The city’s oldest golf course has welcomed (and challenged) generations of golfers over the years. Here, a few players take their best shot at the 585-yard, par-5 third hole, nicknamed “The Tunnel.”
Writer: Mike Wellman
Photographer: Duane Tinkey
WAVELAND IS A MANY-SPLENDORED PROPERTY, primarily, but by no means only, a golf course. That aspect of the historic grounds formerly known as Waveland Park marks its 125th anniversary this year, its quasquicentennial, a word that only escapes the dictionary every century and a quarter.
My earliest memory of the place is circa 1960. A first-grade classmate with a wintertime birthday hosted a party that featured sledding on the golf course slopes. So I first experienced Waveland as an Alpine venue. At that nascent stage of my life I couldn’t have guessed Waveland would be a through-line of it, but it’s proved to be.
Phase Two of the relationship ensued when I was given a junior golf badge one summer as an adolescent, shortly after the course was reshuffled like a deck of 18 cards to make room for the MacVicar Freeway. I lugged my hand-me-down clubs the mile or so from my home on Kingman Boulevard to the first tee and away we played, early and often.
Phase Three was something else. In golfing lexicon: out of bounds.
A classmate, John Gallagher, started working at Waveland as a groundskeeper after high school. These were the days preceding the installation of an automatic irrigation system. He worked year round — during golf season his duties included deployment of sprinklers on the greens, and in the wintertime the city contrived a skating rink on a flat patch on the 15th hole. Somebody had to hose it into existence and man the warming house.
Sometimes John worked overnights. One summer night a few of us dropped in on John to lend assistance and enjoy some refreshments while we were at it, as we were wont to do. What are pals for? In those days, the mid-1970s, the Des Moines Police Department’s fleet included a helicopter they used as an eye in the sky. Its searchlight found us while it swept the area surrounding the observatory between the 17th green and 18th tee. We scrambled like cockroaches caught ransacking the kitchen as the helicopter descended. We froze in obedience to bullhorned commands. They didn’t take us in that night, maybe due to John fast-talking us out of it, or maybe because there were too many of us to fit in the copter, pun intended.
For John, turf management became a labor of love. Eventually he went off to school in Florida and trained as a golf course superintendent, a career he retired from after some 40 years maintaining a series of private clubs in his adopted state.
“I remember it vividly,” he said of his epiphany, “standing at Waveland at 2 a.m. in the winter of 1978-79, holding a fire hose making a skating rink, with the windchill at minus 65.” It was a life-changing moment.
Some years later he had a kismetic experience while soliciting bids for an irrigation project at the Florida country club where he was working at the time. “The contractor mentioned a project in Des Moines when we were discussing references,” he recalled. “I asked him where, specifically, and it turned out they’d installed the system at Waveland.”
YEARS IN THE MAKING
For the record, our social antics were far from the only nocturnal wildlife activity at Waveland. Besides juvenile humans, Waveland is a habitat for deer, foxes, snappers, groundhogs, raccoons, hawks, geese and ducks. Course lore includes tales of wood nymphs frolicking over hill and dale au naturel on moony summer nights.
More recent incidents have occurred in the light of day. Last year someone planted a homemade pipe bomb near the 8th green early one morning. It was defused and he was arrested, tried and convicted. But most mornings are more serene, like the daybreak a few summers ago when hot air balloons touched down on the 6th fairway, during the run-up to the annual National Balloon Classic in Indianola.
It goes without saying that Waveland is a mecca for local golfers. Every year, it hosts more than 49,000 rounds. But its caretakers have their own perspective, especially the ones with ages like golf scores.
Jimmy Smith, 66, mows fairways. He, too, first experienced the place as a schoolboy sledder when his big sister and future brother-in-law shoved him down the No. 9 Matterhorn in the dark.
“I retired in January 2020,” he said. “A year later I met [course superintendent] Aaron Sander and got hired. The hour and a half window we get at dawn before they let golfers on the course is something I will never tire of. It’s hard to describe. Dare I say spiritual? The No. 9 fairway is on my mowing route, and when I do my last lap, I always look back towards the tee box … and remember that shove all those years ago.”
Superintendent Sander is in his 11th season at Waveland. He’s “only” 53, but an old soul with a feel and affinity for the pedigree of his workplace, which he regards as a “historical goldmine.”
“When I first started here I knew the course was old,” he said. “What I didn’t realize was how many people this course has affected over the generations. Eighty-five-year-old men tell me stories of playing Waveland with their fathers 75 years ago.”
