Our youngest son and his family just moved from Florida to the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina. He has been playing quite a bit of golf and while he never had a golf cart here in Florida, he determined that based on the area in which he is living that it might not be a bad idea to get a used one. Unlike The Villages there are not a lot of golf cart stores so he went the want ad route. He shortly found one that looked like what he wanted at a fair price. Unfortunately, when he went further, he found that the cart was for sale in Sandy Lake, Pa. What is strange in this case is that Sandy Lake is where I lived during most of my grade school days. (Yes, I know they don’t call it grade school anymore, but that is what it was when I was there so I like to be accurate. Can’t really change history, you know).
The other strange point about the matter is that I didn’t know that there was a golf cart anywhere in Sandy Lake. The nearest golf course is about 18 miles away. Back in my day, none of us could afford to play golf anyhow so we didn’t worry about where a golf course might be located. In fact, we didn’t even know what a golf cart was. Of course, that might be that they didn’t have them then. That was in the day when everybody walked – and you lugged your clubs yourself. The latter assumes that you were not wealthy enough to hire a caddy. That would have been the case in Sandy Lake when I was there. (Perhaps the dentist or the doctor might have been able to do that, but they did not have the richest patients so who knows).
What intrigues me further is for what the golf cart now located in Sandy Lake was used. My best friend back in the grade school days lived on a farm just outside the metropolitan area of Sandy Lake. They grew a large quantity of corn, and I helped a couple of times to pick it. (So perhaps the present-day golf cart was used on the farm?) It was not good eating corn, but rather feed corn. Thus, while I got sweaty, there was no corn to bring back to the family. It was just something to do – and there wasn’t much to do in Sandy Lake I can assure you. I will have to admit that we could walk down the railroad track for about a mile until we came to the neighboring town of Stoneboro (where I went to high school.) The reason we often did that, especially in the summertime, was that is where there was a nice spring fed lake. The lake was called “Sandy Lake.” Yep, the lake was not in the town of Sandy Lake, but rather in the next town.
It should be noted that even if we had a golf cart back then we could not have ridden it down the track to the Lake. It was barely wide enough for us let alone a golf cart. Beside the RR cops would have chased us off. Now one of the things back in my day was that liquor sales were very controlled in Pennsylvania. Each community voted whether it was to be dry or wet. The saying was that Sandy Lake would always vote dry as long as they could go to Stoneboro which was wet. Boy, a golf cart might have come in handy then as if you were careful and used the back roads between the towns it would have made a good hauler of a little booze. In addition, a golf cart might have been great for use at the Great Stoneboro Fair which was held then every Labor Day! Boy, we missed a lot back in my grade school days! (For the record The Blonde in the House lived in Pittsburgh and didn’t play golf. Thus, she didn’t worry about golf carts).
(Update) Two yellow rubber duckies have been spotted in a Maine harbor. The rumor is that it is Ludwig and his brother Larry. How Ludwig got from Savannah and perhaps found Larry is unknown?
Villager Barry Evans is a columnist for Villages-News.com
