100 YEARS OF HISTORY
A fateful Do Si Do, raucous house parties and golf, of course: DCC’s oldest member reflects on traditions for its 100th birthday
Text by Paul Logothetis
Prize-giving, the corn boil, the yearly quilt raffle, the Ladies’ Cocktail Party, and the parties, of course: These are but a handful of the traditions nurtured since the Dunany Country Club’s inception in 1922. For Alexander Gray “Sandy” Hyde, the club’s oldest living member, these traditions – and the volunteers who make them function – symbolize the DCC community.
“After 100 years, there are many traditions within the club and those traditions are at the heart of what made the club work. A small club like ours can’t live on anything but tradition, please continue with them,” says the 98-year-old, who is quick to point to the role of volunteers in nurturing the golf course and the community’s longevity.
“Volunteers do everything and through the volunteers you make a community, which is what Dunany is,” says Sandy, who recognized the attraction of Dunany the moment he first set foot here, “by accident,” as he puts it.
1930: A Dunany introduction
In the summer of 1930, the Hydes travelled from Montreal to visit friends who were renting the smaller Maguire cottage on Clear Lake. The horse-and-buggy days may have been a thing of the recent past, but the journey to Dunany was a multi-hour trek. Getting on the single-lane, gravel-and-rock Dunany Road from Lachute, you’d be lucky to avoid a tire blowout and make it to the cottage within 45 minutes.
The Great Depression was all around them and, while Sandy’s father William’s takehome pay was a lot less than it had been around the time of Sandy’s birth in 1924, the family had it better than most. Still, Sandy played with hand-me-down clubs that summer when he got his first taste of the sport, playing alongside his mother, Bessie.
The course, only eight years old, had come a long way since the founding members each paid $50 to acquire the Smith Farm for $950. The terrain was well wooded, hilly and strewn with rocks, and the members got to work felling trees, clearing brush, removing rocks and mowing fairways with the occasional assistance from a rented team of horses. Funds to develop the course were raised by selling the lumber.
By the time Sandy teed off for the first time, the course had gone from three holes with sand greens to six holes, and the transformation to a nine-hole, par-32 course was completed by 1927. Sandy remembers the course being tough, with the fairway grass long, the rough an afterthought, and the greens requiring a backswing to get the ball to the hole.
The Hydes fell for Dunany, especially its pristine lakes, and began renting the original Sutherland cottage on Boyd Lake. The family would eventually build on land that Phineas MacVicar had leased to them on Clear Lake.
Though there was no established junior program, Sandy’s golf game improved alongside playing partners Bob Everson and Walter Tilden. The three of them would go on to win a combined 14 Men’s Club Championships (a joint-record 10 to Bob Everson and three to Walter Tilden).
“Everson would start out in the rowboat and pick me up from my dock before we got Tilden, and we’d dock the boat just past Ken Smith’s house. We’d slip between properties and walk along the path in the woods that came out right at the golf course,” says Sandy, who went on to play with many of the club’s founding members.
“I was playing reasonably well by 14 and the older ones knew I could play. If my friends couldn’t play, I would go over to the golf course and sit on the 1st tee. René Raguin and his friends would come along and, if they were short one, I was invited to join. Any time somebody had three, they’d ask me to play with them and I’d say I’d love to. It was indicative of the way the club worked.”
1939: The clubhouse’s inauguration
The club has always enjoyed a good party, and Sandy has clear memories of the celebration of the clubhouse’s inauguration in 1939, when hundreds of guests showed. “It was a wingding,” Sandy says of the square dance that featured three fiddlers backing up master caller Clarence Neil.
“Everybody from miles around were there, with the clubhouse interior managing rectangle dancing – six squares of eight for 48 – at one time inside and three sets dancing outside on the screen porch. The clubhouse was overflowing! And even with all that banging and dancing, the floor never collapsed!”
Fate smiled on 15-year-old Sandy that night as he snagged a dance with Hugh Kearns’ niece, Grace. Grace was visiting from Montreal, where they would randomly meet again soon after and begin a courtship that would end in marriage. As Sandy and Grace squared their sets and Do-Si-Do’d, Sandy couldn’t help noticing the adults awash in the fun, ducking out of the clubhouse to the surrounding woods for a belt of booze (the bar had yet been built).
“After doing this seven or eight times, those adults could hardly stand up,” says Sandy. “Some were worse than others, some had the reputation, anyway.”
Parties have been a staple of Dunany summer life, especially house parties in those early days when the club was ill-equipped for the daily usage we have come to know. Oil lamps lit the scene before electricity was available to all in 1950 and while the first telephone line to Dunany was extended to James Parkes’ cottage on Clear Lake in 1930, it wasn’t until 1946 when most Dunany residents had them. Actual partying calmed down during the war years and in 1942 an 18-year-old Sandy won his lone men’s Club Championship.
1942: Winning the Men’s Club Championship
“This was in war time and you have to remember my nemesis was Jack Haldimand, who had beaten me the previous two years. He was now in the army,” says Sandy, who had watched as Jack Haldimand had won the Wilson Cup (now called the Wilson-M.D. Roy Cup) three years running.
