For those who grew up on the Wing Point golf course, the fairways roll out in reverse, each flag guiding the way back to some memory or milestone.
On this spot once stood the old clubhouse, the scene of so many tournament events and parties.
Over here once lurked a particularly voracious sand trap; over there was a favored fairway for throwing out sleeping bags and camping under the stars.
Even today, when Joan McMicken Wilt surveys the course, she sees the homes and families and faces that have come and gone.
“I look at a house and think, ‘Why in the world is that there? It’s right on the green,’” said Wilt, born into the neighborhood and its golfing community in 1922, and whose grandfather had helped lay out the first course two decades earlier.
Wing Point Golf and Country Club – part playground, part social hub, perhaps even a wee bit “status symbol” for those represented by its 550 current memberships – celebrates its 100th anniversary this coming week, with a series of events both private and public.
It’s not the oldest golf course on Bainbridge Island; that distinction belongs to the Country Club of Seattle, developed at Restoration Point seven years earlier. But it has come farther since 1903, when the Wing Point neighborhood was a collection of summer cottages.
Edward Coleman and other vacationers – “Scott Fitzgerald types,” as one historian put it – laid out a three-hole course in a fruit orchard, tramping through rows of trees with their cleeks, mashies, niblicks and jiggers – today’s drivers, long and short irons, and wedges – in tow.
From those humble beginnings grew a nine- and then 18-hole track, and a club that would merge with and divest itself from the neighborhood around it several times, and become a prominent fixture in lives and lore.
Its history mirrors the ebb and flow of the island itself; highlights from an account by club archivists Steve and Harriet Davis show:
1920: With capital of $10,000, the country club is incorporated, and within five years a nine-hole course is laid out south of what is now Wing Point Way. Sixteen members pledge $100 each toward the needed $2,500 to build a clubhouse, and another $500 for furnishings.
1936: The club dissolves, merging with the neighborhood association; its organization remains spotty for several decades.
1954: A club mailing list shows 70 families, with dues at $42 per year. Plans for a new clubhouse surface under the chairmanship of longtime islander Dale Fox.
1963: A swimming pool and tennis court highlight the clubhouse’s debut, while grass appears on greens previously made of a sand, sawdust and oil composite. Total cost: $300,000.
Along the way the club reincorporated, but by the early 1970s – hit by the “Boeing Bust” and economic malaise – again ran into financial straits, and was forced to sell off 65 acres previously purchased to complete an 18-hole course.
But the land sat fallow, and in 1988 the club got the property back after agreeing to spend $1.05 million building a “back nine” in conjunction with a private development.
The new holes opened for play in 1991, with some 40 foursomes strolling the fairways and cart trails that wound amongst luxury homes off High School Road East.
Today’s Wing Point exudes a studied unhurriedness.
Regulars greet each other on the putting green or in the pro shop; inside the clubhouse, ladies’ bridge games break out at round tables, while husbands congregate in the small bar. Luncheoners enjoy a light menu of excellent sandwiches and burgers. Propriety reigns – collared shirts are a must.
“It’s just like a home away from home, almost,” said Lee Jorgenson, who joined the club with his wife a decade ago when they built a home on the back nine, and who golfs and eats there regularly.
Many members join for the immaculate course, which under the direction of Bill Schilling has been honored for environmental stewardship.
For Jorgenson, club life takes the place of the vacations he forgoes to manage San Carlos, his popular Winslow restaurant.
Wing Point club currently has 400 “proprietary” memberships comprising families and individuals, and another 150 “house” and “social” members.
Proprietary status brings stock in the club and entitles one to all amenities, including the golf course. Such memberships are said to be selling these days in the $8,000-$10,000 range – plus another $300 per month in dues and fees.
If you just want a social circle, you can rent one at Wing Point for about $90 a month, after a $500 entrance fee. A “house” membership grants access to the clubhouse and lounge, and the various social events – everything but the golf course.
While membership may be economically prohibitive for many, Jorgenson said that does not translate to a social stuffiness implicit in some tony Seattle clubs.
Wing Point, he notes, makes its banquet hall available to the Chamber of Commerce, Kiwanis and other groups; visitors are welcome on a metered basis, and the organization stays “plugged into the island community.”
The Bainbridge High School golf teams practice and compete on the course free of charge; several annual golf tournaments benefit Helpline House, with another supporting breast cancer research slated for later this month.
“I realize maybe everybody can’t be members, but I think (Wing Point members) do what they can to make it accessible,” Jorgenson said. “I always tell everybody I’m the poorest guy out there, and nobody looks down their nose and doesn’t want to play with me because I don’t drive a Jaguar.”
The threads binding Wing Point old and new are perhaps its longtime members, who are central to the coming week’s celebration. Wilt, who no longer golfs, still holds court as the club’s longest legacy.
“I’ve got a sentimental attachment to it, and I value my membership,” she said. “I can take guests and that sort of thing, so I keep on going.”
She is among longtime members, including Steve Davis and Warren Petersen, whose parents were Wing Point folk and who grew up romping around the course.
All remember Jimmy Rose, a Scotsman “with an accent you could cut with a knife” and a fondness for his nation’s signature drink, who worked as course pro during the 1940s-50s. It was largely under his tutelage that Wilt, Petersen and Davis learned the game.
This was long before such niceties as course irrigation; as Petersen recalls, every summer, “the fairways were brown and hard as rocks.”
Wilt recalls the war years, when a group of Marines set to ship out to the Aleutians were invited up to the club for a sendoff. They wound up teaching the local girls how to march, putting them through drills on the fairway.
Also at that time, Warren recalls members borrowing hand radios from soldiers on tournament days, to give those bending elbows at the bar a play-by-play from the course.
“A lot of people wouldn’t budge from the clubhouse,” he said, “and would sit there and wait for reports.”
More recent was the day an unseen eagle dropped a ling cod at the feet of a golfing trio approaching the sixth tee.
By the time Golf Digest and other media got hold of the story – through a Wing Point member who was scoring a tournament at Pebble Beach – the cod had become a salmon. And the correspondent, who wasn’t even part of the trio of witnesses, walked off with 12 dozen new balls and a new driver as payment for his tale.
The next century for Wing Point? With the club now tightly hemmed in by residential streets, expansion seems unlikely. Plans for a driving range several years ago were beaten down by neighbors.
And this week, members will look back to the days when the club was much smaller still.
Petersen and groundskeepers have recreated the shorter nine-hole layout as it existed decades ago, and built a couple of sand greens to go with it. A match with period clothing, mashies and leather golf balls is planned.
For the members of one the few 100-year-old institutions on Bainbridge, the week may bring a bit of melancholy with the fanfare.
“It’s exciting to watch it change, (but) I also miss a lot of the way it was,” Wilt said. “It was a rougher kind of course, but it was also friendlier. You knew everybody. It was smaller, like the island.”
