American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Sam’s affection for his mother bordered on adoration. “Long after she died, he spoke of her often and with no little reverence,” Al Barkow notes in his thoughtful biography of Sam, offering a deeper insight on her in his terrific Gettin’ to the Dance Floor: An Oral History of American Golf: “I’d like to have had all my characteristics and character from my mother. She was one of the few people I ever knew who had front sight as well as hind sight. We never went to my dad for anything.” Barkow speculates that he played so well just down Highway 220 at the Greater Greensboro Open, which he captured a record eight times, because it was the last stop on the winter tour and only a few hours from his mama’s front porch and home cooking.

  Sam’s prodigious physical gifts were clearly a family trait—huge hands, powerful muscular control, topped by astonishing range of motion that would grant him the ability well into his seventies to stand flat-footed on the floor and touch the top door jamb with a kick that would make a Radio City Music Hall Rockette split her tights with envy. His brothers were similarly gifted, particularly Homer, twelve years Sam’s senior and his personal hero. A high school star in football, swimming, and boxing, he could slug a golf ball farther than his famous kid brother for many years. But to bring in additional income, Homer left school early to work as an electrician and amateur inventor. For decades, residents of Hot Springs claimed Homer Snead built the first radio ever heard in the county and even developed a technology that eliminated the all too common static only to have an enterprising Homestead guest steal his brilliant idea and make a fortune selling it to an outfit called RCA, or so the story goes. Homer’s real love, though, was golf, and when Sam was seven Homer began letting his kid brother shag balls for him on summer mornings in a meadow above their house before he hiked off to work in town. Because Homer always carried his one hickory-shafted club wherever he went, Sam had no option but to improvise by cutting a swamp-maple limb and using the knotty end to bash around anything that resembled a golf ball, including rocks, dirt clods, and hickory nuts. One day, he recalled in The Education of a Golfer, “The organ was finishing off the sermon when I came down the road, swinging at rocks and dried-up manure. One of the rocks took off like a bullet, even went through the church window, and sprayed the congregation with glass. The preacher, whose name was Tompkins, was the first one out the door, but all he found was an empty road. I stayed in the woods until dark, then wouldn’t admit a thing when they gave me the third degree. They never did prove it on me.”

  Despite the colorful shadings of Appalachian poverty he applied to what he fondly called his “backwoods boyhood days,” Sam Snead’s childhood was in fact something of a rural idyll. Barefoot and armed with his swamp stick, before long he could hit a golf ball for “twenty fence posts,” or approximately 125 yards, or so he later claimed. He experimented with grips and stance until the club just felt natural in his hand and the ball more or less stayed true to his aim.

  When he was seven years old, a black kid he often played with, Franklin Jefferson Jones, proposed they steal some candy from a local shop, and they did so, but Sam was overcome with remorse and tearfully insisted they take it back. “Frankie thought I was out of my mind but suggested that we could earn candy money by packing clubs over at the Homestead Hotel links in Hot Springs. A set of clubs weighed nearly as much as my sixty-five pounds. Since my shoulders weren’t wide enough to support a bag, I hung it around my neck and staggered along after the golfers.”

  He earned fifty cents a loop, but eighteen holes exhausted him. Around his eighth birthday, with snow still on the ground, a hotel guest hired barefoot Sammy to carry his bag, which he did before he lost all feeling below the shins, promptly dropped the bag and staggered back to the caddie house, where he warmed his feet by the caddie master’s woodstove. The verdict was frostbite on all ten toes, and he was fortunate to keep them. A year or so later, he disappeared to caddie for most of a Sunday, missed supper, and came home at dusk to find his furious mother waiting for him. “I wound up gettin’ one of the worst lickin’s I ever got. I hadn’t told a soul where I was all day and she had my brothers out lookin’ over half the county. After that, I made sure she knew where I was when I was caddying.

  “That hurt,” he amplified in The Education of a Golfer, “because I was a hurrying kid with ambition. Horsehair Brinkley and Piggie McGuffin, two pals of mine, had to run to keep up with me. I tried every which way to learn to play golf on a real course, but when I was ten or twelve years old there wasn’t a chance. The Homestead and Cascades Hotel courses were for wealthy tourists only. Anytime we peckerwoods sneaked onto the local ‘Goat Course,’ which was a nine-holer for hotel employees, a cop would holler, ‘Hey, you little bastards!’—and we’d have to scatter for the woods without even time to putt out.”

