Tee party for golfers in Greene
Observer-Reporter came to the rescue last week to identify the location and four of the five women in the latest Mystery Photo.
Those readers were unanimous on the location – the lounge of the Greene County Country Club, with its knotty pine paneling – but there was disagreement on the identity of the women before we arrived at a consensus.
”This was the Ladies Golf Association passing from old officers to new officers,” emailed Alexa Conklin Gilles, who is in the process of moving from West Palm Beach to The Villages in Florida.
”I grew up at the Greene County Country Club,” Gilles said. “My dad was the pro, and we lived in the apartment upstairs above the clubhouse in 1958 and ’59.”
Gilles recognized Dorothy “Dottie” Bernaduci, a highly competitive golfer whose name appears in tournament results in online newspaper archives from the 1960s through the 1980s; Irene Taylor, who was a pharmacist in Carmichaels; Virginia Detwiler Battistoni, who along with her husband, Angelo “Blackie” Battistoni, were avid golfers at the club; and Ruth Keener.
As Gilles literally lived at the club, so did Tammy Vowcheck Watreas, whose family lived in another apartment above the club at the same time as Gilles.
”My mom ran the kitchen at the club, and my dad was a coal miner. We moved in there when I was 6 years old, and we stayed there until I graduated from high school in 1968,” Watreas said over the telephone from St. Louis, Mo., where she is helping her daughter with a move to a nearby military base.
“I was club champion seven times,” Watreas said. “I haven’t played golf in years.”
There were a number of guesses at the identity of the woman standing at right in the back row, the only one without a smile. Without agreement, we’ll have to leave her identity a mystery.
We may have been wrong about the approximate date of the photo. We guessed it might have been taken in the early 1970s, but most of the readers who responded think it dates to the mid to late 1960s.
Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.