Here are excerpts from Joe Passov's article about Joe Lee in Travel and Leisure Golf Nov 2003:
Joe Lee's Legacy
Overlooked for decades, the straightforward courses he and Dick Wilson designed are once again being given their due.
by Joe Passov
One day early in 1962, Ben Hogan opted out of his usual round at Seminole Golf Club in North Palm Beach, Florida, to try a new course located a few Sunshine State Parkway exits to the south called Pine Tree. Word had spread that this Dick Wilson-Joe Lee design was something special, but final judgment would have to wait until golf's purest shot maker had had his turn. The verdict? Hogan scraped it around in seventy-three, one over par, then wrote in the club's guest book, "The best course I have ever seen."
So, whatever happened to Pine Tree?
A young Jack Nicklaus played Pine Tree and called it "a truly great course." Sam Snead called it "the best golf course in the South" and became a dues-paying member, as did fellow Hall of Famers Mickey Wright and Louise Suggs. Indeed, Pine Tree was the "it" course of 1962, the Pacific Dunes of its day. Golf Digest ranked Pine Tree in the top ten in the U.S. in 1969, and it remained in the top thirty through 1984. By 1993, however, it had plummeted out of the top 100......