Playing Partners
A Father, A Son, and Their Shared Addiction to Golf
Chapter One
Blessed Onlyness
My father's name was Gerhard. Now, imagine growing up in a
middle-class New York suburb, just after World War II, with a father
named Gerhard. I still shudder over that day in second grade when,
in a primitive stab at ethnic profiling, Mrs. Sanford strolled the
room asking each of us to recite the names of our parents.
"Shirley and Bill," "Mary and Bob," "Eileen and Lester," chirped my
homogeneous classmates at the William Street Elementary School. Then
she reached my desk. "Doris and Gerhard," I mumbled quickly. "Doris
and what?" "Gerhard."
"Ah, Gerhard ... that's a good German name," she said, serving two
dozen eight-year-olds their first oxymoron. At recess later that day
my direst fears were realized when Dicky Smyers planted an
accusative finger in my chest and said, "Your dad's a Nazi."
Well, my father was emphatically not a heel-clicker. That said, he
was about as American as apple strudel. Born in a small town in
Schleswig-Holstein in 1903, he left home at age nineteen, hopping a
steamship ... read full excerpt from Playing Partners: A Father, a Son, and Their Shared Addiction to Golf ebook
