Prologue -- Shattered Dreams

As 1960 dawned, Americans had good reason to believe that a bountiful era was at hand. For the first time in nearly a decade, no Americans were fighting abroad. The 1950s had been a decade of prosperity (that is, if you were Anglo), inventions and innovations. Three out of every four houses had a television (a percentage that was rapidly increasing each year). The interstate highway system had ushered in the automobile era and more and more Americans were moving to suburbia.

Nowhere was that truer than in Southern California. Houses and housing tracts - indeed, whole new cities - were springing up almost overnight. Freeways were being laid as quickly as possible (bulldozing, among other things, the region's once thriving rail rapid transit network known as the Red Cars). Cheap gasoline made it possible for people to drive wherever they wanted for work or pleasure.

The economic boom was also felt in the golf community. More than 150 golf courses were built in Southern California from 1960-1979, ranging from modest municipal layouts to elaborate country clubs. Golf course communities began to spring up, not all of which survived; many developers were simply a decade or so ahead of their time and some of the courses (and their surrounding communities) went by the wayside.

The "baby boomers" were having children of their own in record numbers and the whole society began to take on a more youthful look. Nowhere was that better symbolized than when John F. Kennedy became the youngest person ever to be elected President of the United States. It was a run that many thought would never end . . . until a sunny day in Dallas, Texas.

Perhaps America came of age on November 22, 1963; it certainly turned a page in its history and entered a turbulent era.

Led by a charismatic preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement ushered in new rights for all Americans. The movement was too fast for some, not swift enough for others. King was eventually assassinated.

The nation did slide slowly into another war, this time in an area of the world hardly anyone knew about before 1960: Vietnam. We landed men on the moon, saw another Kennedy assassinated and watched Richard Nixon resign in 1974 as U.S. President. Along the way, we entered the computer age and never even noticed as a new disease appeared: AIDS.

The nation grew up in those 20 years. So did the golf community.

After the successful fight to pass Proposition 6 (which helped guarantee fair taxation for golf course and other recreational facilities), the SCGA began to mature into an organization that did more than just rate golf courses and conduct tournaments. Although the seeds of that growth were sowed by boards in the 1940s and 1950s, it was in the 1960s that the SCGA began to implement programs that would have long-term impacts on all golfers throughout the association.

Chapter 1 -- Handicapping: From Index Cards to Computers

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