Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9412270022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Any green. It didn't matter.
Any green on any course that would have them, so they could enjoy the game they shared a great passion for - golf.
But it was the 1950s, years still before busing and Rosa Parks, when blacks and whites drank the same water, only from different drinking fountains, and they couldn't share the same fairways. Golf then was almost exclusively the white man's domain.
Most courses - it didn't matter whether they were private or public - were strictly white-only. In Roanoke, where the Claytors lived and where Dr. Claytor came from a prominent medical family - his father founded Burrell Memorial Hospital - this policy was as true as anywhere. Not one course opened its gates to anyone except whites.
The Claytors, however, were not to be entirely denied. Their love of the game was born years earlier at the dawn of their own union.
The year was 1935. Frank Claytor was in school at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, and he spent that summer working at the Homestead resort in Hot Springs. Natalie lived in nearby Warm Springs and also worked at the Homestead.
The couple met, and along with her brothers who worked as caddies at the resort, Natalie introduced her future husband to golf. They played on a crude course at the resort reserved for the staff, called the goat course because it straddled the side of a mountain. But they also played on the guest courses, sneaking in a few holes in the late evenings after the courses were closed.
In Roanoke, where they later moved when they were married, golf was more off-limits. To play, they had to travel to black courses in Greensboro or Winston-Salem.
It was inconvenient, not to mention unfair, but it was the inconvenience and their love of golf more than anything that moved the Claytors and their friends to eventually break the racial barriers on Roanoke's golf courses.
`Our country club'
They started first at home, or rather, at the Claytor family home place, called The Wagon Wheel Farm, in a section of Roanoke County known then as Kingstown.
The farm was no longer worked by the family, and it was there in the early 1950s that the Claytors built their own par-three course.
They did much of the work themselves, with the help of their seven sons and Natalie Claytor's brother, Hugh Beale.
"It was sort of like a family project," explained Will Claytor, one of the seven sons. Now 47, he is the director of real-estate valuation for Roanoke.
He explained how the course was built.
For the greens, they dug out circular pits in the ground and then filled them with a mixture of sand and discarded motor oil. The mixture compacted to form hard sand greens that didn't require the upkeep and close-cutting of grass greens, but still putted pretty well.
For the tees, they dumped dirt in mounds and boxed them in with railroad ties. The fairways had been pasture land. There were no sand traps, but a small creek running through the property did make for a water hazard on several holes. The holes ranged in distance from 75 to 225 yards.
At first, the Claytors called the course The Par 3 at Wagon Wheel. They also had a swimming pool there, and the old family farmhouse was converted into a clubhouse. Adjacent to the site, too, was the Kingstown Drive-In movie theater.
The Claytors invited their friends and other prominent professionals in the black community to come out. Among some of the first invited were Lawrence Hamlar of Hamlar & Curtis Funeral Home; George Long, a longtime railroad worker and well-known waiter at The Hotel Roanoke; and Frank Landers, who worked for 35 years at Burlington Industries and Precision Fabrics in Vinton.
"It was our country club," said Hamlar, now 72, who was hooked on the game immediately. He still plays today.
All the players were novices, Hamlar said. There was nobody to offer lessons. No club pro. He remembered the first time he went along with the Claytors to the course in Winston-Salem. He had never seen a golf ball washer before. When he tried to use it, he lost his ball in the soapy solution.
"I looked around to see if anybody saw me," Hamlar confessed. "I was so embarrassed.''
Frank Landers, 68, also remembered learning the game. "I could hit a ball a country mile, but then I'd turn my back because I couldn't tell you where it was going," he said.
When Landers brought George Long out to the course, Long remembered being skeptical. "I said, 'Man, I can't play no golf.'"
That night, Long bought his first set of clubs from a pawn shop for $30. "I got the bug in me right from there," he said.
Increasingly discontent
By 1959, the Claytor farm had grown into a popular social spot, as well as a place to play golf. Wives and children would come with the men to picnic or swim in the pool or play cards at the clubhouse. A woman named Clarabell Carter served everything from snacks to full meals out of the farmhouse's kitchen. There were even several white patrons who occasionally came out.
But the Claytors never wanted the hassle of running a country club. They just wanted to play golf.
So, along with Hamlar, Long, Landers and several others, they formed the Pine Valley Golf Association to operate the course.
George Long suggested the Pine Valley name as a nod to the pine trees that dotted the course. But the name also was partly taken from the Pine Valley Golf Club in New Jersey, a course recognized nationally for its difficulty. Either way, it seemed an appropriate moniker.
Over the next several years, membership in the club grew to 78.
At the same time, the more serious golfers in the club grew increasingly discontent. They wanted to play on full 18-hole courses without having to drive to North Carolina.
"What did we do to deserve it?" Long said. "All we wanted to do was play a little golf. You'd think we were asking for their life."
Finally, on the heels of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the group decided to push for change. "All of this we had planned," Hamlar said.
None of them expected much resistence.
"We were confident," Long said.
Already by then, an informal bi-racial commission of black and white community leaders was working to open Roanoke's theaters and lunch counters. The schools had been integrated since 1960.
Racism ``wasn't that dyed-in-the-wool thing. It wasn't something that was ingrained," Hamlar said. "They hadn't established a pattern of, 'This is the way things are.'''
