The Real Man Behind the Black

That same year, Moses finagled an option to purchase the 1,368-acre estate of the late railroad tycoon Benjamin Yoakum. It included a private course, Lenox Hills Country Club, a 1924 design of golf architect Devereux Emmet. The course was renamed Bethpage Golf Club, and in April 1932 it opened to public play at $2 a day. Burbeck moved his wife and son into its clubhouse, where he would manage the course and prepare for the next grand Moses project: conversion of the property into an enormous golf complex, Bethpage State Park. It would contain three more golf courses and an expansive new clubhouse, all open to the public. Moses proclaimed it would be "the people's country club."

This was three years after the stock-market crash. The Depression had gripped the country. Bethpage was viewed as a pipe dream -- there were no tax dollars to support it. But Moses issued revenue bonds to purchase the land and proposed that the courses and clubhouse be built entirely by work-relief labor. Moses didn't worry about legalities. Using more than 500 day laborers, work began on one of the new courses (Bethpage Blue) in the summer of 1933, even though title to the land did not change hands until May 1934.

Robert Moses ramrodded construction of New York bridges, dams, highways and parks, including Jones Beach and Bethpage State Park.
AP photo

HARD TIMES FOR TILLIE
As a master showman, Moses knew how to generate news. So he retained A.W. Tillinghast as a consultant to the project. Tillinghast was hired on Dec. 30, 1933, months after the Blue, Red and Black courses had been laid out. His contract paid him $50 a day for a maximum of 15 days.

This was hardly the sort of fee Tillinghast normally would have accepted. But the genius who created Winged Foot and Quaker Ridge in New York, Baltusrol and Ridgewood in New Jersey and San Francisco Golf Club in California had fallen victim to bad investments and heavy drinking. Struggling to keep his home in Harrington Park, N.J., unable to find work designing new courses, Tillinghast had taken the job as editor of Golf Illustrated in early 1933.

He visited the Bethpage State Park site in January 1934 and described the scene of 600 workers in his February issue. He wrote about the park again in April, saying that he was "honored by being selected as the consultant in the planning of these courses" and that the land reminded him of Pine Valley. He described the terrain of the fourth and fifth holes of what would become the Red Course. He made no mention of the Black Course.

He talked about Bethpage again in the October issue of Golf Illustrated, this time describing only the caddie corps that Burbeck had established for the existing course.

Work proceeded at Bethpage throughout 1934. Two holes were added to the old Lenox Hills course, now renamed the Green Course, so that all four courses would commence and finish at the new clubhouse. The Blue and Red courses were grassed that fall, but construction on the Black was delayed until the next spring. A new house for the park superintendent was constructed near what is now the 14th green of the Black Course. It's the house Joe Burbeck grew up in.

In June 1934, Tillinghast turned up at the U.S. Open at Merion near Philadelphia. Eager young golf architect Robert Trent Jones spoke with him. Tillinghast said he was so disgusted with the business that he didn't care if he ever built another golf course.

In November, Tillinghast and his wife headed to California to stay with friends. When they returned in February 1935, they found tax assessors had foreclosed on their home, and Tillinghast soon lost his job as magazine editor. He was also "laid off" from the Bethpage project on April 18, 1935. The very next day, Robert Moses and an entourage that included Burbeck led reporters on a grand tour of Bethpage, and a week later the Blue Course was thrown open for play.

To help his destitute friend, George Jacobus, president of the PGA of America, hired Tillinghast to consult with PGA members on how best to improve their courses. On Aug. 10, the clubhouse and Bethpage Red officially opened, with 4-year-old Joe Burbeck unlocking a giant padlock to the clubhouse as Robert Moses looked on. Tillinghast wasn't present. He and his wife were already on the road, the first of two sweeping automobile tours of the country during the next two years while Tillie served as a consultant to PGA of America member courses. He returned periodically to the New York area, but never stopped by Bethpage, not even for the Black Course grand opening on July 2, 1936. Newspaper coverage of that date lauded Robert Moses and the importance of the work-relief nature of the project but made no mention of who designed the course.