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History of the Croquet Club of Vermont |
Croquet Sites on the Web |
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EXTRA |
A Brief History of the Croquet Club of Vermontby William J. Cheeseman, September 13, 2011I first encountered the Croquet Club of Vermont in the 1980's. A few years earlier, I had been introduced to the American six wicket game by Bob Kroeger on an unusual court on Boston's Lewis Wharf, and I played for several years with the Boston Croquet Club on two full-size courts at the Sherborn Inn in Sherborn, Massachusetts. In 1981, my wife and I bought a second home in Quechee, Vermont, next door to a home our old friends Ephraim and Helen Shulman had bought the year before. This was a fateful event for the Croquet Club of Vermont in more than one way, as you shall see. When I began spending a lot of time at my new Vermont home, I asked Bob Kroeger if he knew any croquet players in Vermont, and he gave me an introduction to the Vermont club. I arranged to play a couple of games with an original member of the club—I now forget who it was, but I think it was John McWilliams because Sandy Etherington was sick at the time. We played on the club's courts at the Woodstock Sports Center, formally known as the Woodstock Inn & Resort Racquet & Fitness Club. Unfortunately, I could not play regularly in Vermont because my work life was centered in Boston. In early 2000, my wife and I moved to our Quechee home full time, and I joined the Croquet Club of Vermont and began playing regularly. At that time, the "second blooming" of the Vermont club was in full flower, orchestrated by long-time members Tina Moore and Nell Richmond, new president Ned Graffagnino, and many others. I soon took an interest in the history of the club, and before long I arranged to interview one of its founders, Rhea R. Etherington of Woodstock. I intended to turn that interview into a history of the club, and now, more than ten years later, I have done just that. In October 2000, club member Bob Browning and I visited Rhea at her home in Woodstock. Bob was about 90 and Rhea was in her mid-80's, and they knew each other well. Bob served as go-between to set up the interview. At first, Rhea wanted fellow founder Eldredge "Ellie" Jackson to join her for my interview, but she changed her mind due to Ellie's frail health and in the end Bob came with me, instead. Rhea began the interview by pointing to her front yard and informing me that the club got its start right there. I quickly learned, however, that the impetus for the formation of the club was her earlier experience of the game of croquet in California. She and her husband Sandford "Sandy" G. Etherington, Jr. spent winters in Palo Alto, in an apartment on or near the Stanford campus. They saw a croquet game in progress at the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe in southern California, and they thought it would be a great activity for the older folks in Woodstock. Later, they went to Santa Barbara and saw more croquet, and they started playing there themselves. They joined the San Francisco club, which was just getting started. She showed me photographs taken around 1987, she thought, in Sonoma Valley with members of the San Francisco club. She said she also played at Meadowood in Napa Valley when it first opened as a resort destination. At some point in their California experience of croquet, they came back to Woodstock and started the Croquet Club of Vermont. It was not a formal process, and they never had any by-laws. In 1984, when they built their house, they also built a small court on their not entirely level front yard and started inviting friends to play with them. She recalled that they also played on a grassy area near the tennis courts at the Woodstock Sports Center. At first, about ten very enthusiastic friends participated, and the number gradually grew. They were eager to learn more about the game of croquet, so they started collecting books. Then they got help from Sandy Kayden, whom they met through the U.S. Croquet Association. Later, in 1990 when she was moving to California, they brought Bob Kroeger up from Boston on her recommendation to continue to teach them how to play and to help them with tournaments. Teddy Prentis once taught at the club, as well. A number of the early members played together in the winter in Florida, and the group grew to about thirty members. Rhea and some of the others were acquainted with Laurance S. Rockefeller, who had a substantial presence in Woodstock as the founder of the Woodstock Inn & Resort in its modern incarnation and who, over a period of many years, was a great benefactor to the community. They began courting him, in her words, to build real croquet courts for them. Ellie and Mary Jackson worked on him, as did Nell Richmond. Every time they saw him, they would mention how wonderful it would be if they had a croquet court. Rhea and her husband Sandy even had him to dinner. Finally he said yes, and he had professional plans drawn up. Once the courts were built, membership picked up fast. John McWilliams (Julia Childs' brother) and Sandy Etherington organized the equipment and the greens keepers, and they acted as unofficial co-presidents of the club until health issues forced John to step down. At one point, they persuaded Laurance Rockefeller to play on the new court. The members showed him how and, in Rhea's words, "prayed to God he'd go through the wicket." He did, and he said "I like this." One year, Sandy, Rhea and other members played in a tournament in Newport, Rhode Island. The next year, they decided to hold an invitational tournament of their own. The 1989 invitational turned out to be a great idea, because many of the members had Florida friends who played, and many of them came to Vermont for its first invitational. There were lots of parties and much entertaining. As a result, the next year's invitational was a booming success, and the following year they had to turn people away. During club tournaments, Sandy and Rhea offered the use of their front lawn court as a "practice court," and lots of people came to practice. Rhea told me she finally