CHAPTER 4: THE SOCIAL SCENE
Even sitting at home with his sisters and a babysitter, Marc Vanderbeke knew Saturday nights at the Short Hills of his youth were infinitely special.
“I remember every Saturday night, we’d be home, and our parents would come out here,” Vanderbeke recalled from his childhood in the early 1960s. “Go out to dinner. Dance. Parties. There were big bands. Ballroom dancing.
“My dad would dress to the nines. My mom? Oh, she was so pretty. My mom always said my dad was the best dancer out here. He was a professional tap dancer when he was like 18 or 19 years old. When they’d have parties out here, my mom said, ‘Everybody wants to dance with Dad. I want to dance with him, too.’ All the wives knew Stoney could just float on the floor.”
If it sounds like a scene from a Busby Berkeley musical, you’ve got the right idea about the Short Hills social scene in the mid-to-late 20th Century
For three decades, from the late 1950s through Tom Campagna’s 1987 retirement, Short Hills Country Club was, as Jim Jannes said, “the place to you wanted to go” and “the place you wanted to be seen.”
And not just on Saturdays. Day and night. Six days a week. (On Mondays, they rested.)
Art Holmes remembers diners lined up wall-to-wall — all dressed formally, of course — for the best prime rib in town.
“Boy , if you asked somebody to go out to Short Hills for prime rib, they couldn’t say yes fast enough,” he said.
The occasionally honorable Judge Greg Chickris remembers the music — orchestras and then later rock ’n roll bands. And he remembers the (still) infamous Short Hills pours.
“The booze was fantastic,’’ said Chickris, an East Moline native whose family joined Short Hills in 1972. “Short Hills was noted that they gave you a full pour.”
Jim Jannes would second that.
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“If you think you could go in there and have two scotches and water and go home, you’d be crazy,” he said. “You would be on your ass. They poured you a drink.”
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Bob Schwieder joined Short Hills in 1977 and descends from a great uncle who was a founding member more than a half-century before. He recalls regular block-party gatherings at the club with his neighbors from Moline’s Wildwood Addition, who almost exclusively were Short Hills members.
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“It was a great neighborhood, convenient to Short Hills,” Schwieder said. “You never even thought about going across the river to another club.”
According to Lynn Downey, the Homewood gang could give the Wildwood bunch a run for their money.
“They were all diehard Short Hills people,” she said. “There were likely 40 to 50 to 60 of them and when they’d come to party, they would party until the wee hours of the morning. Everybody came and partied hard.”
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Fun and neighborliness extended beyond Moline neighbors, of course.
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“Everybody was friends with everybody. They had a good time,” Downey recalled. “Short Hills was the fun club.”
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And a busy one.
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In the mid-60s, Fulton said the board upped the number of certificate holders from 300 to 325, and the waiting list still totaled 50 or more.
Families raised the number of actual memberships to close to 800, Downey said. In the summer months, the club employed three shifts of 100 to 120 employees. And the members kept them hopping.
“The people who enjoyed Short Hills, the people who used Short Hills, they really used it,” Jim Christiansen recalled. “It wasn’t one or two days a week. Arvid Koehler spent five days a week eating dinner. That was the way with a lot of people.
“Short Hills was the entertainment center. If you belonged to Short Hills, you used it. It was a social gathering. And, boy, it was used.”
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The Family Place
From the outset, remember, George Ross declared Short Hills would grow as “a family playground.”
As the 1960s dawned, that is precisely how the club grew.
Marc Vanderbeke came of age within a par 5s distance from today’s 12th tee, biked to the course as a youngster and either used the pool, fished the ponds with his pals when groundskeeper Tom VandeWalle wasn’t looking, and developed a golf game good enough to later win multiple club championships.
Tom Bracke hailed from the same neighborhood and likewise built his game by spending summers at the “family playground.” He got good good and fast, winning his first club championship at age 16.
“My dad was 43 years old when he started to play and he really didn’t know much about golf,” remembered Bracke, who went on to play Division I college golf at the University of South Florida. “But we played a lot together as a family – my mom, my brother, and my dad, and we just kind of learned the game together. We just kept playing golf and enjoying it and, sooner or later, I got pretty decent at it.
“This was our summer cottage,” Bracke said of Short Hills. “We didn’t go to Minnesota or Michigan or Wisconsin. We spent all of our time here. I rode my bike over here and we spent all the time we could here.”
Marty Davis and Jim Smith enjoyed their teen-aged years at Short Hills in the early 60s, spending time at the pool or on the links.
