American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Not to put too fine a point on the subject, modern science tells us there are three primary colors from which all others—including white—are derived. In music, three basic notes dominate the musical scale. Pythagoras, the father of math, declared three the perfect number because it contains its own beginning, middle, and end.

  In the context of our story, perhaps all of this means absolutely nothing and is simply a happy coincidence—except that scientific methodology regards the number two as a statistical coincidence, three as evidence of a significant evolutionary pattern.

  Whatever one might choose to make of this numerical phenomenon, simple coincidence or cosmic design, the first of the three, John Byron Nelson Jr., was born at home just outside Waxahachie, Texas, on a cold, overcast Sunday evening in February of 1912, the first of three children belonging to Madge Allen Nelson and her quiet but hardworking farmer husband, John.

  Samuel Jackson Snead was Monday’s child, the last of six born to Harry and Laura Snead at home in the tiny Blue Ridge hamlet of Ashwood, Virginia, three miles from the leafy resort village of Hot Springs, on May 27, a beautiful Appalachian spring day.

  Finally, on August 13, 1912, Clara Hogan gave birth to her third child on a Tuesday at the new Women’s Clinic in the county seat of Stephenville, Texas. For reasons unclear—possibly having to do with a lingering Western superstition that all newborns should be properly named at home, where more than half of Americans were still born in 1912—she chose not to name her new baby son until she brought him home to the modest wood frame house she and husband Chester rented on Camden Street in Dublin, a small town that boasted a tidy opera house and a couple of popular saloons, six miles from what not so long before was considered Comanche territory.

  The strong-willed, unsentimental daughter of a successful cotton broker and prominent member of the Dublin Baptist Church, Clara’s considerable social aspirations were possibly compromised by marriage to the handsome heir to the village blacksmith shop, a pleasant and if somewhat dreamy fellow called Chester Hogan. She gave her first two children the rather fanciful names of Royal and Princess but chose to name her third William Ben Hogan after his two grandfathers, Chester’s blacksmith father, William Hogan, and her own father, Ben Williams, a fastidious dresser who was known to have an excellent head for numbers. She called the new baby “Bennie” for short. Clara was just eighteen years old.

  Of the three who would, in time, constitute the greatest triumvirate ever in competitive golf, Nelson’s was the only one whose birth was difficult. “My mother once told me the labor took all day and into the night,” Byron recounted in his memoir How I Played the Game. “It took so long the doctor who came out from town was all but certain that I would not survive being born. But my mother was a determined woman who wouldn’t give up. He finally had to use forceps to get me out. It broke my nose and I still have these little dents in my skull, you see, from that ordeal. I must have been pretty still because the doctor assumed I hadn’t made it and just set me aside, on a table. While he worked to save my mother my Grandmother Allen, my mother’s mother, took care of me. The story I always heard was that she got me cleaned up and I took a breath and she yelled out, ‘Doctor, this baby is alive!’ The toll on my mother was heavy, though. She needed a long time to get back on her feet. There were no antibiotics and medicines available back then. She just rested and slowly regained her strength. I weighed twelve pounds, eight ounces. I believe that doctor told my mother he’d never delivered a baby that large. Anyway, that’s the way I came into this world.”

  Madge Nelson was nineteen, a spirited, highly intelligent and religious girl, still an infant when her family moved from East Tennessee to the Lone Star State two decades after the Civil War, much as the Hogans fled to Texas from the poverty of Mississippi immediately after the war. She was a crack Bible scholar and schoolteacher when she married John Nelson, four years her senior, in February of 1911. Their married life started on the 160-acre cotton farm he’d inherited when he was just six, after his father died of tuberculosis, five and a half years after the same disease—then called consumption—had claimed his mother. A pair of maiden aunts raised him on the family’s farm in Long Branch, a small farming junction just outside Waxahachie, in a stark and simple farmhouse heated by a large woodstove in winter and shaded by a pair of large cottonwoods in the blazing summers. Madge, like her mother, had an uncommon fondness for the poetry of Lord George Gordon Byron, which is perhaps why she called her son “Byron.”

