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Orlando, Florida The curled up cigarette danced with the wind across the vacant lot, my thoughts running after it toward a time when golf wrapped its arms around me in an unusual way. In the mid 1950s, my father and three friends opened a miniature golf course, driving range and a fully-lighted par three, a side business for Les Lerner, Jack Lesavoy, Sheldon Merman and Murray Saltzman. In the aftermath of World War II, the Sheldons and the Murrays, college educated sons of the Abes and the Sols who had made good from their meager immigrant lot, were free to take their swings at what must have seemed to their fathers to be such frivolous pursuits. But it made a bit of sense. In fast growing suburban locales like Allentown, Pennsylvania, two hours west of New York City, men could still hold down jobs at Mack Trucks and Bethlehem Steel for 30 years. They'd have leisure time. Meanwhile, golf was enjoying a surge in popularity thanks to a rugged bull of a man from Western Pennsylvania. His forearms chiseled from a blast furnace, Arnold Palmer embodied the can-do spirit of a country eager to get on with the simple job of enjoying its hard won freedom.  Palmer embodied the spirit of a country eager to enjoy its hard won freedom. Palmer practically invented the role of athlete as endorser, as my father would come to find out. He contacted the rising star in hopes of putting his name and likeness on the new golf venture. But Palmer's asking price was prohibitive, so the Dorneyville Golf Center was born, named for the tiny borough on the expanding edge of town. Business was so slow in the early years that my dad jokingly called it the first fully lighted cemetery in America. By the early '70s, though, it was fully entrenched in the community. By this time, my three brothers and I were coming of age, and would work there from our teen years through college. We operated the cash registers, picked up trash, planted flowers and drove the range picker collecting and then washing golf balls. Naturally, we played plenty of pinball and spent our share of time on the range. We hired mostly our friends as co-workers. During slow periods in the morning we'd sit around the picnic tables on the patio listening to the old pro, Frank Stocke, tell stories. Frank sat the way good storytellers sit, comfortably with his right leg crossed over his left. The eight-dollar lawn chair may as well have been a Lazy-Boy. His audience on this warm July morning was a group of teenaged boys, none of whom had experienced much beyond suburban life. Frank, early 60s with silver hair slicked back across a balding pate, impeccable tan borne of years dispensing five-dollar lessons in crisply pressed, powder blue or green Zanzabelts, drew deeply on the unfiltered Pall Mall, eyes becoming slits above a face whose myriad lines read like a beat up map of all the city's corner barrooms. He coolly exhaled the blue-gray stream of smoke and the young flock inched forward. My eyes instinctively followed the airborne cigarette stub, flicked from Frank's thick fingers with the precision of a Jack Nicklaus seven iron. Someone would sweep it up later. The tale was about to begin. "Why one year," Frank intoned in a deep, smoker's baritone, "I lead The Reading Open." "You're kidding!" I shot back, playing straight man for a guy who worked a night shift at Willard Battery and hustled golf lessons by day. "You really lead a pro tournament?"
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