by Roger Cranse
“All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.”
—George Orwell
During my caddying days I saw two holes-in-one. The first was in the late afternoon, sun low on the horizon, shadows long across the fairway, a time billed by the club for mixed foursomes. My golfer hit an 8 iron; the ball arced high, crested, fell out of sight toward the elevated green. The others hit, I shouldered my bags and humped out ahead. It’s a caddy’s job to keep track of his golfers’ shots, get there first, and be ready with the clubs. But I couldn’t find the ball; it looked like it had fallen to the green, but it wasn’t there. The others arrived. We looked around the green, in the rough, in the sand traps. No luck. I started across the green toward the pin, forearms steadying the bags, “Maybe it’s in the cup,” I said, not believing my own words. The others moved with me. We looked down and there it was, nestled beside the pin. Perhaps the Voodoo golf god had nudged it in while we weren’t looking. I don’t remember what happened next; maybe they cheered, shook hands, clapped the lucky golfer on the back. At the end of the loop, back at the clubhouse, he gave me exactly nothing, not a fiver, not a buck, not a quarter, not a dime. Drinks for the clubhouse, zip for the caddy. I hitched home. Early the next morning I was back at the caddy shack ready for the shape-up.
The clubhouse and the caddy shack lay at opposite ends of the parking lot, two hundred yards and worlds apart. The colonnaded redbrick and clapboard clubhouse rested beneath great shade trees on a lush lawn, like a southern plantation home. Men and women golfers in alligator shirts and sleeveless blouses glided from putting green to tennis court to swimming pool to dining room. This was unapologetically a club for the well-off: admen, bankers, docs, lawyers, dentists, industrialists, their bored wives and preppy kids. Members were white, Northern-European, Protestant. There may have been a few upwardly mobile Italians among them—we’re talking New Jersey in the 1950’s——and I think I recall a Jewish name, but I could be wrong there. Blacks, of course, were unthinkable.
The caddy shack, a squat cinderblock rectangle, sits on a drab dirt rise of crab grass and sumac at the other end of the parking lot. Viewed from the clubhouse, across rows of Buicks and Cadillacs, Jags and Mercedes, the shack looks like the gate to a netherworld, an alternate universe of body odor, bad manners, coarse language, and ragged clothes. Starting around 7:00 A.M. broken-down cars—Fords, Plymouths, Chevys—rumble up and park at this netherworld. Car doors slam, men amble up to the shack, light cigarettes, sit on the rickety green benches that line the walls inside and out. They wear baseball caps, stained khakis, Keds, long-sleeved shirts with shoulders worn through. The cream of this lot caddies for a livelihood—Florida in the winter, Jersey in the summer. They are the first out in the morning and they often get two loops a day. At eight dollars a loop, sixteen dollars a day, throw in the occasional ten-dollar loop, and you’re looking at a hundred bucks a week which is about what my Father made teaching school—and he had to pay taxes.
Descending by degrees from the pro-caddies was a motley of down-and-outers: winos, the mentally ill, shell-shocked war vets, drifters, blood sellers, junkies, jail birds.
And a few boys, like me. The first summer we were “B” caddies. We carried only one bag, we were the last out in the shape-up, and many days we didn’t get out at all—we waited. The sun creeps up in the sky, heatwaves shimmer off the shack’s corrugated tin roof, the green benches turn to iron, you get up, you walk around, you eat a candy bar, you sweat, you sit down, you wait. Eight hours of waiting and then you go home with no money. Most kids didn’t make it beyond a few weeks.
The lord of the caddy shack was a guy named Squirrel, the assistant caddy master. At just over five feet, Squirrel’s complexion was what my Mother would have called “swarthy.” Squirrel’s dress and grooming matched his authority: shiny leather shoes, pants creased to a razor’s edge, crisp white shirt, close shave, glossy black hair slicked back; this man did not carry golf bags. Squirrel’s eyes were the palest blue and could look alternately menacing or mirthful, although even the mirthful glint suggested skullduggery of some kind. A gold tooth showed when he smiled; his walk was a slow rolling swagger, a mobile fireplug. You moved instinctively out of his way when he rolled from his combination office and store to the caddy shack door. Nobody messed with Squirrel; you didn’t even joke.
