Club Times - September 2021

THE GOLF PROFESSIONALS of the Atlanta Athletic Club In 2023, Atlanta Athletic Club will celebrate its 125th anniversary. The club was founded in 1898 by a group of 65 Atlanta businessmen who enjoyed playing sports and camaraderie. This article is the fifth in a series entitled “125 Years: The Legacy of Atlanta Athletic Club.” The purpose of the series is so that members may become familiar with the history and heritage of the great club to which they belong.

Stewart Maiden

The AAC’s golf professionals played a critical role in helping to mentor the club’s best players. The golf club’s first professional was Alex Smith, born in Carnoustie, Scotland, in 1872. He immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island in 1898 with five brothers and took his first job as greenkeeper at Washington Park in Chicago. Smith, a runner-up in the U.S. Open in 1898 and 1901 and champion in 1906 and 1910, was offered a position at East Lake after winning the 1906 U.S. Open and remained for about a year. On March 1, 1907, James Maiden, Smith’s brother-in-law and known to the members as “Jimmy,” replaced Smith, at a salary of sixty dollars per month. Maiden’s duties were spelled out in his contract and restricted him from charging more than a dollar for a forty-five-minute lesson and two dollars for playing eighteen holes with a member. In 1908, Maiden left to become head professional at Nassau Country Club on Long Island, where he remained until 1948. East Lake replaced him with his brother, Stewart, known as “Kiltie.” He is best remembered for giving a young Bobby Jones his first set of clubs (a driver, brassie, midiron, mashie, niblick, and putter) and being the person after whom Jones modeled his golf swing. In his 1927 autobiography Down the Fairway, Jones wrote that the arrival of Stewart Maiden at the AAC was “the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me in golf, which is saying a lot, because my entire career, if it may be called a career, has been lucky.”

Over the past century, the AAC has produced some of the sport’s best amateur golfers in the nation, including Alexa Stirling, Perry Adair, Margaret Maddox, Watts Gunn, Charlie Yates, Charlie Harrison, Dot Kirby, Tommy Barnes Sr. and Jr., Gladys and Joyce Denson, Martha Kirouac, DeWitt Weaver, Neal Hendee, Justin Bolli, Courtney Swaim Trimble, Scott Dunlap, and Bailey Tardy, all of whom enjoyed or are enjoying distinguished careers. Their accomplishments have kept the AAC in the national spotlight for nearly a century. Many competed in state or regional events, making a name for themselves and the club throughout the South. But none was better known than Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones Jr. Born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1902, Jones was a lifelong member of the AAC, having played his first and last rounds at the club’s East Lake course. Jones explains how he was introduced to golf in Down the Fairway, “Golf began for all of us— Mother and Dad and me—in the early summer of 1907, when we moved out of the city to board with Mrs. Frank Meador in a big house about a mashie pitch from what was then the second fairway of the East Lake golf course of the Atlanta Athletic Club, five miles from town.” Jones’s parents had taken lessons from Jimmy Maiden and played regularly at East Lake. Fulton Colville, one of the other boarders at Mrs. Meador’s house, gave Jones his first club, a cleek (an iron with a long, shallow blade that compares to today’s 3-iron or 4-wood) cut down to size by club