Club Times: November/December 2022

we will not be in a position of having a half-finished course with all of the money gone.” Jones promised to oversee the construction personally and complete the new course by 1967. By April 1966, twenty-seven holes were mapped, and the construction had begun. In May 1966, the name River Bend Country Club was officially adopted, and in September and October 1966, the course was seeded. The new twenty-seven-hole course at River Bend was dedicated on May 27, 1967, with a celebration that was attended by some 700 members; 224 golfers played the course for the first time. The club announced a “Name-The-Nines” contest for a fifty- dollar prize and received two hundred entries. They finally settled on Big Bend, Waterloo, and Long View. Robert Trent Jones actually designed the first thirty- six holes, with the last nine wrapping around the clubhouse. But the club decided to hire architect Joe Finger to rework the last nine holes because they did not go down to the river bottom like the other three nines. The club eventually bought additional property near holes 2 and 3, and the fourth and final nine opened late in the summer of 1970. Construction on the new clubhouse began in October 1968, scheduled for completion in September 1969, for a price of $1.1 million. The clubhouse was originally divided into two distinct wings to accommodate golfing and social members. During construction, golfers used the tennis and swimming complex as a temporary clubhouse. On June 14, 1970, the athletic center, the Olympic-sized swimming pool, and five outdoor tennis courts officially opened. Several months later, the city finished the extension of Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, which came within a mile and a half of the club, helping to significantly reduce travel time for members. In 1974, the St. Andrews Room, which offered the members a large banquet facility, was added to the original clubhouse.

For a while, the AAC thought it could operate both the No. 1 course at East Lake and the new River Bend course. But play at East Lake did not dramatically increase, despite the notable improvements to the facility. At a February 13, 1968, board meeting, Larry Martin explained that the club was going to have difficulty maintaining two golf facilities and recommended that River Bend become the only one. He explained, “I believe that this club can live with only one golf facility, unless we want to pay substantially higher golfing dues than at present.” At a stockholders meeting on April 2, 1968, the final vote, on the board’s recommendation, was to dispose of East Lake, 900 in favor, 551 opposed. As Jim Auchmutey reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “The sale of East Lake, in 1968, was controversial to say the least. To some, the idea of disposing of the hallowed links was almost sacrilegious—tantamount to building a drive-in theater at Augusta National. Friends parted over the issue. Harsh words were spoken.” But the final vote prevailed. When it came time to sell the East Lake course, twenty- five members of the AAC, led by Paul Grigsby, pledged money to raise $1.6 million to purchase the older facility “with the intention of continuing its existence for all time as one of the world’s most noted country clubs.” The membership dropped dramatically, from two thousand to less than two hundred. In a 1983 article for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Grigsby, an AAC member since 1938, explained, “You know, I went to talk to [Bobby] Jones eight or 10 times back in 1968 to try to stop the sale, but he never wavered. His loyalty belonged to the Athletic Club, not a plot of ground. But he did say he was happy we weren’t going to let the old place go to pot.”