Sander is leaving a lasting mark on Waveland and vice versa. Last year he was injured while working on the dissection and removal of a fallen oak tree. A massive limb broke free from the trunk and hit him like a runaway truck. He was flung some 30 feet, suffering six broken ribs, a punctured lung and a broken leg. “I also must have landed in poison ivy because I had it all over me when I was in the hospital,” he said. After 10 days there, he was laid up at home for several more weeks before he could even so much as oversee the grounds from a cart. The year before, he was swarmed by hornets while cleaning up after a derecho.
“We spend countless hours in the woods at Waveland,” he said. “We manage the woods as much as we do the turf.”
Sander talks about his job like it was bestowed upon him, a public trust. “My main goal is to preserve what is already here,” he said, “and maybe make it a touch better for the next guy who is honored to be the steward of Waveland.”
So far, so good. The curvaceous and muscular layout has never looked better.
When my older brother Mark retired a decade or so ago he, like Jimmy, landed a part-time gig at Waveland, mowing greens at dawn. He figured the prime perk would be unlimited free play. But he didn’t anticipate the soothing sensation of motoring out of the maintenance shed with the rising sun at his back and the setting moon looming overhead. In recent years he’s endured surgeries on a knee and both shoulders. But working there is like going to church for him. I’ve seen him on his knees weeding flower beds like a sacristan setting an altar, sometimes in mid-round when he’s off duty.
Since 2008 Waveland has been privately managed by C-Corporation, contracted by the City of Des Moines. C-Corp President Jeff Chiodo talks like the enthusiastic curator of a museum. “Look at this old map,” he’ll say, pointing to a framed one in the clubhouse. “This was when the entrance was on Polk Boulevard and the greens were square to make mowing easier.”
He’s got a trove of archives that he and Sander find fascinating. But Chiodo’s focus is two-way, past and future. Respect the history;
plan ahead. Just as the course opened for the season in early March, a proposal to install lights on the front nine was announced jointly by C-Corp, the city’s parks and rec department and Musco Lighting, the Oskaloosa company that has illuminated major outdoor venues worldwide. The project would have made Waveland one of only three municipal courses in the country to offer nighttime golf. But neighbors pushed back. Chiodo listened and reconsidered.
“We remain committed to ensuring Waveland Golf Course continues to serve as a valued community asset for residents and golfers alike,” he said in a statement at the time.
“Waveland Golf Course has been an excellent neighbor,” said Todd Snell, president of the Waveland Park Neighborhood Association. “We are lucky to have such a beautiful, classic course in our neighborhood.”
The Drake Municipal Observatory has crowned a Waveland hilltop since 1921.
PITS AND PEAKS
Phase Four of my lifelong love affair with Waveland began when I retired in the fall of 2020. Golf courses were sanctuaries during the COVID pandemic, perfect venues for social distancing. I resumed playing golf after letting my game go dormant for many years.
So what’s in a name? In the case of Waveland, life itself. The ups and downs of my own are represented in the range from the hole-in-one I scored long ago on No. 13 to the stitches I needed after someone’s errant drive brained me as I was walking off the 4th green one morning a few years back. Mostly I go there now to wander on long daily walks, rescuing lost balls. They’re as plentiful as the stars in the sky surveilled from the observatory.
Waveland bills itself as the oldest municipal golf course west of the Mississippi. Is it really? Maybe. Not all courses that are open to the public are municipally owned. Waveland still is, even though it’s privately operated by C-Corp. What’s more certain is its claim as the only course that’s also home to an observatory, which isn’t as incongruous as it might seem. Golf has an extraterrestrial aspect, on a miniaturized scale. Dimpled meteorites hurtling through inner space, propelled by wannabe rocket launchers. Plus, the fallen star-filled woods.
The place remains for all ages and seasons, but it’s perhaps best viewed at its ripe old age of 125 through the eyes of old-timers who go there to feel briefly ageless, to bask in spring, summer and fall and hold the wintertimes of our lives at bay as we whistle past the Glendale graveyard next door. I’ve reserved a spot there that affords a view of the 9th hole across the street, the hill where we celebrated birthdays in first grade, the one Jimmy takes pride in mowing just so, where he rode his Flexible Flyer into the night on his maiden voyage as a kid.
That earliest memory goes back 60-plus years. But I have fresher ones, too. It was a warm Monday in February, with record-setting temps in the low 60s. I thought of the Mark Twain quote about a round of golf being “a good walk spoiled.” But there were no flagsticks or golfers there, and I didn’t bring any clubs along. A gaggle of geese strolled the 7th fairway. Otherwise, it felt like I had those 200 acres to myself. I found a few balls and more than a few of these words.
“Unspoiled” was one of them.
Contributor Mike Wellman is a local freelancer, author and former staff writer for the Des Moines Public Schools.
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