  Byron was seven when his sister, Ellen, was born. By then his father had sold their farm and leased a 240-acre cotton farm on the bluffs above the San Saba River in south-central Texas. With its handsome columned courthouse and lush groves of pecan trees that locals claimed predated Columbus’s arrival in the New World, San Saba was a beautiful town with half a dozen churches and a violent cowboy past—famous for the “Mob Rule” violence that required the Texas Rangers to keep the peace, resulting in the deaths of forty-three gunslingers. The year the Nelson family moved there hoping to expand their fortunes, 3.5 million pounds of pecans were shipped out of San Saba, more than twice as many as anyplace else in America. The town called itself the “Pecan Capital of the World.”

  The Nelsons lived a dozen miles out in the country in a thin-walled sharecropper’s house that overlooked the fields and river. One summer Byron’s family killed sixty-five rattlesnakes around their house, and Byron recalled first putting on shoes about age eight and joining his father’s hired hands in the cotton fields, weeding rows of the state’s leading cash crop through summer and picking the prickly balls with sticky resin in the fall. “I can’t say I ever liked picking cotton much because it made your hands bleed and it was powerful hot, hard work,” Byron recalled nearly eight decades later. “But my parents encouraged me to work hard because they knew our field hands would work harder when they saw a child my size working like I did.”

  Until then, out of necessity, Byron was educated at home, but when a new primary school opened three miles away, he was permitted to ride a coal-black horse to class over the objections of his maternal grandmother, who came to stay with the financially struggling Nelsons from time to time. Because Byron already knew how to read and write and do his multiplication tables up to twelve, the principal promoted him to the third grade. He earned constant As in spelling and penmanship. “I missed being outside all day. And I missed being at home with my folks, particularly my mother. My father was one of the finest hardworking men you ever met, but I’d have to say it was my mother who really helped shape my outlook the most. She was such a strong but gentle person who knew her Bible and taught me early that its messages were the only way to live your life, to do right, to be strong.”

  Lack of money was always an issue for the family, in part because the boll weevil devastated Texas cotton crops during the first two decades of the century until a formal eradication program was established by the state, but also because the prosperity that was beginning to light up the country’s larger cities and prompt record numbers of Europeans to immigrate had yet to filter down to the remote, hardscrabble Southwest.

  Complicating matters, when America entered the First World War in 1917, John Nelson was drafted but then turned down for active service due to a mild case of tuberculosis. After less than a year in San Saba, he moved his family a hundred miles farther west to the prosperous railroad town of San Angelo, the county seat of Tom Green County, which had the largest sheep and lamb livestock yards in Texas and also one of the largest sanatoriums in the Southwest. They lived in a house rented by Madge’s parents, the Allens, who’d temporarily relocated from Fort Worth to the “Oasis of West Texas” in order to be near their son Benton, Byron’s uncle, who was under treatment at the sanatorium. John found part-time work loading bundles of mohair wool onto freight cars on the Santa Fe Railroad and hauling gravel for the state crews that were constructing a new paved highway north to Fort Worth. When he found himself too far away to get home for the night
, and unable to afford staying in a boardinghouse, he often took to sleeping in an empty piano crate he carried along with him. “Our family,” Byron recorded in his memoirs many years later, “knew what poor meant.”

  After Benton died of TB, Byron’s baby sister, Ellen, was also diagnosed with traces of the highly communicable disease. The family moved north for a time to the Allens’ permanent home in Alvarado, twenty-six miles south of Fort Worth, then into a small frame house in a mixed-race, working-class neighborhood called Stop Six, so named because it was the sixth stop on the bus line that linked the most famous cowtown in the West to Dallas. John found a job driving a delivery truck for White Swan Foods but got laid off during an economic slump that followed the great influenza pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people—3 percent of the world’s population—between March of 1918 and summer of 1920. Fortunately, he soon found a better job making delivery runs for the Dyer Feed Company on 15th Street in Fort Worth, a job he kept for many years. Known to be a fair boss, Mr. Dyer was an unsentimental character who swore like a ranch hand and drank hard liquor. Under the influence of his hardworking Christian delivery man, or so the family lore held, Mr. Dyer eventually reformed his ways and softened up.

