U.S. Open

Mayor Of San Francisco, Lord Of Pebble Beach

How one family bet big on the Monterey Peninsula

A Conversation with Lewis H. Lapham: Lord Of Pebble Beach

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By Lewis H. Lapham

Photos By Julian P. Graham/Pebble Beach Company Logorio Archives

June 2010

As between the garden of eden and the golf courses on the Monterey Peninsula my father and grandfather didn't make meaningful distinctions, and as a boy growing up in San Francisco in the 1940s I was given to understand that one day I would know why: One day when the war was over, and I was old enough to retain a swing thought and drive the ball to a distance of 200 yards. In the meantime the Japanese Navy was still at large in the South Pacific, my knowledge of the wonders held in escrow at Cypress Point and Pebble Beach limited to the hearsay that my forebears were happy to supply -- deer browsing in the forest, whales basking in the sea, movie stars preserved in alcohol, the lie of the land shaped as if by the hand of Providence.

My grandfather, Roger D. Lapham (1883-1966), had been a founder of the club at Cypress Point in 1927, its president and most devoted member throughout the 1930s. During even the worst years of the Great Depression no two weeks went by without his hopeful presence on the first tee, a vivid and exuberant figure usually dressed in at least four colors of the rainbow, the owner of a still-surviving fleet of steamships willing to play for whatever sum anybody cared to name. The attack on Pearl Harbor remanded the ships to government service, and in 1944 Grandfather, then in his early 60s, his round, red face and shock of snow-white hair known to every bartender in Chinatown, became mayor of San Francisco. Often to be seen wearing a hand-painted orange or purple tie, he delighted in the expression of vivid opinions suitable for framing as a morning headline.

The author's father, Lewis A. Lapham, plays
away in 1930 as his grandfather watches.

My father, Lewis A. Lapham (1909-'95), a man of markedly different temperament and character, also had been present at the creation of Cypress Point, enlisted at the age of 18 in 1927 by Dr. Alister Mackenzie, the designer of the course, to drive golf balls into various undifferentiated wastes of grass and sand to mark the points at which to begin a fairway, extend a bunker, route the approach to a not yet fully imagined green. As accomplished a golfer as my grandfather, my father's playing of the course likewise had been interdicted by the war. A reporter and columnist for the San Francisco Examiner in the early '30s, afterward inducted into the family shipping business, he was recruited by the U.S. Army in 1942 to manage the transport of munitions to the hazards all too clearly marked on the beaches at Guadalcanal.

THE WAGER
It wasn't until the spring of 1946 that both gentlemen were at liberty to arrange a rite of passage to the Monterey Peninsula, and on the drive south, as was to be expected from the mayor, he proposed "some sort of wager" to add an element of drama to the proceedings. Gambling was his passion, on a golf course and at the bridge table, where he deemed it unsporting to look at his cards before announcing a bid. The approach to the game sometimes presented the difficulty of finding a partner on the premises of the Pacific Union Club but ensured its being played for what he regarded as a properly courageous stake. Within 20 minutes of leaving the city he suggested odds of 10-to-1: $50 if I broke 100 against $5 (a month's allowance) if I did not; strict USGA rules, no putts conceded, the scorecard to be attested by Frank Archdeacon, the caddie better known as "Turk" in whom my grandfather reposed the trust that other men assigned to J.P. Morgan or the pope. My father advised against the proposition. A sucker bet, he said, and one that I was sure to lose before I reached the last three ocean holes and the sardonic barking of the sea lions on the rocks at No. 17. Yes, in San Francisco once or twice I had posted scores in the high 80s, but not at Cypress Point, not as a boy of 11 uninitiated into the mysteries of ice plant. My grandfather waved away the word of caution as if striking at a fly. How else was I supposed to learn the game if not as moral allegory, a pilgrim's progress meant to try the spirit and search the soul.

Allowing me the time it would take to reach Gilroy to accept or refuse the bet, the ancestors turned to the formalities of a history lesson. The courses at Cypress Point and Pebble Beach owed their existence to Samuel F.B. Morse, descendant of the inventor of Morse Code who in 1919 had obtained the whole of the 7,000-acre Del Monte Forest between Carmel and Pacific Grove, a liquidated asset of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The sale price of $1.3 million brought with it an additional 11,000 acres in the Carmel Valley and the railroad's plans for subdividing the land along the bluffs on Stillwater Cove into narrow residential lots, 50 feet by 100 feet, available to the building of seaside tenements.

Morse burned the plans. He looked upon his new property as the "circle of enchantment" in which he proposed to sell substantial houses to prominent people for important money. Betting that a better class of customer would prefer bigger homes farther up the hillside overlooking both an ocean and a golf course, he engaged two amateur golfers, Jack Neville and Douglas Grant, to compose the national monument at Pebble Beach. The lots on the bluffs were replaced by the incomparable series of holes from No. 6 through No. 10, Neville saying, years later, "It was all there in plain sight."

Morse's designating the result as a public course prompted him to add to his domain the further advantage of a private course, and by 1927 he had persuaded my grandfather, a friend and frequent golf companion, to set up the syndicate that had paid $150,000 for the 170 acres at the southwest tip of Monterey Bay. They undertook to construct 18 holes and a clubhouse for an additional $350,000, the cost to be offset by the offering of 250 memberships at $2,000 each. Dr. Mackenzie, a once-upon-a-time physician who as a major in the British Army during World War I served as a camouflagist hiding gun emplacements on the Western Front, held to the belief that golf architecture was "largely a question of the spirit in which the problem is approached. Does the player look upon it from the 'card and pencil' point of view and condemn anything that has disturbed his steady series of 3s and 4s, or does he approach the question in the 'spirit of adventure' of the true sportsman?"