At 7:30 A.M. we’re all there, fifty or sixty caddies sitting on the green benches talking, smoking, reading the racing sheet, squinting through the low morning sun. Just before 8 A.M. the phone in Squirrel’s office rings once. Everyone shuts up, like a door slamming. Squirrel on the phone, “Uh, uh, uh, uh.” It’s the first call of the day from Mickey, the caddy master, down at the clubhouse. Squirrel rolls through the shack, stands in the doorway where he can see everybody. He’s holding a stubby golf pencil and a stack of cards. Utter silence. His ice blue eyes shift from man to man. Inscrutable. He speaks. “C’mon, Joe. Harry, c’mon. C’mon, Tony. You,” Squirrel jerks his head at someone, “C’mon.” Squirrel scribbles numbers on cards, the men collect them and head down for the bench at the pro shop where Mickey assigns caddies to golfers. Squirrel’s got everyone’s number down and usually his name. His head swivels around the ragged crew. “Ace, c’mon. Turk, c’mon, Turk. Bud, c’mon.” He goes through twenty men; his eyes sweep the crowd. Will he call more? Everyone’s waiting, thinking, c’mon Squirrel, get me out, I don’t want to sit here, I need a loop. No. He rolls back to the office.
This is the shape-up; you get hired anew everyday—or not—depending on Squirrel. Talk picks up again.
Unlike most boys who tried it, I got through the long, long waits thanks to cigarettes and paperback books. I’d read for an hour, my ass would start aching on the wooden bench, I’d get up, move to the edge of the parking lot. The first drag, like focusing a camera, sharpens the scene in front of you. The flag on the pin of a nearby hole flutters in the gentle breeze. A foursome of colorful shirts moves slowly up the hill. Manicured green descends toward a brook, winds through sculpted sand bunkers, comes to a geyser of ice-cold spring water splashing in the copper bowl of a drinking fountain under tall pines at the fifth hole. You hear shouts from the swimming pool, smell the fertilizer and warm earth, look up and see deep blue sky arching over undulating green. Back inside Squirrel sells you a ten-cent Coke, you read an hour, and it’s time for another smoke. I hung in this way all summer until school started in September.
The second summer Squirrel’s gold tooth flashed, he handed me an “A” badge, and gave me a nickname, Red. Squirrel understood dues; I’d paid mine. I didn’t usually get out in the first twenty but before forty I’d hear, “C’mon, Red.” My number was 166 and Squirrel had it down cold.
While the caddy shack was Squirrel’s exclusive domain, Mickey, down at the clubhouse, was the nexus between the two worlds. Every morning Mickey set up his card table between the bench and the pro-shop. Mickey of course knew all the members and their kids by name. As members walked up to Mickey’s table, he’d greet them jovially, like old friends. “Good morning, Mr. Aldrich!” “How are you this morning, Dr. Bean!” “Mrs. Foster, top of the morning to yah!” He never used first names, but his tone was so intimate, so familiar, that it sounded as if he were. The only exception was the kids. Mickey called them by their first names—until they were in college, that is. Then it was, “And here’s young Mr. Aldrich, back from New Haven!” “The young and future Dr. Bean, fresh off the train from Cambridge, Massachusetts!” The kids back from New Haven and Cambridge and New York scoffed – “Mickey, I’m still Jeff!” – but secretly they expected these social promotions.
After greeting the golfers, Mickey waves over the first caddy on the bench, grunts, writes two golfers’ names on the caddy’s card, hands it back without looking up. The caddy takes his card to the pro-shop, gets the golfers’ bags, and heads out for the loop.
