Dan,
Thanks for the trip down memory lane for me! Joe Black was my first golf course design under K and N. This, along with the Lake Arrowhead thread really, really takes me back.....
A few stories - I picked up Chick Evans for the grand reopening. He lived in one of the row houses on the right of the picture, and was probably 80 at the time. When I went to the door, his one room apt. had a golf net strung up, and his wife was sitting behind the net while he hit a few balls to warm up for the big grand opening shot (using, btw, my 5 iron)
We took him on a drive around, and he told us a story about putting one spalding dot golf ball in an old willow tree to memorialize his mother. He asked if we had taken down that tree, and we were lucky that we hadn't, given we had turned the course from east west to north south. The tree sits just right and ahead of the new sixth green. He found it, I reached in the hole, and there were thirty old golf balls down there.
During construction, we came in one day to find a merry go round from a nearby park up on the roof of the old building. Given that it took a crane to get it down, we wondered how the heck vandals got it up there in the first place. I always felt they should have put equal energy into finding a job or something!
The goofiest feature of the course is the dry lake on 2. We dug, hit water table of such pressure that we couldn't even keep liner down, so they decided to raise the bottom, fill it with gravel and call it a dry hazard.
K and N sort of let me run with this, and got a full time supervision contract, more so I could learn from Wadsworth than supervise them in any way. I learned a lot from them on that job.