  “I think it was those early years when we moved to the city that I began to think about someday just having a ranch of my own out in the country,” Byron Nelson mused many decades later one afternoon at his ranch in Roanoke. “My earliest and happiest memories, after all, were all associated with being out in the country, shoeless and as happy as could be, a little fella riding that coal-black horse to school and back. That sort of thing stays with you, don’t you know. Life in Fort Worth was very different, very tough at times.”

  During this flight from disease and poverty, a third child, Charles, appeared—yet another mouth to feed—and Madge Nelson turned to her faith for strength, joining the local Church of Christ community and rarely missing dual Sunday services, which not only shaped her oldest son’s spiritual values but probably saved his life. While playing with a puppy that belonged to some neighbor children, Byron was exposed to rabies and sent for twenty-one days to stay at a state mental hospital in Austin, where the cost of treatment—a series of painful daily shots administered with a large needle into the abdomen—would be covered by the state. About halfway through, after developing severe headaches and high fever, he was sent home to Fort Worth. The instant his mother touched his burning head, she looked at her husband and declared, “This child’s got typhoid fever.”

  While he battled the dreaded salmonella bacteria—generally associated with the ingestion of contaminated water, a disease that supposedly once wiped out a third of Periclean Athens—Byron’s body weight dropped from 124 to 65 pounds in a matter of weeks. A lanky five-foot-eight, he’d lain in bed gazing at his own gaunt pelvic bone, and wondering if he would ever regain his strength, sneaking malted milk balls whenever his mother was out of the room. He grew even sicker, and when his temperature topped 106, the doctor had him packed in ice and advised his parents they should prepare for the worst.

  At which point a friend from their church saved his life by means of cleansing enemas, treating him twice daily for ten days, until he slowly began to recover. During this winter of 1924 he turned twelve years old, but owing to the effect of the damaging high fevers he could never recall his twelfth birthday or really much else, save for fond memories of his prior life, barefoot and riding a horse across the wide-open plains of West Texas.

  “The fact that I survived rabies and typhoid fever left me with a strong sense of gratitude,” Nelson reflected years later. “I was happy to have my life back. I got baptized and joined the church myself about that time. I knew God had saved me for some reason and determined I would never be unhappy again. I also heard from some boys at school about the money they were making over at the Glen Garden Country Club. They were working as caddies. I had no idea what that meant, but I thought it was worth investigating just to see what it was all about.”

  Like Byron Nelson, Samuel Jackson Snead was unusually close to his mother. Laura Dudley Snead was forty-seven years old when she delivered the last of the six children she had with her quiet, deeply religious and somewhat emotionally remote husband. They named the baby for both his maternal grandfather and the famed Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, a distant relative. Before him had come Lyle, Homer, Janet, Jessie, and Welford, whom everyone simply called Pete. Sneads had inhabited the tiny hamlet of Ashwood since before the Revolutionary War, dating from an ancestor named Richard Snead’s land grant from the king of England. Harry Snead, after failing to make a go of farming on the rich valley land he and a brother had inherited, moved his family to a six-room farmhouse a block behind the village’s primary school and went to work three miles away at the Homestead, one of the oldest resort hotels in America, maintaining its boilers and performing other maintenance jobs for $125 a month. Sam would recall his father rising early six days a week and putting on one of the two fancy three-piece suits he owned and walking to the hotel, where he would change into work coveralls and shovel coal and repair things in the hotel’s maintenance workshop with the skill of a mechanical polymath. On Sunday, he put on his finest three-piece suit and walked the same three-mile stretch to services at the Ashwood Methodist Church in the shadow of the Homestead.