Mickey remains a mystery to me. Those hearty greetings—were they subtly laced with mockery, or irony? What did he really think of the golfers and their privileged world? Maybe he was just happy making a good living, not hefting heavy stuff or spending his days on a howling factory floor. Now I imagine him home in the evening, a Newark row house, paging through the Star Ledger, kids at their homework on the kitchen table, wife drying her hands and bending to the TV, and all that club stuff—the card table, green bench, red-faced blustery members in alligator shirts and spiked shoes—all as real as the smoke that drifted from his pipe and out the screened window by the Lackawanna tracks nearby.
I remember faces from the caddy shack but only two names: Leroy and Frank.
Leroy was an old Black man—fifties, sixties, maybe seventies. He was short and round and wore bib overalls with a flannel shirt underneath, suggesting a field hand. His hair was white. Leroy secreted his tobacco products in the pockets of his overalls—a battered pack with a few smokes, a crumpled pouch, a corncob pipe. Pulling on the weathered pipe, eyes half closed, he seemed a kind of solace for the old man. Slow weekday afternoons on the bench at the clubhouse—no golfers for hours—Mickey and Leroy enacted a bit of vaudeville for the audience of sore-assed caddies.
“Leroy,” Mickey said, “you got ‘bacca?” Mickey pronounced it, “Lee-raw,” setting up the Jim Crow context for their little drama.
“No,” Leroy pulled back on the bench, playing his role gamely, “ain’t got no ‘bacca!”
“Oh, Lee-raw, you got ‘bacca.” Mickey got up, pipe extended, and went for the bench. Leroy stood, crouched, Mickey closed, Leroy shuffled away, and the two clumped around theatrically in a slow chase.
“No ‘bacca, no bacca,” Leroy panted.
Mickey caught him from behind, extracted the crumpled pouch, and made a great show of filling and lighting his Kaywoodie. Leroy made mock attempts to grab the pouch. Mickey handed it back ceremoniously, it disappeared into the overalls, and Leroy slid onto the bench. “Take my ‘bacca,” he mumbled. A tear—of merriment or sorrow or general weariness—rolled down a brown cheek. “My ‘bacca.”
The other caddy whose name I remember is Frank. Frank was a shell-shocked World War Two vet. He was skinny, had blotchy skin, chewed on a toothpick. Frank would be telling you a story, or talking about getting a second loop, and suddenly, without warning, his arms would shoot into the air, straight up, and he’d shout, “Boom! Boom! Boom!” and cackle crazily. Then he’d go back to his story. Squirrel screwed his index finger in circles beside his head and said, “Guy’s nuts. Too many battles. Forget about him.”
Frank and I sometimes went out on loops together. He’d laugh and talk as we trudged along the rough. “Red, that fountain at the fifth! That water! Freezing cold! Ah!” And then the crazed cackle. Frank was usually able to restrain his “booms” around the golfers. Every once in a while, though, we’d be walking down opposite sides of a fairway, he’d look over at me, his arms would fly up, and he’d mouth a silent, “Boom! Boom! Boom!” As far as I could tell, the golfers never noticed.
And then there was a guy whose name I don’t remember who was the sorriest character on the bench. One morning his hands shook so badly he couldn’t light his cigarette. I held out a match, he dragged deep, coughed, spat out phlegm, dragged again, leaned back, exhaled a cloud. Things were getting rough, he said, eyes closed. Can’t get no loops, Squirrel don’t send me out. Gotta sell blood, drink cough syrup. That goddamn Squirrel.
He coughed again, leaned over, hawked a greenish-yellow glob onto the crab grass. Sores covered his forehead and arms, his cheeks were gray stubble, his clothes rags, and he stank of something fermented. Occasionally he’d get a loop on the weekend, after everyone else was out. How the golfers tolerated this bum, I have no idea. I guess like the rest of us he was mostly invisible.
