SEE my resume here

 

I am a freelance historian, writer, and archivist with 25 years of experience doing good work wherever I go. I was born in Portland, Oregon on January 10, 1960, and fell in love with history as a young boy, imagining during trips to the Oregon coast what it must have been like for Lewis and Clark when they reached the Pacific Ocean almost two-hundred years earlier. I remember the car coming over the coast range mountains on Highway 26 and seeing that majestic blue ocean stretching before us, the setting sun reflecting an orange glow off a shimmering expanse of water. It stirred the soul. This must have been what Lewis and Clark felt, I thought.

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I majored in history and political science at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and earned a B.A. in 1982. After working in the real world for eight years I returned to graduate school at George Washington University in Washington, DC, earning my M.A. degree in 1993. I began working there the following year in the Special Collections Department of the Gelman Library, I was responsible for managing a collection of some 20,000 books, along with hundreds of maps and thousands of photographs. In the University Archives I managed 1,000 collections of records and personal papers, as well as hundreds of thousands of photographs. I assisted researchers from all over the world, providing them with information, and accessioned and processed hundreds of linear feet of collections, including the papers of the personal physician to President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Janet Travell.

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I left GWU in 2007 to be closer to my ill mother. I worked at Dicks's Sporting Goods selling golf clubs and doing club repair after she passed away and helped take care of the estate until 2013, when I began doing volunteer and later consultant work for the United States Golf Association (from 2013-2018.) There I organized papers in the African American Golfers Archive and gathering and entring data into a database of all its championships. I entered over one million fields of data for the U.S. Open (1895-2017) and Women’s Open (1946-2017), including venues, yardages, scores, and player statistics (greens/fairways hit, putts, driving distances.

 

In my professional life, going back 25 years to my work at George Washington University, I have been a keen researcher, cataloger, processor, and indexer of diverse collections. Creating annotated bibliographies has been a part of that work, and my knowledge of golf history and literature is extensive. I have a personal library of almost 200 volumes and also have literally thousands of pages of articles (hard copy and digital) on golf that I have collected over the years. These materials cover a wide spectrum of subjects – player biographies, course and championship histories, PGA Tour, Champions Tour, LPGA, Ryder Cup, USGA, women’s golf, architecture, slow play, scoring records, Presidential golf, rules, announcers, junior golf, writers, caddies, celebrities, equipment, long hitters, teachers, college golf, handicapping, disabled golfers, galleries, history of golf, international golf, golf on TV, and golf techniques, etc. I have also indexed major golf magazines like Golf Digest and Golf Magazine (and others going back to 1895) along the same subject headings, with some 15,000 entries to date.

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I offer research to individuals and organizations using both my personal collections of articles and manuscripts, as well as the holdings of the USGA. I leave no stone unturned in searching for information, and strive to find new things to add to old stories. This research has resulted in my writing two books and numerous articles. As part of my last two years work at the USGA (20% of my time), I wrote a 43,000-word short history of women’s golf in the U.S., focusing on issues of class, gender, and race, putting it in the context of the times. During the process I gathered some interesting quotes from former LPGA players Jane Blalock, Sandra Haynie, Myra Blackwelder, and Missie Berteotti on their experiences with sexism in playing the game. My last piece was on the 1932 Curtis Cup, based on previously untapped correspondence I processed on my first run at the USGA in 2013 as a project archivist. All of these have been published in the British journal Through the Green.

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I have also researched the historical background of the long-running distance debate in golf, including the evolution of the ball and clubs (especially metal drivers) since the early 20th century. A 207-page report was produced in 2018, which the USGA has considered as part of its Distance Insights project with the R&A in Scotland. This includes the demise of the wound ball and the rise of the ProV1 since 2000, COR and spring-like effect, increased MOI and their affect on the explosion of distance on the professional level since the mid-1990s.

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I have lived in Bedminster, New Jersey since 2014.