  So he practiced his golf swing in a family pasture in Ashwood, improvising an improbable homemade club from a buggy whip a local blacksmith gave him, to which he attached a clubhead he’d picked up from his uncle Ed Dudley, using small wood screws—or so Sam always spun the tale. Given the supple flex of this makeshift “shaft,” he developed a slow, unhurried tempo, learning to “wait” on the swing, and was soon able, he claimed, to hit a ball two hundred yards. He also sank empty tomato cans in his backyard, creating a five-hole course where he could chip and putt.

  Throughout his teens, whenever he wasn’t helping slaughter hogs, running his own trap lines, hunting wild pigs or trout fishing in the surrounding hollers and creeks, he was making money caddying and occasionally tagging along with his brothers Homer and Pete when they played matches. Pete, the closest to Sam in age, was his only brother who also made a living out of golf, eventually becoming head professional at the Homestead.

  The household Sam grew up in was, for the most part, harmonious and even musical. His mother played the guitar, his father the trumpet, brother Pete played the saxophone; all were self-taught. Along with Laura’s half-brother Ed Dudley, who owned a restaurant on Main Street, the family sometimes picked up extra money by playing for dances at the Homestead. At age ten, Sammy began fooling with Harry’s trumpet and taught himself to play, and down the road a bit he soloed with some of the featured bands at the resort. Even after his fame and fortune arrived, one of his favorite things to do was slip off to a popular “jazz shanty” outside White Sulpher Springs and blow the trumpet till the wee hours. Or, as his son Jack would recall, he’d just pick up his old trumpet and a mute, then disappear to a back room where he would play along with big band records for hours. “I think that was something Dad loved doing since he was a kid,” said Jack. “He always told me he learned most of what he knew in life when he was a boy—including that trumpet.”

  “You know, I read somewhere once that your first dozen years shape the rest of your life. Well, when I look back on my childhood I realize how pretty fortunate I was overall,” Sam remarked to a writer who called on him at the Greenbrier in the early 1990s. “An awful lot of what I later applied to my golf career came from either home or those woods around Hot Springs. Hunting and fishing taught me a helluva lot of patience and even basic psychology. I learned to watch what was happening around me and rely on my own hunches about everything. We weren’t the poorest folks in town and we sure weren’t the richest. No way. But I’d say we did all right. We were close, and I never felt like I was missing a whole lot. Just about anything I put my head to, why, I could do it.”

  Contrary to accounts of Ben Hogan’s obscure early life that began to emerge about the time his fabled playing career was drawing to a close—suggesting a childhood marked by poverty and hardship—much of Ben’s boyhood was, in fact, normal, happy, and reasonably prosperous by the standards of the rural Southwest. Family and friends recalled Ben and his siblings playing games on the oak-shaded streets of lively little Dublin, Texas, playing in nearby Clear Creek and attending picnics at the Dublin Baptist Church, where their mother had strong ties.

  For a time prior to and just after Bennie’s birth, Chester Ho
gan abandoned his father’s blacksmith shop and hired on with Sam Houston Prim, a former bookshop owner who’d opened a firm that bottled a sweet cherry-flavored concoction called “Dr Pepper” and shipped it all over West Texas. It was Chester’s job to wash used bottles then refill and cork them before loading the fresh crates onto delivery trucks and the Fort Worth–Rio Grande Railroad. The work paid decently, but Chester missed working with horses and the people who owned and loved them. Once his father died, he returned to run the town’s principal livery stable, the place he was always happiest.

  An advertisement for the family business, from the Dublin Progress in about 1915, shows a pony wagon carrying the three young Hogan children and draped with a Fourth of July parade banner that cheerfully proclaims: PAPA’S A BLACKSMITH. LET HOGAN SHOE YOUR HORSE! The oldest son, Royal, would be remembered as a natural athlete who pitched a mean sandlot baseball game and helped organize the town’s first team. Princess, who had her mother’s stern good looks and no shortage of the Williams gumption, sang at church and even won a few choice parts in productions at the Dublin Opera House. She and her brothers were regulars at the open-air movie theater on Friday nights, where they watched the Keystone Kops and Charlie Chaplin, a world far removed from a dusty square in the frontier West.

