Men of Vision

Listen to William M. Short, president of Seattle’s Inglewood Country Club: “We saw it coming months ago. Over in Kirkland (site of the Lake Washington Shipyards, five miles from Inglewood) war workers are sleeping in chicken sheds, in parked cars. We had square yards of space going unused 20 hours out of the day.”

Farsighted Inglewood Club members did something about it. They turned their $200,000 clubhouse, surrounded by fine lawns and sweeping fairways, into a dormitory which will house and feed, twice daily, 300 men who pay $12.50 (or $13.50 for a private room) per week.

The few Inglewood golfers who still venture out 14 miles from Seattle for a game see grease-stained workers and a few sailors playing table tennis, the slot machines, drinking beer and inexpensive Scotch at the club’s bar, playing poker and bridge in the lounge, reading before the great fireplaces or rambunctiously roughhousing in the corridors on the second floor.

But the members do not mind. “The money we take in,” said Bill Short, “will pay to keep up the greens and fairways. When the war is over we still will have a golf course”—which is more than some clubs are going to have.

Significant Fact: Hardheaded, practical Bill Short, whose idea it was, is past president of the Washington State Federation of Labor and a former coal miner who was educated to golf and country-club life through his dickerings with businessmen on wages & hours problems.