Short Hills celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1972 and remained a thriving family playground years beyond.

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“Short Hills was the club to belong to,” said John Callas, who returned to the hilltop with his own membership after finishing law school in the mid-1980s. “Moline and East Moline were bustling areas. It was the growth area of the Quad Cities and all the Deere people were here. Short Hills was the spot.”

 

From the outset, Deere & Company brass had been influential in the club’s emergence and growth. Burton Peek, a CEO and nephew of the company founder, was an active early member whose passion for the game is memorialized at  Augusta National. There, a dwelling near Butler Cabin still bears the Peek name and a plaque on the grounds quotes ANGC co-founder Clifford Roberts’ assertion that Peek was a man “who hit the most golf balls in one lifetime.”

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(Disclaimer: Roberts never met young Greer Peters.)

 

In 1964, Deere & Company Chair Bill Hewitt ensured the company’s lasting presence in the Quad Cities when he and his wife, Tish — John Deere's great-great-granddaughter — relocated company headquarters from the Moline riverfront to an opulent corporate campus just a few miles south of Short Hills.

 

The beautiful new digs were dubbed the Glass Palace, and their close proximity sealed the hilltop club’s status for a couple more decades as both the place to be and the place to do business.

 

Bob Schwieder joined the club in 1977 after transferring back to his native Moline from a leadership assignment at a Deere & Company plant in Wisconsin. His country club choice was encouraged by Deere VP Bill Jeffers, one of a number of neighboring Deere execs who also resided in the fast-growing Wildwood Addition and played and socialized at Short Hills.

 

“If you’re going to belong to a club, you want to join one that’s convenient,” Schweider recalled years later. “It was also convenient to Deere & Company. If I wanted to have a luncheon with business partners, I could do that.”

 

Although he didn’t golf, Bill Hewitt was one of several Deere & Company chairs who followed Peek in taking up Short Hills membership. Bob Hanson already was a member when he was appointed chair and CEO upon Hewitt’s retirement. Sam Allen, who retired from the top spot at Deere in 2020, also held a membership in his time.

 

Numerous VPs and others in the Fortune 150 company’s chain of command were members as well, and a few even arrived at The Glass Palace with Short Hills’ roots.

 

“I had Joe England shagging range balls for me for 25 cents an hour,” Bob Fulton remembered of one eager young Short Hills member in the early 60s. “He later became a Deere vice president and made $2 million a year.”

 

When Larry Meeske joined the club near his boyhood home in 1985, he promptly became a regular in the standing Saturday and Sunday games that consisted of Deere execs. He also participated in the annual Deere Closed Open at Short Hills.

 

“You had to work for John Deere and had to be a member of a country club,” he said of that event. “They had a big dinner afterward and an executive would speak on the current status of the company. It was a bit of a command appearance. You’d better be there.”

 

For many years, Lynn Downey said, Short Hills served as Deere’s de facto entertainment and dining center.

 

“They did a lot of their social events at Short Hills until they got a kitchen at Deere headquarters and started using their own facilities,” she said. “We did a lot of things at Short Hills for them.”

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Short Hills did for Deere and very much vice-versa.

 

“I have to praise Deere for what they did for Short Hills,” said Jim Christiansen. “They were the ones who as a corporation used Short Hills more than anybody.”

 

Member Directed

 

One thing Deere did not do was dictate the club’s direction.

 

“They did have a rule — if you were an officer of the company, you couldn’t be on the board of Short Hills,” Schwieder said. “I think they just thought 'we don’t want to influence Short Hills,' which makes a lot of sense. They could have inundated the whole membership with Deere people.”

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Indeed, it was longstanding members like Christiansen, Art Holmes, Bob Fulton, Tom Bracke. Marty Davis, Marc Vanderbeke, Fred Lukasik, and countless other active members past and present who with Tom Campagna and staff set the club’s direction through those glory years.

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From George Ross and the initial Board of Directors on down, Short Hills followed the template of private equity clubs the world over. It was and is member-owned and member-directed, and its success and 100 years of longevity is decidedly member-driven.

 

Campagna was recognized across the golf industry for his management acumen, and, certainly, the members who employed him appreciated his abilities.

 

“He was probably the best-known country club manager in the state of Illinois,” Art Holmes told The Dispatch on the day Campagna died. “He had the ability to just do incredibly correct things for the country club and people who were members. He always made you feel whenever something good developed, it came from you, but in many cases it was his ideas.”

 

Still, as often as not, active and impassioned members did the work, funded necessary improvements, and created the fun — family-oriented and otherwise — that made Short Hills Country Club the QC’s place to be.

 

The elaborate and creatively-themed June Parties were the result of copious committee work and year-round planning that immediately began after hard-earned hangovers mercifully subsided.

 

A Father-Son Tournament launched in 1964 was patterned after an event at Midlothian Country Club near Chicago, which became a sister club to Short Hills after members of both clubs met at an annual nationwide event in Las Vegas.

 

Within three years, the Short Hills affair welcomed 100 teams from across the Quad Cities and the Midwest. The original events were led by Dr. Silvio Errico and his wife, Marguerite. The Father-Son grew and flourished through the years under the guidance of Ken and Ilaf Roman, Stony and Gerry Vanderbeke, and Bob and Rosemary Hinrichsen.

 

It continues to this day out of fealty to club and family.

 

“One year Kenny Roman came up to me and said ‘You know you are going to have to continue this when we quit,'” said Marc Vanderbeke, who was part of the committee that kept the Father-Son going and growing two decades into a new century.

 

Other member-managed family events gave Short Hills energy through the glory years.

 

“We had grand affairs here,” remembered Marina Panousis. “The Easter Bunny would be here to hand candy to the kids. Dan Ligino was our Santa Claus every year. We had a lot of things for our children.”

 

Under the direction of QC Sports Hall of Fame Coach Tom Derouin, Short Hills youth tennis teams dominated Harris Cup competitions with other local country clubs in the 80s and 90s. And the 30-strong Short Hills Sharks made a hard-earned splash in the pool in the 70s and 80s.

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“We were here every morning at 8 o’clock,” swim mom Panousis said. “And we would stay all day. Swim practice was every morning. We had good teams.”

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Short Hills topped the other clubs in other important ways.

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“I’ve been to all these clubs locally but I think Short Hills probably had more activities for members at the clubhouse and on the golf course than any other,” said Art Holmes. “Every member had experience with something and they all brought their work to the club doing something. It was a diversified group of members and they were active.”

 

Indeed, as influential as Deere & Company’s support was to the club’s success, Short Hills’ membership came from throughout the business community. There were doctors, lawyers, members of all walks of professional life, particularly small business owners

 

Schwieder was part of a weekend crew from a wide array of professions that got to the first tee at 7 a.m., beating the Deere group by an hour.

 

“It was just a fun group of guys,” he said. “There was a general manager from International Harvester. There were independent business owners. Stash from the sausage company. You can go all the way back to Erickson, the plumbing company. That was fun because it was my job to find out how many guys were playing in the morning. We didn’t have a sign up. It wasn’t a league. If you showed up, you played. It was my job to throw the balls into the air and team up the way the balls fell. That was fun.”

 

That’s how the weekend games still get “organized” today.