Wee Golf

Historic is Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, with one foot in Tennessee and one in Georgia. Here the Union soldiers tumbled the greycoats into retreat in the Battle Above the Clouds; here, last year, shrewd Garnet Carter, owner of Fairyland Club, built the first Tom Thumb golf course, complicating an ordinary 18-hole putting course with ingenious hazards. Last week to Fairyland went putters from many corners of the U. S. to roll balls through hollows, to carom them from banks, down tunnels, over dishpan water hazards and around basket-size sand-traps in the first national Tom Thumb championship.*

Some putters from Jacksonville, Fla. were smartest. They came two weeks before the tournament started and putted round and round the Fairyland course, where every hole is named for a fairy story with little statues of the characters —gnomes, animals, little people—as hazards, direction posts, decoration. By long practice the people from Jacksonville learned to play Cinderella, to kill Red Riding Hood, to fool Little Miss Muffet. Of course, Chattanooga putters had practiced on the course a lot too, but they were rattled by competition with the outland contestants. Impulsive Chinese Grace Moy of Brooklyn arrived in her car late one evening and went right out to play. She was up early in the morning to play some more. Her scores were bad. She said: "If I don't break par this round I'll jump in the goldfish pool." She did not break par. She did not jump in the bowl.

A great crowd followed Ernest Fossa, 14, champion Tom Thumber of Massachusetts. Fossa hurried his shots, took sixes on the last two holes.

Midget Cigarsalesman Herbert Barnett (32 yrs., 50 lb., 30 in.) did not have his own clubs with him. He had to play around with a 35-in. putter, did badly. He said: "What could you expect? The only full-size article I use is a Meditation Cigar."

In the end. the smart Jacksonvillains triumphed. After four 18-hole rounds (par, 56) blond J. K. Scott who says he scores from 75 to 80 on real golf courses won the $2.000 first prize for men with 223. Mrs. J. E. Rankin who won the $2,000 for the best lady was from Jacksonville too. Her score was 241. Putter Newton Coggins from Jacksonville and Mrs. R. L. Stone of Chattanooga were runners-up.

Garnet Carter has part interest in patent rights on the use of cottonseed hulls or other "comminuted flocculent vegetable material" as putting greens (TIME, July 14; Aug. n). His patents on hollow-log and other hazards are still pending. A great rival—Miniature Golf Courses of America Inc.—had sprung up to compete with his Tom Thumb Golf. Wisely they compromised on the market: to Miniature Golf, the indoor courses; to Tom Thumb the open spaces. Latest Department of Commerce figures for this fast-growing U. S. business put the total investment at $325,000,000 for 30,000 courses.

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