Rising Club Handicap

One nonscientific but reliable sign of business comeback from previous recessions has been the appearance of longer lines at country-club golf tees and on membership waiting lists. Most members, after all, are businessmen--and they are much more likely to join in good times than bad. But though most service enterprises are now advancing strongly, the country-club business is still in something of a hole. A survey of 75 clubs by the Manhattan accounting firm of Harris, Kerr, Forster & Co. shows that membership, which had been on the rise for 17 straight years, went down about 1% in 1971. Faced with this slippage, some clubs have relaxed their restrictions and pushed aggressive membership drives. A few have even tossed in their name-embossed towels and closed up.

The size of the handicap varies widely from club to club. At one extreme, members of Los Angeles' Hillcrest Country Club (whose ranks include Jack Benny, George Burns and Groucho Marx) learned several years ago that oil had been discovered on their land; the club has no problems with membership turnover. Members, who have shares in the club, collect tax-sheltered dividends on their original initiation fees, and "B.O." (for "before oil") memberships have become so valuable that they are willed from father to son.

The sheer prestige of belonging keeps waiting lists long at the small group of old-money clubs that exist in every big metropolitan area. It will be a long time before prospective members are put through less than total scrutiny at such WASPish establishments as Chicago's Onwentsia Club, the St. Louis Country Club, the Los Angeles Country Club (entrance fee: $25,000) or Long Island's Maidstone Club.

Still, many other clubs are caught in a squeeze between soaring costs and the amount of dues that members are willing to pay. According to the Harris, Kerr, Forster study, the bill for maintaining a golf course last year jumped 9%, to $5,364 for each hole, and has nearly doubled in the past 15 years. Paradoxically, rising land values have brought disastrous increases in taxes on many clubs--particularly in states that levy especially large taxes on land that is not being put to the best use recommended in local zoning plans. Property taxes on the Purchase Country Club in suburban New York, for example, have rocketed over the past decade from $6 000 to $218,000.

A few states, including Ohio and California, have come to the rescue of clubs by forcing municipalities to tax golf-course land at low rates. Some establishments elsewhere--including Chicago's Edgewater Country Club and the New York area's Fairview Country Club--have sold out to developers, either to reopen at a less costly location or to distribute the profits to members and close altogether. Most clubs have elected to pass on the costs of higher taxes to members in the form of stiffer dues and sometimes year-end assessments. Quite a few companies gave up the practice of paying club dues for their executives during the recession and still have not loosened up on that policy.

Small wonder, then, that clubs are recruiting hard. "We have had cocktail parties and brunches where we have asked members to scour the bushes and bring their relatives and friends," says Thomas O'Connor, manager of the Ravisloe Country Club near Chicago. Like some other socially stuffy institutions, New York's Scarsdale Golf Club has begun to admit a few Jews. An occasional club has resorted to seeking new members through newspaper ads. Those ads, however, must run in the same paper with come-ons for an increasingly popular alternative to golf clubs: the residential development that includes a golf course.

Country clubs are making other moves that reflect changing U.S. attitudes. Many are responding to the tennis boom by adding new courts, which lure younger members. At Chicago's Northmoor Country Club, the formal dining room is being nibbled up by a fast-expanding informal food area featuring hamburgers and other low-priced dishes. The club also lets members use snowmobiles on the golf course in winter months. Despite such concessions, many affluent young couples just are not as turned on by country clubs as their parents once were.

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