Art: Stradivari of Golf

John Campbell, assistant plant engineer of the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co., returned to New York last week from the home of his ancestors on the S. S. Majestic with a portfolio of rare and valuable prints, a box full of strange balls and about 80 ancient & honorable golf clubs. There were warped cleeks, battered baffys, jiggers, brassies, spoons and nibicks, the whole making the finest collection of antique golfing impedimenta ever brought to the U. S. Soon they will occupy a special museum wing in the new cruciform James River Country Club near Newport News. After he had exhibited a print of what he believes to be the first recorded game of golf, reprinted from an illuminated Book of Hours in 1457 in the British Museum, Engineer Campbell dumped the rest of his treasures on the deck for the benefit of ship news reporters. They included a number of bullet hard leather pellets stuffed with feathers. “These are the famous feather balls,” said Mr. Campbell. “They were in vogue until 1858 when they were replaced by the hard rubber ‘gutties.’ They have a cover of horse leather soaked in oil and are filled with gull feathers. It took a top hat full of feathers to stuff one ball. They are a wee bit hard.” Pride of the collection are a group of early 19th Century clubs from the bench of the late great Hugh Philip of Scotland. “Just as fine a piece of skill this chap Philip had with golf clubs as Stradivari with his violins. There is nothing sweeter than some of his sticks. Fact is, every one of them I got is a treasure. Thank the Lord golf sticks can’t be turned out like ice boxes. . . .” The Virginia gentry who will soon have a chance to see the work of the Stradivari of golf must thank a New Yorker for them. The golf museum was made possible through the munificence of an indefatigable museum founder, tall Archer Milton Huntington, son of Railroad Builder Collis Potter Huntington. Archer Huntington insists that his real hobby is Hispanic studies, not founding museums. He has written several travel books on Spain, translated the epic of the Cid Campeador, introduced Artists Zuloaga and Sorolla to the U. S. Less successfully last winter he sponsored one Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós. Argentine illustrator (TIME, March 7).

His second wife, 56-year-old Anna Hyatt Huntington, is the daughter of Zoologist Alpheus Hyatt. She is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and a sculptor fully equal in ability to Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney. A pupil of Gutzon Borglum, she designed a huge equestrian statue of the Cid in action for her husband’s Hispanic Museum, but specializes in lions and Joans of Arc. Her best known Joan, that on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, shows the Maid standing in her stirrups with sword raised. Other Anna Huntington Joans have been erected at Gloucester, Mass., Blois, France, and in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

As a museum founder, Mr. Huntington is chiefly responsible for the Museum of the Hispanic Society of America and the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Last year he set aside a section of his estate near Camden, S. C. as a sanctuary for ancient mules and offered to pay $20 apiece for broken down jacks and jennies until the mule migration from North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama became more than he could cope with.

Hardly was news of the golf museum cold on the presses last week than Archer Huntington started still another. To Syracuse University he gave a 13,000-acre tract of Adirondack forest land, principally in Essex County, N. Y., to be known as ”The Archer and Anna Huntington Wild Life Forest Station,” where students of the University’s New York State College of Forestry may hide in the bushes, watching the habits of the mink, the rabbit, the deer and the muskrat.

The golf museum is by no means his only gift to the city of Newport News. Archer Huntington is the principal owner of the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co., builders of numerous naval vessels and the Dollar liners President Hoover and President Coolidge. About two years ago he announced that he would like to establish a Mariners’ Museum near the shipyard to contain a fine collection of ship models and exhibitions of marine equipment, engines, prints, maps, etc. on the order of the great maritime display in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The plan grew. Trustees of the Mariners’ Museum bought 811 acres of land, built an artificial lake 165 acres in extent, tenderly transported 15,000 crabs to the salt waters of the James River, established a game sanctuary and forestry school, and organized a ladies’ garden club.

At the present time the Mariners’ Museum contains almost everything from wild geese to hybrid rhododendrons except ship models. A workshop to build such models all on the scale of a quarter of an inch to the foot has been designed by Mrs. Huntington and built. Modelmakers’ first task will be to reconstruct every craft launched at the Newport News yard.