had the front yard court torn up in 1989 because parking was too awkward, but Bob Kroeger remembers using it into the 1990s (with Sandy complaining about the crows). For a time, Rhea remembers, there was a dining room at the Sports Center where the club had Tuesday night dinners and tournament dinners. Later, maybe around 1985, the dinners moved down the road to the Woodstock Country Club. Then the club began to "stabilize," in Rhea's words, as the members got older. By around 1996, it was standing still—the old members kept coming, but they were not successful at bringing in new members. Sandy Etherington died in 1997, and others became unable to play as they grew older. Rhea sensed that the club was beginning to fade. But just then a new group of active players became involved and took up the game as the club again grew. She mentioned in particular Tina Moore and Nell Richmond. Bob Kroeger especially remembers Tina Moore working tirelessly to keep the club going. It was at the height of the recruiting effort for this second blooming of the club that I first became a regular member, along with several other newcomers who became very active for many years. At the time of Sandy's death, the club had decided to set up an annual memorial tournament at the end of summer, and the Etherington Memorial Singles Tournament took place under that name for many years. For several years the club prospered under the leadership of newer members, including Ned Graffagnino who served as president for a number of terms. I also remember that Chuck Vanderstreet of the Woodstock Inn & Resort was a facilitator and major supporter of the club, as I understand he had been for many years. In 2000, at the time of my interview of Rhea, there were a number of people whom Rhea thought of as "originals" still playing with the club. She mentioned Otis L. Guernsey Jr., a very colorful character with a long history as a Broadway film and theater critic and arts editor for The New York Herald Tribune and, in his long-time role as editor of the annual Best Plays series, as what some called "the most prolific theater editor in United States history." Otis's stately but humorous demeanor was greatly enjoyed by club members on court and off, until his death in May 2001. Rhea acknowledged that Otis was not actually involved from the beginning of the club. She also mentioned Holly Rohde, Tom Schriber, Nell Richmond and Ellie Jackson. She added that John and Joe McWilliams no longer played, nor Anne and Dick Johnson, nor Priscilla and John Hardiman. From my own experience with the club, I will name a few of the active players during the heyday of its second blooming in the early 2000s, in no particular order (and with apologies to those I leave out): Holly Rohde, Nell Richmond, Bob Browning, Tom and Connie Cassady, John and Tina Moore, Otis and Dorianne Guernsey, Bill and Janet Hamilton, Art and Mary Lou Boniface, Ned and Betty Lou Graffagnino, Willa Nohl, Bob and Janet Steele, John and Maureen McAveeney, Louise Schwebel, Robert and Barbara Philips, Rick and Diane Hobart, Hollis and Lenore Rinehart, Bob O'Rourke, John and Cathleen Dainton, Tom Kennedy, Louise Logan, Eph Shulman, and Bill Cheeseman. By the mid-2000's, I stopped playing croquet due to the press of other commitments, but I maintained my membership in the club. I will end this Brief History by returning to 1981 when my wife and I bought our home in Quechee next door to Eph and Helen Shulman. We had known the Shulmans for many years in Boston. As I became more involved in croquet in Boston and later in Vermont, I tried from time to time to interest Eph in the game, because I was convinced that he would be a star. He put me off for years. Once, in 1990, I talked him into visiting the croquet courts at the Sports Center with me. By coincidence as I recall it (but it was probably by design), the finals of the invitational tournament were under way that day. Eph and I sat on the stone wall under the trees watching, and eventually we witnessed Laurance Rockefeller handing out the trophies. Ten years later (and more than ten years ago now), while I was going through Rhea Etherington's and Tina Moore's photographs in 2000, I ran across several shots of two young men—Eph Shulman and me—in the background, sitting on the wall behind Sandy Etherington, Laurance Rockefeller, and Margaret and Dave Hull from Connecticut:
I finally succeeded in convincing Eph to take up croquet. He has become a stellar player, with a handicap approaching 4. More importantly, he served as president of the Croquet Club of Vermont for the last few years, retiring just a few days ago. During that time, as members from the early days of the second blooming moved away from Woodstock or stopped playing, Eph slowly brought in new members one by one, and they have become the core of the club's third blooming. I am confident that new president Tad Richardson will continue to bring members into the club and secure its continuing vitality. ------------------------------------------------ Croquet Sites on the WebHere are a few links to croquet-related web sites that you may find useful or entertaining. Croquet in America - Official Site of the USCA Bob Kroeger—Professional Croquet Services and Products ------------------------------------------------ Resource 3Contact our web master, Bill Cheeseman, at bill@cheeseman.name if you have a good idea about what should be inserted in this spot. Know any good croquet jokes? Have a special strategy tip? We'll entertain any and all ideas that are fit to print. ------------------------------------------------ Resource 4Contact our web master, Bill Cheeseman, at bill@cheesesman.name if you have a good idea about what should be inserted in this spot. Do you have an interesting photo from your winter croquet in Florida? Greetings from old friends of the club? We'll entertain any and all ideas that are fit to print. ------------------------------------------------ EXTRAThis spot is reserved for a tribute to the first member of the club who finishes "in the money" in regional, national or international competition. Care to predict who that might be? ------------------------------------------------ |
