- George Dunne National in Oak Forest, Ill. (I think Dick Nugent) - Owned by the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Lovely layout, albeit over treed IMO it is a forest preserve what do you expect?
Also several lakes which force carries that slows down play. Not quick rounds here. However Bill Casper runs it and keep the course in very good shape.
. . . Too bad. It's a fun track, with a number of interesting holes, and a plethora of wildlife wandering around during your round.
Fond memories of working on that course while with Killian and Nugent, one of their last before the split. They had just met Jim Colbert and brought him to the opening. Stood on the first tee and said, "If this isn't a par 5, I'm going home." (It was) While KN did the design, they brought in an old time irrigation designer under separate contract. His designs remained single row, as would have been typical when he started in the biz, but given the scale of the course, which is huge, typical of Dick Nugent, it wasn't enough. Sometimes he used double row on the tees, they were so large, but went back to single row in the fairways, LOL.
I presume in the 40 years since it has been built that this has been upgraded to at least double row?
Sort of OT, and maybe no one really cares, but short story. Some of the design associates had by that time gotten tired of their standard 2 mounds behind every green. During the planning phase, we ran the idea of variety by them, even coming up with a system of rolling a dice to determine if there would randomly be 1 to 6 mounds, maybe even one without any backing mound at all. They agreed in the office, but when we got out on an early field visit, where the first green had just one mound, Ken (and it was really Dick's project) suggested splitting the one into two. The next green had 4, which he suggested be reduced to 2 as "too busy".
After he changed all of the five greens shaped by then back to 2 mounders, one of the design associates pulled up his car, emptied all the survey gear and plans out and quit on the spot. Any design associate will tell you getting over ruled on "your idea" in the design is a pretty constant frustration, LOL. That said, I imagine he told his wife about it, who was more concerned with him being employed over being a satisfied career professional, and he was back on the job the next day, head down drafting. Dick walks in (late, as was his custom) and says, "Hey, I thought you quit?" The answer, "I brought donuts to apologize" apparently the universal "I didn't really mean to" language, LOL.