Golf Ball Hunter

    A friend recently got back from visiting her parents in England.  When she was telling about her trip, she mentioned that she stayed in a B & B, near her parent’s house.  When I wondered why, she said her parents owned a regular sized house, but her father used one room for his Lego projects and another room for his trains.  This started me thinking about my father.

    I can’t remember my father ever dedicating himself to a hobby.  He looked after the lawn, property, and house maintenance and maybe on a rare occasion, went fishing, but I can’t really think of anything that I could say was his hobby, at least when I was living at home.  That changed after I had moved to Canada, and my brothers and sisters, also “left the nest”. 

    Then in our weekly phone calls, my mother started mentioning that my dad would go out early every morning and hunt for golf balls.  (Our property did butt up beside a golf course.)  

    Dad would find the golf balls, clean them up, put them in egg cartons, and sell them.  I was happy to learn that he finally seemed to have a hobby to keep himself occupied, but I didn’t really realize just how huge that hobby of his was.

    In the summer of 1990, we flew down to Indiana to visit with my family.  While there, my dad continued his early morning treks to the golf course, and the number of balls he brought back astounded me.  Here are the number of golf balls Dad found that I recorded in my diary:

    July 3-    40

    July 5-    53

    July 6-    50

    July 7-    50

    July 8-    70 (My brother Roy joined Dad in the hunt)

    July 9-    103

    July 11-    70

    

    On on July 14th, before I went to bed, my mother suggested to me that I go with my dad on his early morning golf ball expedition.  Hearing that we would have to leave at 5:00 AM, I declined the invitation, but a few days later on July 15th, I woke up at 4:30 AM and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got dressed and went out golf ball hunting with my dad.  

    It was still dark outside, and misty, but it was warm.  We tramped around in the woods beside the golf course, but didn’t find many balls.  The golf course did have a tournament the day before, so I guess they had a more talented cliental playing on the links.  The water level of the lake on the course was low because they had been irrigating,  and with Dad’s extending ball grabber, we were able to pull 50 balls out of the lake.  All together, we found 73 golf balls that morning. 

    July 16-    70

    July 17-    91, plus a #2 Iron, golf club

    We left on our flight back to Canada later that day.    

    

    I have always been amazed at the huge number of golf balls that my father collected and sold, and what terrible golfers must have played at the course.

    Now thirty years later, memories of all those golf balls remain in my memory, and whenever I see a golf ball (not very often), I always think of my dad.

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