  Healing water was the source of the area’s first prosperity, for the hot mineral springs that burbled abundantly out of the steep and craggy slopes of Bath County were believed to cure any malady of body or spirit. In 1755, at the age of twenty-three, George Washington encountered them as a captain in the Virginia Militia, and the following decade a rudimentary hotel was erected by a large hot springs pool. By the 1880s, when J. P. Morgan financed a complete renovation of the hotel, the Homestead was considered the country’s finest mountain retreat and catered to an elite patronage that included presidents and titans of industry. Thomas Edison, a frequent visitor, designed the famed mountain retreat’s state-of-the-art electrical plant, and presidents Harrison, McKinley, and Taft all came there to play on the resort’s six-hole golf course. Nine months after Sammy Snead was born, Scotsman Donald Ross completed an expansion of the original layout to eighteen holes, popularly called the Old Course. Two years later, Woodrow Wilson honeymooned at the Homestead with his second wife, Edith Bolling.

  Throughout his life, especially whenever a big-city reporter was within earshot, Sam was fond of emphasizing his impoverished hillbilly heritage. His large and lively clan, as biographers and family friends have amply noted, was by no means well off; Harry augmented his income at the hotel by raising chickens and a few cows on the original Snead property just outside Ashwood, and every son was expected to find a job of some kind to contribute to the family pot. But the Sneads were far from the indigent mountain folk who inhabited the deeper recesses of one of the surrounding hills and hollows. Sam’s proud, hardworking, churchgoing father wore a fashionable handlebar mustache and expressed his vanity with the fine store-bought suits and starched white collars he favored well into his dotage, and enjoyed additional stature in the community serving as the captain of the Hot Springs hose-and-reel brigade.

  Like his father before him, Sam eventually relied financially on wealthy sporting and society types who stayed at the Homestead. Yet unlike Harry Snead, who knew his place, as it were, his son came to feel resentment of the privileged classes. He wouldn’t be the first working boy ever driven by class envy, though whatever slights he suffered early in life would later manifest themselves in an undisguised contempt for snobbery in any form and a willingness to skewer and at times openly exploit the idle rich that his father held in such high regard.

  Once famous as America’s golfing hillbilly, whenever asked about his parents Sam would invariably talk about his mother with almost biblical reverence, explaining how this true daughter of Appalachia had overseen this strapping, athletic family, cooking all their meals, maintaining a clean and Christian house, and making sure he
r sons all behaved. From his father, on the other hand, he received only one modest piece of advice. “A man who keeps his shoes polished and his fingernails clean,” Harry Snead liked to say, “can get by with the rest.” Ironically, Sam was destined to also become a smart dresser himself, given to banded straw hats and perfectly tailored silk sports jackets that echoed the lessons he’d learned as a raw-boned, barefoot “pecker-wood kid.” Thanks to both of his abstemious parents, from childhood he forswore the evils of drinking and smoking.

  It was Laura Dudley Snead who had the final say and wielded the greatest influence on her youngest boy. Sam liked to say she was already an “old woman when I first knew her,” and he grew up exercising the prerogative of the last-born, doted-upon baby, by his own admission “running a little wild in the hills,” which meant fishing and hunting and trying to avoid being shot by the numerous moonshiners whose stills were in his favorite coon-hunting hollers. He found and kept a young buck deer as a pet for a time, and learned how to slaughter hogs in the fall. “When the chores was finished,” he wrote in The Education of a Golfer, his splendid 1962 memoir, “all us Snead kids scattered for the hills. We were rounded up on a Sunday the way they call hogs. My mother, who had a good strong voice, would let out a war whoop that could be heard over the next mountain, and when we straggled in they scraped off the mud and wood ticks and put us into clean clothes for churchgoing.”