  Neighbors recalled that Bennie—like his father, quiet and undersized—was his papa’s little boy clean to the core, a bit of a happy loner who preferred to spend his free time hanging around the blacksmith shop, where he calmed the horses as they were waiting to be shoed and fed scraps to the village dogs that always congregated there. Decades later, Ben Hogan’s most cherished possession was a small black-and-white photograph that shows him sitting astride a chestnut mare with his father, cradled between Chester’s belt and the saddle horn. He was no more than a year old. Both father and son are looking away from the camera—a rare pose in those days, as if they’d been suddenly distracted, glancing at something in the distance. Their expressions, in this haunting photograph, in any case, are calm and nearly identical, and the spiritual connection is unmistakable. “Ben’s father was his hero,” his wife, Valerie, once told Dave Anderson of The New York Times.

  The year Byron Nelson’s family moved to a rented house in San Angelo, a fresh new start that soon had the elder Nelson sleeping in an empty piano crate, Bennie Hogan’s own life took a sharp and fateful turn.

  By 1921 there were more than nine million automobiles on America’s ever-expanding network of paved roads and highways, as Secretary of Labor Herbert Hoover liked to boast. The state of Texas alone paved more than a thousand miles of new highways that year. Not surprisingly, a record number of businesses catering to the traditional horse trade shut their doors for good that year; within five years, it’s been estimated, more than half the remaining livery stables in America failed. The summer Bennie Hogan turned nine, his mother suddenly packed their belongings, put their Camden Street house up for sale, and moved her family into a small wooden rental house on the southeast side of downtown Fort Worth, Texas’s rowdiest city.

  Clara Hogan wasn’t oblivious to the village talk that her quiet husband’s smithing business had simply become a victim of changing times. But the problem went deeper than that. Even if she’d felt obliged to explain their turn in fortune—not likely, given that she was so silent on private matters that her own children and grandchildren knew virtually nothing about the family’s history for decades—her prime objective was to try to stave off her husband’s grievous mental depression that deepened every month as debts mounted and his business dried up like jimsonweed.

  During the early months of 1921, Chester Hogan had ceased attending church and sometimes never even left the house to open up his stable. Clara Hogan’s hope was to have Chester “treated” at the only facility in all of West Texas equipped to handle issues of mental health, a large mansard-roofed institution on the eastern flank of Fort Worth. The determined and pragmatic Clara—a gifted seamstress—took matters into her own hands by doing contract alterations for Cheney’s downtown department store, which catered to the tastes of the city’s well-to-do matrons.

  It seemed, for a short while, that they would be fine. Fort Worth was the celebrated “Cowtown” of Texas, the place where the Santa Fe Trail began, the self-described “Queen of the American Prairies” and “The Place Where the West Begins.” The city had a burgeoning population of more than 150,000, at least thirty saloons the Baptists had failed to get shut down, a booming cattle market and an ornate Texas & Pacific train depot that saw more than seventy trains a day pass through.

  Submitting to his wife’s iron will, Chester agreed to treatment regimes at the sanatorium in Arlington Heights—alkaloid tablets, calming mineral baths, and mild electrotherapy, therapies that had been around since the late nineteenth century—and found a job training to become an auto mechanic. Clara installed their children in the local public schools and took a bus to Cheney’s six days a week. Royal found an afternoon job delivering prescriptions for a druggist. The rent got paid and Chester showed marked improvement, his black moods gradually easing.

  Five months into this new life, in fact, he pronounced himself cured and declared he intended to return home and reopen his shuttered livery stable. Clara, however, wanted no portion of this plan. Dublin held only the specter of their failed hopes, whereas Fort Worth afforded the anonymity her extremely private nature craved, as well as the financial opportunities that were luring historic numbers of rural Americans from the farm to the city. So Chester returned to Comanche County alone, and within a month neighbors reported he was in a visibly upbeat mood, informing anyone who would listen that he’d “soon bring Clara and the children home for good.”

