Bulletin for August 6th, 2020
Zoom Golf
Suppose that in 1908 Paul Harris had launched Rotary as a meeting of diverse professionals to exchange ideas and form meaningful, lifelong friendships – on Zoom. Just how many weeks of Gallery View, Share Screen, and Chat would it have taken before everyone clicked ‘Leave Meeting’? Zoom is how we do Rotary now and it’s a mixed blessing.
I mean this week a certain Past-President wanted to share a 30-second video with us. The video extoled the extraordinary efforts of the Toronto Chapter of the North American Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce managed to raise enough money to purchase 10 million surgical masks for distribution throughout the US and Canada. But for the first 3 or 4 minutes of our meeting time we sat listening in, aching to offer our ideas, as he tried to figure out all this ‘Share Screen’ stuff. It brought to mind that Aesop’s fable, the Ant and the Grasshopper, you know- the one about preparation.
Dave Beckett, ever prepared, explained the idea behind the Zoom-BBQs scheduled for August 20th. Five generous members have made their back yards available to us in order that we might split up and socially distance ourselves. Better than all of us crowding and making merry, as we have done, so convivially, in years past. Each of these contiguous BBQs will link up with President Owen at some stage in the festivities.
Owen knows how to host a party I can tell you, I remember a September 2004 BBQ at McEllhinny’s. The whole club plus partners, no masks, no distancing, lots of hugging and innocent transmission of viruses; we just about cleaned them out of house and home. Here’s a shot of Owen, still hungry.
Much of the rest of today’s meeting was golfer news. Andrew Gaydon announced a planned, $100 per player, golf day at Hidden Lake on September 10. It’ll be a no-fuss, low key, members and partners fund-raiser with projected profit of 30% going to the club’s kitty.
Our guest speaker was Steve Abraham, a personal injury lawyer and colleague of Bruce Hillyer and Bob Martin. Steve is currently President of the Burlington Golf & Country Club a role he took on as the culmination of 6 years on the board of the club. Steve took ‘Speaker View ‘on our monitors to review the changes underway at BGCC. The same changes that left us homeless for a few weeks pre Covid-19.
I think non-members of BGCC have watched with some amazement at the scope of changes being wrought not only to the landscape but also to the barely-a-decade-old clubhouse. All changes to improve the members’ experience of course.
As a non-golfer I found the history of the club more intriguing than today’s changes to the greens or dining room. Quite astonishing that in 1922, a group of businessmen had the foresight to envisage the need for a golf course. They purchased what was then rolling farmland, or in my pre-settlement imagination, a tract of former Lake Iroquois lake floor. Anyway, buy it they did together with water-rights that endure, and a new course was overlaid. It was designed by one of the best, Stanley Thomson a Canadian golf course architect, and a high-standard amateur golfer. He was a co-founder of the American Society of Golf Course Architects.
I had never given a moment’s thought to the idea that golf course layouts are subject to fashion, but of course they are, everything is. So, the course is being 21st Century modernized with dog-legs added, bunkers nudged over and fairways lengthened (Who knew that another 30 feet makes a difference?).
And all of that brought to us by Zoom.
P. Scribe