“I can't remember a thing about (winning it), the only thing I knew was that this was probably the last time I was going to play this competition with confidence,” says Sandy, who recalls needing an intense level of concentration to win the championship. “Thank goodness Jack Haldimand was not playing! If I was ever going to win this thing, I was going to do it now.”
Sandy and his younger brother, Ferrell
The war’s impact was clear, even at the golf course where less members were available to help with maintenance. When Sandy collected his trophy at prize-giving, he knew life would change in the coming months when he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. For Sandy, there was never any question about signing up.
“It was more a peer pressure thing than anything else. You’re 18, the world’s your oyster and there is a certain amount of excitement about it. Everyone was doing it. You didn’t really think about it so much,” says Sandy, who was posted in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where he flew navigators out to sea and taught math until war’s end.
Sandy remembers the elation that followed war’s end, especially in Dunany, where friends and families reunited and celebrated with vigour.
“The parties were more raucous after the war,” he says. “Parties were the best part of our summers in Dunany.”
Dunany: A lifelong home
In 1955, Sandy and Grace bought the Allyson Family cottage next to his parents (which would eventually be owned by his younger brother Ferrell). Sandy, Grace and their children – Janet and Lynn – didn’t miss a summer in Dunany until the couple moved to Victoria in 2003. With visits more sparing, Ross Leslie asked the board to make Sandy a lifetime member.
“My wife and I lived in 26 different houses through our marriage because of moving around for work, and Dunany was our only constant home,” says Sandy, whose career in the construction industry took the family across the country. “We looked forward to visiting with our friends each summer because the friends didn’t change even if the housing did.”
Sandy won’t be in Dunany to celebrate its 100th birthday but knows it will be a memorable celebration.
“Continue what you’re doing because you are doing it very well,” he says. “If you don’t continue with volunteers, your community will fall apart. The proof is there after six generations; how many places can say that?”
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Sandy Hyde’s guide to the original 9-hole, par-32 Dunany Country Club golf course
The original hole names are listed and may appear different from the scorecard as the order of the holes was changed at times. Don Sutherland suspects the same card was used throughout this time, probably because a large number of cards were printed after the course was expanded to 9 holes.
1st hole: Stewart (342 yards, par 4)
“It was a lot narrower than it is now, and the purchase of the Boyd Farm changed it. There was a great sand trap halfway up the hill on the right side, between the 1st and 7th. The green was on the right side of the present green, you can still see the outline.”
2nd hole: Maples (142 yards, par 3)
“The outline of the tee is still visible (in the woods behind the original 1st green). The green was to the left of the current 6th hole green and the hole was much shorter, closer to 102 yards.”
3rd hole: Canyon (185 yards, par 3)
“It was a long walk through the woods to the 3rd tee, which was on the right just as it is now. The green stood alone beside the tall fir tree. It was a difficult green to hold; you could drive it, but it was better to land it at the bottom of the hill and use a wedge and hit it up.”
4th hole: Pines (166 yards, par 3)
“You took a right off the 3rd green and walked through the woods to the 4th hole. The green was very small, about 130 to 140 yards from the tee then, and it was set behind the current 4th green, about halfway down the path to the 5th tee, which today is the Ladies tee.”
“It’s an especially emotional hole for me because it was on that bench I proposed to my wife, Grace, in 1947. I used a dandelion, and I still have it.”
5th hole: The Bend (320 yards, par 4)“It’s hardly changed at all. At the time, the tee was on the right and the green is the same as today.”
6th hole: Lakeview (430 yards, par 4)
“McRobie’s Walk was a path through the woods along the current 6th that took you to the original 6th tee, which was set below today’s 7th tee. You would drive over the hill and down where there was a great big sand trap on the right to catch a slice. The 6th green was essentially the same as the 7th today, but it was a lot smaller .”
Sandy scored a hole-in-one on the current 6th hole in 1990.
7th hole: Over Brook (166 yards, par 3)
“There was no clubhouse at that time when I started playing. From the tee, you hit over the creek and it was a bit like the 3rd hole: you could drive the green but the green wasn’t going to hold your ball at all. At some point the distance felt like it was closer to 210 yards off the tee.”
8th hole: Punch Bowl (234 yards, par 4)
“The tee was in the woods (after you cross the creek and climb the hill, the tee is set immediately to your right about 15 yards into the woods) and the lady’s tearoom (or the pavilion that was there before the clubhouse) was to the right of this tee. We called this hole the “Punch Bowl” because the hole went down over the creek – there was no pond before the war – up the hill and onto the green. The outline of the green is still visible on the 9th fairway, on the plateau as you walk down off the Ladies tee.”
9th hole: Home (350 yards, par 4)
“You walked halfway up the hill to a very small tee that stuck out, on the right side. Then you played down toward where the 9th green still is now. And then you went home.”
Apart from the Club Championship victory in 1942, Sandy’s list of silverware, included: the Raguin Leslie Cup (2000); the Mustache Cup (2001, ’02); the Dan Main Shield (with Peg Percy in 1991); the Lake Louisa Trophy (1987, 1994 Flight B); and the Clarence Neill (with Revilla Sauve, Don Manconi and David Tomalty in 2001).
Sandy scored an ace on the 6th hole in 1990.
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