  On the dank, drizzily eve of St. Valentine’s Day, 1922, he returned to Fort Worth by train to convince his unyielding wife it was time to do just that. A bitter argument erupted in the front parlor of the tiny frame house at 305 Hemphill Street. According to family accounts, the children stood mutely in a bedroom listening to their parents argue. At some point, Chester picked up his carpetbag and stalked from the room, addled by the demons of self-loathing unleashed by Clara’s belief that Dublin held nothing but failure for them all. As his youngest son rushed into the room to try to comfort his father, Chester pulled a .38 pistol from his bag, placed the barrel to his upper chest, and pulled the trigger.

  A dozen hours later, a headline in the Valentine’s Day edition of the Fort Worth Record read: “Child of Six Sees His Father Shot.” Shootings were a daily occurrence in the Queen City of the Prairies, and the brief article reported that “while his condition is critical he has a good chance for recovery.”

  The son was Bennie, of course, and he was nine. By the time the paper hit the streets, his father and hero, who’d turned thirty-seven just days before, was already dead. A slightly clearer (if also inaccurate) account of the shooting appeared a few days later in the Dublin Progress, based on details Clara Hogan probably provided, explaining that it was the family’s “twelve-year-old son” who witnessed the suicide. Royal Hogan, in fact, was thirteen. Among those who knew the Hogans best, the abiding impression was left that, in an attempt to shield the younger and more impressionable Bennie from the cascade of sorrow and natural curiosity that was bound to follow, Mama Hogan had placed her older and much more resilient son in the room where their father committed his desperate act.

  In any case, Bennie refused to attend the funeral. Decades later, near the end of her own life, Valerie explained to the Times’s Dave Anderson that they’d been married for “many years” before she learned of Chester’s suicide, the singular event that shaded her husband’s life and worldview. “And his father’s death just hurt Ben so much,” she’d added, “they were not able to get [him] to go to the church. He couldn’t bear to see the casket.”

  A short time later, Clara Hogan picked up extra piecework at two other downtown department stores and moved her family to a house on East Allen Street, in a slightly better neighborhood calle
d Morningside, just a few miles south of the Texas & Pacific train depot. To provide a bit more social stability, she placed her two youngest children in the Sunday school of a local Baptist church. Royal quit the drugstore and dropped out of school to take a full-time job delivering office supplies on his bicycle; he also sold copies of Amon Carter’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the Westbrook Hotel and pumped gas on Lancaster Avenue. “He became my rock of Gibraltar,” Mama Hogan boasted to a reporter three decades later, attempting to clarify rumors about her youngest son’s troubled early life. “Without him I hate to think what might have happened to us.”

  When Bennie, then a fourth grader, volunteered to help out by hawking late editions of the newspaper on the boarding platform at the sprawling Texas & Pacific depot, Clara let him. Princess made her contribution by baby-sitting and working part-time at the same drugstore where Royal had worked.

  Immediately after school, barely four feet tall and weighing seventy pounds, young Bennie Hogan hustled to the depot and sometimes worked all night to peddle his bundle of papers; he could occasionally be found curled up asleep on a waiting room bench by dawn’s first light, his large aviator’s cap pulled over his face. Many decades later, any time the aging golf legend happened to see a Fort Worth newsboy working late on the streets of Cowtown, according to his longtime secretary and closest friends, he would pull over and purchase the kid’s unsold papers and send him home.

  “That station was where I learned to take pretty good care of myself,” Hogan reflected gently, almost fondly, to a reporter in the early 1950s. “It toughened me up real fast. You either fought for your turf and won or you went someplace else. I wasn’t about to give it up.”

  By age ten, Bennie Hogan’s childhood was over. Two years later, he heard Royal, whom he called “Bubber,” say that local boys were getting sixty-five cents just to carry a golf bag around eighteen holes at the Glen Garden Country Club. And had Ben’s brother—then sixteen, with his maternal grandfather’s head for numbers—not been working full-time at the office supply, he might’ve headed straight for the country club himself. Though he’d never seen the game played, Bennie had read about golf in the sports pages of Amon Carter’s famous newspaper, particularly the splendid exploits of colorful touring professional Walter Hagen, and the admirable amateur Bobby Jones, who won his first U.S. Open Championship on Long Island in the summer of 1923.