As peace prevailed, there was concern among U.S. economists that hundreds of thousands of soldiers returning home from the battlefields of Europe and the South Pacific would lead to rampant unemployment. That proved to be farther off the mark than some of the wayward drives you’ll see off White Tees on a Short Hills weekend. 

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The American economy exploded in the months and years following the war, and the QC economy boomed with it.

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Thanks to John Deere and the expansive farm tool manufacturing industry that had grown up around his steel plow, jobs were waiting in plenty when Quad Cities Johnnies came marching home.

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By July 1948, the bi-state region boasted more than 46,000 industrial jobs in more than 300 plants large and small, and the QCs were featured in a 1949 edition of the national magazine Business Week under the headline “The Farm Machinery Capital of the World.”

 

One decorated returning soldier, though, forsook the machine shop for the pro shop.

 

Tom Campagna was 11 when he began caddying at Short Hills in 1935, joining his four brothers and dozens more sons of factory workers who grew up in a row of houses on 19th Street in East Moline.

 

Campagna long remembered carrying the bags of early Short Hills icons like East Moline Mayor E.H. Sohner, florist Jules Staack and the original Judge Francis Coyle.

 

Campagna had risen to the rank of caddie master before he left to join the U.S. Marines in the fight overseas. He returned with a pair of hard-earned Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in the Pacific theater, and an eye on returning to the work he’d left behind.

 

On return to Short Hills, Campagna served in nearly every role but the proverbial chief cook and bottle washer: janitor, pro shop manager, and bartender, to name a few. Campagna was assistant club manager to Lucille Bartlett when she resigned in 1951, and the war hero was asked to hold down the position while a search was conducted for Bartlett’s replacement.

 

Hold it down, he did. Excepting for a two-year period spent working on the mighty fine Rock Island Line, followed by one year as manager of Burlington Country Club — “I got tired of everyone thinking of me as ‘Little Tommy,’” he said years later of that brief interlude — Campagna managed Short Hills with efficiency, grace and an iron golf glove until his retirement in 1987.

 

‘He Ran a Tight Ship’

 

Some 35 years after his retirement and a quarter-century beyond his death, stories still are being told about the omnipresent Campagna at the club on the hilltop he literally called home.

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The one told most often concerns a fire in the clubhouse basement discovered by Campagna in the early morning hours of July 13, 1977. He discovered it because he lived in an apartment upstairs with his wife and daughter. 

 

The good news was that fire only caused $75,000 in damage to the aging structure. That was also the bad news because the clubhouse was, well, an aging structure.  

 

“All the members wanted it to burn down,” said Short Hills veteran Jim Christiansen, whose family joined in 1954 and who served as a pallbearer at Campagna’s funeral many years later. “There’s Tom up there in the apartment. He stopped it.”

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Today, Short Hills members still speculate on whether Campagna’s quick call to the fire department that early July morning was made, in part, to preserve what he thought was a pretty sporty wardrobe. His style assessment seems open to interpretation.

 

Campagna’s niece Lynn Downey started a half-century-long stay as a Short Hills employee in 1967, and, like virtually everyone, has fond memories of her uncle’s on-the-job demeanor.

 

“He always came off very serious, but he had a funny side to him,” she recalled. “You never knew when he was going to crack a smile or crack a joke.  He was kind of in the trenches of it all. He was a good guy. He ran a tight ship. He was a Marine, so if you did something, you did it right. He was a good guy to work for and he was fair.”

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Campagna was respectful of the members who employed him, but they, too, were expected to follow the rules. 

 

Decorum was mandatory as Short Hills began to hit its stride as a club in the middle of the 20th Century, including a non-negotiable requirement that all men would wear jackets in the dining room.

Campagna had a cure — from his own closet, some might posit — for those who chronically attempted to circumvent that rule.

 

“We always had to have jackets on hand guys could wear, and Tom would come up with some unusual jackets,” Downey remembered. “Don’t know where he got them from, but the members started remembering to bring their own jackets.”

 

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