`Natural thing to do'
And none of them felt particularly like they were part of the sweeping civil-rights movement.
Hamlar again: "I never thought too much about the historical thing. I just thought it was the natural thing to do. I didn't think of it being all that newsworthy."
In fact, it wasn't. Their efforts were never chronicled in the newspapers or aired on the 6 o'clock news.
Their quiet resolve was no less unbending, however.
They started at Salem Municipal Golf Course just a few blocks away from where Frank Landers lived. One day, he went up to the course and asked why no black players played there.
Because none had ever asked to play, he was told. They were welcome any time.
"So, I said, `Well, we'll be here tomorrow,''' Landers said. The next day, joined by a foursome that included Hamlar, Long and Sonny Thomas, Landers became the first black man to tee off on a public or private golf course in the Roanoke Valley.
The reaction, he said, was cordial. "Salem was a small town. Everybody knew everybody. They knew me. ... We didn't have a single problem."
Breaking into the area's two other public courses proved more difficult.
At Ole Monterey Golf Course, owner Sy Bahakel at first resisted, fearing that opening the course might drive away his white patrons.
Long said the Pine Valley group had hoped Bahakel, because he is Jewish and also faced discrimination, would be more sympathetic.
To protest, Long or Hamlar or others routinely drove out to Monterey, clubs in tow, and asked to play on the course. Each time, they were refused.
This went on for most of the summer of 1964, until finally, Bahakel called Hamlar at his funeral home business one day and said the course was open.
"In 15 minutes, I had a foursome," Hamlar said.
Again, the reaction was receptive. Other players stopped to shake their hands. "They told us, `This should have been done a long time ago.''' Hamlar remembered.
"You know, that made us feel very proud.''
`That Martin Luther King'
At Blue Hills Golf Course, the group was similarly refused entrance, only this time around, it took considerably more than a summer's worth of pestering to open the door.
At the time, Blue Hills had an agreement with the Hotel Roanoke that allowed guests of the hotel to use the golf course as a courtesy.
So, one of the group members, Red Charlton, checked into the hotel. Then, with his room key and hotel voucher in hand, he went out to the course. He bought some items at the pro shop. But when he asked to play, he was refused.
After that, the group hired Danville civil rights lawyer Ruth Harvey, who sent a letter to the Blue Hills Board of Directors that questioned whether the board really wanted a lawsuit on its hands.
The board then took the issue to club's 500-plus members for a vote. ``It seemed like no one person wanted to say, `I'm the one who opened it up,''' Hamlar said.
But strength in numbers - or anonymity - prevailed. The members voted to open the course.
Other courses in the region quietly followed suit, including Arrow Wood Country Club, which later became Countryside.
There was only one exception: the old Jefferson Hills Golf Club located on Colonial Avenue, not far from Virginia Western Community College. The owner of the property, Edgar F. Jamison, vowed he would close the course before he would change his whites-only policy.
"I didn't want to play the raggedy thing no how," Long recalled. But on principle, he confronted Jamison.
"Before we got started, he told me he wanted to make one thing clear, that he wasn't going to have that Martin Luther King Jr. tell him what the hell to do," Long said.
Long countered that he also wanted to make something clear. "I told him I'm not one of those non-violent niggers," he said. And he wasn't leaving without speaking his mind.
Jamison wouldn't back down. Instead, he offered to donate money for them to build their own course.
Long and the Pine Valley group never pursued Jefferson Hills. It closed several years later, and it remains closed today.
It wasn't long either before the Pine Valley course at the Claytor farm also closed once the more serious golfers like the Claytors, Long and Hamlar could go elsewhere for more serious golf.
Today, Cornerstone Church at 6930 Woodhaven Road sits where the old Claytor farm and clubhouse once stood. The old fairways lay fallow against the end of the runway at Roanoke Regional Airport. The Pine Valley Golf Association essentially disbanded.
"It was sort of like the stone we didn't need to step on anymore," said Will Claytor, whose parents both have died. But like many of the children who watched their parents play golf for the first time at the Pine Valley course, the love of the game was passed on to him as an adult.
In 1987, Claytor noticed more black players taking up the game. So, he ran an advertisement in The Roanoke Tribune asking whether anyone was interested in forming a golf association.
Nearly 30 people responded. George Long suggested using the old Pine Valley name as homage to the past, and the Pine Valley Golf Association was reborn.
Six years later, it boasts some 50 members, including two white members. Last night at a banquet in Roanoke, the association inducted its first honorees into the Pine Valley Golf Association Hall of Fame.
They were Frank and Natalie Claytor, George Long, Lawrence Hamlar, Frank Landers, Henry Whyte and Johnny Jackson. They were the original core of people who met to form the association in 1959.
The story of their efforts will become a part of a permanent exhibit at the Harrison Museum of African American Culture.
Today, old and young members of the association say they rarely encounter any problems on Roanoke's golf courses. Hamlar, who still scores in the 80s, said that speaks to the nature of golf and to sports, where people are judged by ability - not race.
"That's one thing about golf," he said. "All people are equal. You miss your putts. You make your putts. I don't think it's a factor."
by CNB