Sport: Atomic Golf Balls

In one of his gloomier moments Poet T. S. Eliot predicted that Western civilization’s sole enduring monuments would be “the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls.” Not if Bart Leiper of Gatlinburg, Tenn. has his way. Leiper, a drumbeater for the local Chamber of Commerce, needed a gimmick to promote the opening of Gatlinburg’s new Pigeon Forge golf course and hit on a surefire teaser: atomic golf balls. At nearby Oak Ridge he persuaded scientists to inject three golf balls with pellets of radioactive cobalt 60, happily headed home to Gatlinburg with the fixings. On opening day last week, as Miss Gatlinburg of 1955 posed prettily on the first tee, a blindfolded caddy, toting a borrowed Geiger counter, demonstrated that a radioactive golf ball could be found no matter how deep the grass or how dense the bushes off the fairway. For all Booster Leiper’s pride, however, the atomic golf ball was still only an experiment. Even if the Atomic Energy Commission approved their manufacture, radioactive golf balls would cost $20 to $35 apiece, too expensive for any but the best-heeled Wastelanders.