F. Earl Christy

Take a Big Spring Swing

As a college girl who hated sports, I took golf to appease the powers that be who insisted I should have physical education credits to graduate as an art major.

Somewhere there exists a video of me in a self-sewn, super-short miniskirt (with built in modesty bloomers) taking swing after swing at a poor little golf ball, but only chopping grass and flinging dirt. In between divots I am seen discretely trying to bob down and replace the golf ball on the tee without exposing my ridiculous bloomers.

I question my sanity in wearing such a get-up to golf class, but what I question more is the teacher’s idea that the entire class watching our “swing” could at all enhance any of our lives. I cringe to think where that video ended up.

At least I had freedom of movement. Can you imagine trying to take a swing with a driver in the outfit pictured on this 1905 postcard? The illustrator, F. Earl Christy, specialized in depicting stylish college girls. I may have looked ridiculous, but this college girl springing around in her high-collared blouse, tight fitting jacket, long skirt and heeled shoes looks like a recipe for a broken foot, or at least a fatal seam split. No wonder it looks like she’s waving a putter. They probably didn’t allow her to use a driver.

It’s hard to tell if she’s on the first hole or the 12^th hole from the marker. But I’m betting she was always as glad as I was to finally arrive at the club house.

On the reverse side of the card, which was mailed from Waupun, Wisconsin, in 1908, H.O. relates in a firm girlish script that she is, “fine and dandy.” She wonders why she has not had a message from her friend and has placed her 1 cent green Ben Franklin stamp upside down and angled a bit to the right, meaning in stamp language, “Why have I not heard from you?”

My guess is that her friend, Theodore, was so overwhelmed by her ungainly golf attire that she twisted an ankle and fell into a sand trap. Of course that’s only a theory. 

  

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