula of water
and there was plenty of land.
And, one day in the 1950s, Greg was a school teacher.
He had summers free and he thought,
you know what, I think I have room for mini golf.
And he had worked in the summers at Wisconsin Dells
and he loved the tourism industry.
So the first thing he did was
get idea, so the story is he traveled around the midwest
with a little notebook and he played mini golf
anywhere he could and he made notes of his favorite
holes which were always the most difficult ones.
And then he replicated those in his backyard
and the story goes it was so difficult at first.
People could find it almost impossible to play.
He had to actually simplify the game.
It was advertised by driving a boat around
with a spray painted sign on it.
Here's a poster from the original course,
which you might know has a shocking resemblance
to my book.
(audience laughing)
And I don't have a pointer,
but in that first hole that's Greg playing with his wife
on the rocket.
And the boy in the front, it's just some neighborhood kid
they recruited just to be the kid apparently.
This is me.
I'm very happy to be working.
(laughter)
My parents purchased Tom Thumb in 1973.
Our first summer was 1974.
We had no idea what we were doing.
That's the story.
My parents were school teachers with a summer to fill
and school teachers, we were living in Iowa.
School teachers in Iowa are well respected
but not well paid.
And my dad had taken a number of crazy jobs
to try to make some extra money.
One summer he sold encyclopedias door to door
and he's not a good salesman, so he sold exactly one set,
which may have been the one in my attic bedroom.
(audience laughing) I'm not sure.
I'd enjoy looking at it.
One summer he counted cars.
This is for those strips they put out across the road,
so his job was to.
They just drop him somewhere in the country road
and he would just sit there with a clipboard.
One, two, you know.
This is someone who's teaching chemistry and physics
and probably has a little more math skills
than counting cars.
So they purchased Tom Thumb Mini Golf
and then the last day of school in Iowa,
we would pack the car, drive to Waupaca,
open up the next morning.
Spend the next three months there,
seven days a week.
Working, waiting on tourists.
And then the night before school started again,
we'd pack up the car, drive back to Iowa,
start the school year.
I hated it. (audience laughing)
Well, I had mixed feelings.
As a kid you really want to fit in
and here I was on the other side of a ticket booth screen
while the kids were playing.
But on the other hand,
here was a place where
you had laughter in the backyard all the time.
You wake up in the morning,
if I slept too late, into the sound
of a cotton candy machine working.
Someone getting cotton candy.
It's not an unpleasant place to be.
The hazards were made by hand by Greg Childsworth.
This was one of them he made in the late 1950s
for the paddle wheel boat.
It's sort of, he was a woodworker.
Instead of making like a dollhouse
in his basement, he made mini golf hazards.
All by hand.
The windmill.
My dad made this one.
it's a gumball machine.
And then people turned the handle hoping a golf ball
would turn it come out of it.
It's very predictable.
You put a little handle and people will turn it.
And there's the castle.
In 2003, my parents
realized they needed to retire again,
so they put the mini golf course up for sale.
I was living in California at the time.
Had to run away as far as I could away from the mini golf,
and when they sold it, I freaked out completely.
I completely freaked out.
And I realized I'm going to have to write this book.
And find out why this place is so important.
And why is it so important?
There's something about miniature golf.
It's inherently goofy.
And that's what I like about it.
People would come to play mini golf and they
would let down their guard.
And they would forget about being a serious adult
at least for an hour.
And they would get all worked up about trying to get
the ball in the nose.
And very excited when they got through the windmill.
And there are very few places in life where grownups
really drop their guard and allow themselves
to be silly.
And it's not Disneyland.
It's not that elaborate,
but I'd like that when I finally went to Disneyland,
my late 20s,
you know I loved how grownups would walk around
wearing a goofy hat.
Goofy and Pluto and Mickey Mouse hats.
And look ridiculous.
Mini golf course at a much lower fee
lets you do that.
And then people would come back every year
to play the same course.
We saw same girl come every year
and then they would bring their children
and then we also loved that.
People showing their kids how to play the holes
that they had played when they were kids.
And I think it was a great priviege to be able to be
a part of that.
To provide this place for people to act really ridiculous
and i wish we had more places
these days, mini golf or otherwise,
where we could really just enjoy ourselves,
drop our guard, act a little silly
and maybe win a free game.
Why not?
Just for a moment.
I threw this in for a funny.
We didn't know how to run a course,
so my mom kept the money we made
hidden in the washing machine.
(audience laughing)
Because we didn't have a safe and she thought well
if a thief came into the house,
on the rare occasion we're not home,
a thief probably wouldn't look in the washing machine
because the thief probably isn't worried about things like
hygeine, so she hid the money in the washing machine
and then of course, there was the time where she
forgot it was there and it got wet,
so this is laying all the money out on the bed to dry.
And she said, I hope no one looks in the window
and thinks we're counterfeiting.
(audience laughing)
It happened twice.
(audience laughing)
Yes, indeed, a place to act silly.
This is my parents playing the airplane hazard
my dad built.
And that's my family.
So thanks so much for coming.
And I will hang around a little longer
for some questions you have.
I really appreciate it.
Get out there and play mini golf.
(applause)