“There were a lot of teenagers hanging out at the pool,” Davis recalled. “A lot of good-looking girls in bikinis. We had a lot of kids to play with, a big junior program. Over at the tennis courts was a little practice green and a bunker. And I would spend hours over at the shag area while my brother was at the pool hanging out with the girls.”
John Callas was a lifeguard at the pool in the 1970s along with a preponderance of his teammates on the Moline High School swim team.
“The pool was packed,” Callas said. “We’d blow the whistle at five minutes to the hour, call out adult swim and the adults and the guards could get in. It was a lot of fun.”
Family ties certainly are built into the memories Jim Christiansen has of Short Hills.
All three of his children were married at Short Hills, and his father died there when he suffered a stroke related to diabetes during a family dinner.
“You talk about a family that lived there, that was us,” Jim remembered. “I spent more time there than the average person because I was working our business there. And I played a lot of golf. Of course, when I was there that club was packed. We had to wait sometimes an hour to get on the golf course. Always played as a fivesome, and that helped make Short Hills. That way if somebody wanted to play golf and they were by themselves, they were going to play golf with somebody. That was the attitude of the club.”
Kids didn’t always have ready access to the golf course. But a few got good enough at the game to challenge the club supremacy of more experienced older hands. They weren’t necessarily warmly welcomed.
“The golf course had rules when kids could play and when they couldn’t and they were pretty stringent,” John Callas recalled, noting there was a backlash when a teen-aged Tom Bracke won the club championship.
Callas’ sister Elena’s women’s championship win at age 13 caused even more of a stir, he said. “They wanted her to wait to play again until she was 16, but by then she’d moved on to U.S. Junior Amateurs,” he said.
Ultimately, Elena Callas took her game to the University of Iowa, where she won All-American honors and today has a plaque in the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
“I got to know Elena,” Bracke said. “She was like me. She would spend her days hitting balls at the range. I was a few years older but her work ethic was incredible. She was the first girl I ever played with who could hit backspin. And she knew how to hit the ball. She was a real player.”
Unlike many early country clubs, and more than a few of later vintage, Short Hills never was an old boy’s club. By the 1960s, women were true players in club business in many ways.
Ladies' Days on Tuesday mornings drew large numbers and the Short Hills side often held its own in Waterman Cup competitions, which were the female version of the Velie. And even when they didn’t play well, they still looked good, Marc Vanderbeke remembered.
“It wasn’t as big as the Velie, but they battled each other,” he said, noting one of his fondest memories was caddying for Geri Vanderbeke at Oakwood at age 13. “Those ladies dressed to the Ts, too. Their skirts were the same color as their shirts. It was pretty cool. And I was proud of my mom.”
Off the course, women were making an impact as well.
“Women make up a tremendous amount of our overall business now,” Campagna said in a 1961 Quad-City Times story about the growing country club scene in the area.
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Let’s Party
Certainly, wives had much to do with the most social events of any Short Hills year: Its magnificent parties.
“The parties at Short Hills were known all over,” Jim Christiansen said. “One was New Years, the other was the June Party. No 1 event at Short Hills and believe me when I tell you there were years at the June Party, you couldn’t even get in. It was that crowded. It was the best party in town. Believe me, it was.”
Each June Party would feature its own distinctive theme, Downey recalled. Several committees spent months planning the food, the fun, and every last detail of the year's premier event.
“It was quite the affair,” Downey said. “Every year would have different themes. It got to the point it was hard to come up with a different theme. They would go all out. People would dress up for the occasion in themed outfits. Lots of Disney characters. Mardi Gras.
“They’d have big bowls of martinis and Manhattans. Big sit-down dinners. The June Parties would be poolside, outside, inside, and all around. Then, they put big tents out on the golf course with food stations that went along with the theme.”
The June Party remained a Short Hills staple until around 2005, when interest began to wane, Callas said. (It will resurface this year, of course, as a signature event of the centennial celebration.)
The Presidents Balls and annual New Year’s Eve celebrations also were major elements of the Short Hills social scene.
“New Year’s Eve was always a cocktail party,” Downey said “For years it was a sit-down dinner and then at midnight you’d serve breakfast. Then, they went to hors d’oeurves for breakfast because people wanted to mingle. This was the place to be and they’d be here until 3-4 o’clock in the morning. It was quite the deal.”
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Good times had by all. Almost all the time.
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Said Art Holmes: “It was just a marvelous place to be.”