Aw, damn. I had not seen Walter in some time - old age had not treated him well - but his influence on this particular American architect could not be overstated, either.
I thought of him just last week in fact, when I was in California. I was shaving at the sink at a golf club, and there was no stopper to hold in the water, and I remembered Walter wondering how a state that had a drought emergency back in the 1980's could justify wasting water that way. It would not surprise him that they still do.
The year I headed to the UK after graduating from university, I was introduced to Walter by his friend Stanley Carr, the Scotsman who was the greenkeeper at Gulf Stream in Delray Beach. Walter had tentatively promised to put me on his maintenance crew for the summer, but the summer of 1982 was a nasty recession in Scotland, and Walter said he could not hire an American kid when they were so many people in town who needed the work. So, he had talked with the caddie master, and set up for me to caddie on The Old Course, on the condition that I wouldn't go out too early and interfere with the men who had to make two loops to feed their families. After that, I was free to hang out around the maintenance yard as much as I liked, and ask questions. It all proved to be the best possible way to learn about The Old Course, and about greenkeeping and golf in Scotland generally.
We saw a lot of each other that summer, because I would be out on the golf course in the early morning and late evening taking photos, and Walter worked morning and evening shifts because those were the only times The Old Course wasn't packed with golfers. He had an irrigation system but never used it on automatic -- he said it was less likely for someone to overwater if it required standing there with a hose long enough to do it -- and I was absolutely amazed how he would flood a green with water one night after not watering it for three weeks. He had his crew collect seaweed off the rocks in the harbor, composted it in the parking lot, and used that for fertilizer so he could spend his budget on labor instead of chemicals. [He was doing sustainability before it was a thing; of course, so was every other greenkeeper in the UK, but Walter kept doing it even when he had the budget not to.]
Walter bemoaned the direction of the turf industry, but at the same time he stayed on top of the latest developments -- he and Jimmy Kidd from Gleneagles [David's father] and George Brown from Turnberry always came to the GCSAA show in the USA, because they understood they had to cater to their American visitors. Walter was a very good golfer, and he always emphasized that his job was to provide a good playing surface, ahead of a "pure" looking stand of turf that didn't provide a firm bounce.
He was in charge of four courses for the town, so he always had a posse of top-flight assistants who would soon move on to important greenkeeping jobs elsewhere: when I lived there, they included today's greenkeeper at Carnoustie, and the now head of agronomy for the European Tour.
You could also say that he has a lot of disciples in the design business . . . anyone that ever worked for me has benefitted from his wisdom.