Of the members themselves I have few memories. One woman kindly requested me whenever she went out. Another woman told me she hated the game but played because sitting around the pool all day was worse. And then once or twice I had an older gentleman who hit with wooden-shafted clubs, including a one iron. His swing was powerful, liquid, precise. His irons rocketed the ball along the fairways in a low ground-skimming arc. He sank his putts in one or two. He made the game seem easy.
The others, they’d hit into the trees and groan; chip into a bunker and throw the club after the ball; say stuff like: I don’t know what’s the matter with me today, I need a lesson; I can’t hit this four wood anymore; oh, no, where did it go now? With these people the game made no sense at all – “A good walk spoiled” as someone had it.
Caddying was by far the better part of the proposition. You got paid and, mercifully, you didn’t have to play the game yourself. The labor was honest, you got good exercise, the physical setting was breathtaking—a gigantic sculpture carved out of the unpromising Watchungs—and I met characters I wouldn’t have ordinarily come across in the blinkered progress of a middle-class boy. Leroy, Frank, Squirrel, Mickey, the blood-selling bum—all gone now I guess.
Frank especially stays with me. In memory, I look over and see him on the opposite side of the fairway. He smiles back, points at the golfers in their alligator shirts and spiked wingtips, throws up his arms. “Boom, boom, boom,” echoes down the years. Frank gave a lot for his country—his sanity, you might say—and he didn’t seem to get a lot in return, but he was a good looper and, like me, he enjoyed the out-of-doors, the sun, the breeze, the good walk, the cool drink at the copper fountain on the fifth.
My second hole-in-one was on the fourth nine, the green clearly visible from the tee and separated from it by a chasm of rough grass. My golfer teed up, came over to the bag, turned to the green, pulled an eight iron halfway out, looked again, sniffed the air, slid the eight back, and took his nine. He addressed the ball, hiked up the left sleeve of his alligator shirt, did that funny little left foot, right foot, left foot Voodoo dance golfers like, drew the club back, let it fall, and click! The ball lifts off the tee, slows, falls from the sky toward the green, hits, hops twice, rolls a foot and tips into the cup. Hurrah! Great shot! Con-gra-tu-la-tions!
Back at the clubhouse, heading for the bar, the triumphant golfer hesitated, turned, and held out an extra buck. I took it. He didn’t say anything and didn’t look my way: beat up sneakers, sweat-through shirt, a barely visible bag-carrying wraith.
The club taught me my place in the world: go in early, use the back entrance, do something useful, don’t get noticed.
I actually had this same guy a month or so after his hole-in-one. He was a youngish fellow, slender, square face, a junior exec at some chemical company down in Newark or an ad agency in the city. We were on the third nine at a par 5 that crosses a brook just before the green. Second shot he takes a three wood, does the Voodoo dance, powers through his swing, the ball whizzes along a low trajectory, lands, rolls, and plop! right into the drink, like an ice cube hitting the tonic. He dunks it two more times and then, head down, walks over to me, takes his bag off my shoulder, goes to the brook, raises the bag with both hands, bends like a gymnast, and launches it in a graceful slow arc toward the brook. It sails up, crests, falls to the water. Ker-plash! His best shot of the day.
He walks toward the little bridge over the brook. “Caddy,” he calls back, “get the bag.”
Which was fine, a small price to pay for such sublime entertainment on a golden summer day, long ago.
Roger Cranse graduated Rutgers University in 1963 – where he studied with Paul Fussell, among others – served two years in the Peace Corps in Nepal and then two years in An Loc, Vietnam, with the State Department. He has spent most of his career since as a teacher and administrator at the Community College of Vermont. Cranse’s recent publications include a memoir, “The Hearts and Minds Guys,” about his experiences in Vietnam. It appeared in the Fall, 2012, edition of Raritan, A Quarterly Review. It was subsequently named a “Notable Essay of 2012” in The Best American Essays of 2013. Cranse’s essay, “Baguettes and the Forever War,” appeared in The New York Times Vietnam ’67 Newsletter on February 27, 2018.