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In 1915, Woodrow Wilson was in the White House, Babe Ruth hit his first career home run and the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat.
Locally, the Conewango Valley Country Club was born.
Now, CVCC is jumping back in time to celebrate its centennial.
“We’re going back 100 years,” said Mary Conarro, who has been a member at CVCC for roughly 60 years, and along with her husband is among the oldest living members.
On Saturday, the club is hosting a Hickory Shaft Centennial Celebration with pre-registered members playing the original nine holes with period clubs and balls. Conarro said the public is welcome to bring their own clubs and play those nine holes-now 1, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17 and 18-at (the regular greens fees).
The event kicks off at 1 p.m.
Those original holes were designed by Donald Ross, the famed golf course designer whose resume includes Pinehurst No. 1, Pinehurst No. 2 and Pinehurst No. 3 in North Carolina, and were open during World War I. Marshall Parshall, Horace Crary and C.T. Conarro were introduced to Ross’s designs while playing Pinehurst No. 2, and asked that Ross design the course at CVCC.
“This was just as fine a golf course as we could have right here in Warren County,” Mary Conarro said. “It was a championship course.”
Conarro said she made it to the finals of her first state tournament in Philadelphia having only ever playing on those original nine CVCC holes.
When Conarro first moved to Warren from Long Island, N.Y., it was also the only place she had to practice.
“I was very fortunate to marry and come to Conewango. I lived in a town where I could raise my kids and scoot up to the club to practice freely. They supported me in my endeavors. I just continually feel very lucky to develop my game at Conewango Valley,” said Conarro.
CVCC has also seen famous names of the game come through. Walter Hagen, the first native-born American to win the British Open-which he won four times, along with five PGA Championship wins-held the CVCC course record in 1927.
The swimming pool, Rachael Lattanzio wrote in a history piece on the country club, “was donated in the late 1940s. Bob Kopf supplied the steel, Homer Colberton the plumbing supplies, and Tim Creal the wood. Many members donated their time and efforts into building it. Rather than drain the pool every winter, they would place timber in the pool to keep the ice from pushing in the walls of the pool.”
Along with the pool, the ’40s brought structural problems as the north and south exterior walls of the clubhouse started to move outward, Tony Creal wrote. There were no wall ties in the ballroom and it was recommended that the steel tie rods currently in place be added. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, excavation around a deep foundation wall was started to add space, a pro shop and club storage.
“In the ’70s and ’80s it was noticed that the men’s room side of the floor was dropping and I was asked to take a look at it,” Creal wrote. “I hired Joe Siracuse, a structural engineer from Buffalo, to look at it with me. We determined that there was too much weight from the shower room floor resting on the ballroom beam and so we put some vertical steel rods in the ball room wall truss to shore it up and made the shower slab lighter. We did the same thing to the north ballroom wall to keep it from sagging more.”
The ’70s also saw the east end of the original porch “enclosed with permanent glass to create a larger dining room and more attractive views of the golf course,” Creal wrote.
And while the club is soaked in history, it wasn’t all serious history.
At first, Pine Grove Township, where the club is located, was dry, prohibiting alcohol sales, Creal wrote.
“In order to get around that, every member had to bring up their own bottles of various brands with their names on each bottle and in a sense make your own drinks,” Creal wrote. “There were relatively few members but still the bottles at the bar were stacked up to the ceiling. It was common practice for one member or another to run out of one of the bottles and need ‘help’ from a friend to keep drinking … and if a member wasn’t there, the familiar cry went out, ‘Take it out of Dean Anderson’s bottle.'”
Creal also wrote about an impromptu bonfire at the club.
“Lloyd Cleveland earned fame by being very frugal and couldn’t come up with the full three dollars to pay his caddy, so the caddies went on strike and ended up burning down the caddy shack,” Creal wrote.
Even current events wound their way into the fun.
“One of them was a devil,” Conarro said. “Krushchev was our worst enemy for the United States and they had a picture of him on a dart board. Everyone tried to throw darts at him and win a prize.”
Aside from golf, the club was and is also a hub for social events.
“They had wonderful parties,” said Conarro. “Fashions were definitely a must and everyone would get all dressed up. They were monthly parties. Conewango Valley was a focal point for people who enjoyed that kind of social activity.”
Elaborate costumes, grand and Bavarian parties were once a usual occurrence at the club, Lattanzio wrote.
“They got dressed up and had fun,” Conarro said.
The Bavarian party, Conarro said, was the biggest of them all.
“They would bring a band down from Buffalo (N.Y.),” said Conarro. “They would play what they called ‘um-pah-pah’ music and they all were dressed in their lederhosen. It always was a very well-attended party. That was an annual event and it went on for decades.”
The hickory stick event is something Conarro would like to see have the same draw as the parties.
“If hickory stick becomes something we enjoy, we might make this an annual event,” she said.