« March 18, 2024 | Main | March 20, 2024 »
March 19, 2024
Michigan Links, Golf and Eddie Guest, the People’s Poet, 1919.
Guest in Detroit, 1935
Enormously popular for the first half of the 20th century, Detroit’s Edgar A. Guest (1881-1959) charmed America with simple and often funny upbeat poems celebrating Midwestern common sense and optimism. No. He’s not my favorite poet. But I’ve a special connection to Guest. He owned a house in a small but storied Michigan summer community where I spent Junes and Julys of the 1960s growing up in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. He died just before my family’s first visit there. His house on Lake Huron was purchased by parents of one of my Detroit classmates. So I often played near and sometimes in that huge dark house made of large dark logs with the largest porch I’d ever seen at the top of Cliff Road. Guest was always closely connected to the place. It seems odd we never met. He was greatly loved and always somehow still alive in that place. At least it seemed that way to me.There was old golf course—one of Michigan’s first courses—nearby that my brother and I learned on. Guest played the game and wrote several fairly schmaltzy but fun poems about golf. This one appeared in 1919 as part of his highly popular “A Path Toward Home”.
“A Lesson From Golf”
He couldn't use his driver any better on the tee
Than the chap that he was licking, who just happened to be me;
I could hit them with a brassie just as straight and just as far,
But I piled up several sevens while he made a few in par;
And he trimmed me to a finish, and I know the reason why:
He could keep his temper better when he dubbed a shot than I.
His mashie stroke is choppy, without any follow through;
I doubt if he will ever, on a short hole, cop a two,
But his putts are straight and deadly, and he doesn't even frown
When he's tried to hole a long one and just fails to get it down.
On the fourteenth green I faded; there he put me on the shelf,
And it's not to his discredit when I say I licked myself.
He never whined or whimpered when a shot of his went wrong;
Never kicked about his troubles, but just plodded right along.
When he flubbed an easy iron, though I knew that he was vexed,
He merely shrugged his shoulders, and then coolly played the next,
While I flew into a frenzy over every dub I made
And was loud in my complaining at the dismal game I played.
Golf is like the game of living; it will show up what you are;
If you take your troubles badly you will never play to par.
You may be a fine performer when your skies are bright and blue
But disaster is the acid that shall prove the worth of you;
So just meet your disappointments with a cheery sort of grin,
For the man who keeps his temper is the man that's sure to win.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)
Pointe Aux Barques, Michigan
For me, it beats Big Sur and the Austrian Alps. My favorite place in the world, it is desolate in the winter and still beautiful. Not too many people live here year round: about 10, they say, and even that may be a U.S. Census error. No one around. PAB sits on the northern-most point of the Michigan Thumb, between Port Austin and Grindstone City, on Lake Huron. It was built as a resort community for St. Louis and Detroit business people in the mid-1890s. When I was growing up and we moved about after leaving the DC area--Chicago, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Chicago again, and finally Cincinnati--we spent June and July here no matter where we lived. Had my first "businesses" here (teaching tennis and later a carwash with my brother). This was the only constant place in my childhood. I still dream about the cliffs and the lake and smallmouth bass and our four dogs and my friends. Edgar Guest, the people's poet, a kind of lyrical Will Rogers, owned a cottage on the main still-nameless road. I used to sit on his porch with my first girlfriend, with whom I am still in touch. I've been here in the winter before, when I was in law school; yet being here during any season is hard to describe.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (3)