MEMORIES OF
HOLT LAKE, Part 6

September 12, 2019


Betty Welch has spent more than half a century
playing and working at the lake and the club

Gary Ridout has been compiling personal memories for a number of years for a newsletter he produces for present-day Holt Lake residents. We're sharing selected samples from time to time with readers of the Sun. Here are excerpts from Gary's July 2019 interview with Betty Welch:

 

I have always loved Holt Lake. I was born in 1931 and grew up in Smithfield. My childhood home was on Market Street in across Front Street from the Legion Hut....

 

My father’s name was Burton Sugg. He was in a plumbing and heating contracting business with Mr. J.P. Rogers. In 1919, my father was approached by Mr. Nat Rand, Mr. R. C. Gillette, and the real- estate firm of Abell & Gray. They had a plan to demolish the dam in front of the Country Club and build a new dam further down Black Creek. Because my father knew a lot about water and construction, they asked him where he would recommend putting the new dam. He told them that the best location was near the railroad bridge. They agreed, and that is where the dam is now located.

 

Even though we didn’t live at the lake, all of us knew that Holt Lake was the most fun place to be in the summer. I was one of eight children, and in the 1930s Holt Lake was like heaven on earth for us. My father bought "swimming rights" for us so we could swim all summer. A man named Mr. H. Lee Waters came through Johnston County in 1937 and took movies in Smithfield, Selma, and at Holt Lake. A copy of the movie is housed at the Johnston County Heritage Center. As a six-year-old, I am in Mr. Waters’s movie standing at the edge of Holt Lake in pigtails.

 

During the 1930s, I loved the dance hall at Holt Lake. I was too young to dance, but I loved to stand and watch people dance. I remember one song on the jukebox was "Marie" sung by Rudy Vallee and written by Irving Berlin. Also, people danced to Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra playing "Boogie Woogie." All of my older brothers and sisters danced the jitterbug.

 

"Very primitive" cabins for rent

Along the shoreline of Holt Lake near where Mark McMillan lives now were several cabins that could be rented in the summer. They were very primitive cabins. One summer my father rented one of the cabins. Each cabin had a screened porch on the front and with cots for sleeping. Inside was a little kitchen with an oil stove. We didn’t care that they were primitive because all we did was sleep there.


Mr. Gillette’s granddaughter was a good friend of mine. Her name was Mary Anna Whitley. Her family owned a large dugout canoe. We would take the canoe down to the lake and flip it over so we could hide underneath it. There was a space to breathe while you were under the canoe. It’s a wonder we didn’t drown because we all laughed so hard.


One day when I was 16, my favorite cousin, Shirley Lee, came to swim with me. We decided we would swim from the Pavilion to the front of the Country Club. We swam up the middle of the lake to the front of the club. I remember I did not want to put my feet down because the bottom was covered with slimy logs. So we crawled out of the water and walked back to the Pavilion. My legs were trembling from so much swimming! In front of Frank Skinner’s house is a big rock. My brother and a lot of his friends would swim from the Pavilion to the big rock at the Skinner home. They were real athletes!...

 

Bo Welch comes to town
My husband, Bo Welch, was associated with the Country Club of Johnston for over five decades.  During the 1940s, Bo lived in Raleigh with his parents. During that time, Bo’s mother became sick, so he moved to Smithfield when he was 12 and lived with his brother Agee and his wife, Minnie Ada. Agee was the golf pro at the Country Club. I lot of people thought Agee was Bo’s father, but he was not. Bo worked at the golf course during his years at Smithfield High School. Bo, Agee, and Minnie Ada lived on the second floor of the original clubhouse. I met Bo at Smithfield High, where we were classmates.


The original clubhouse burned down on a cold Thanksgiving in 1950. There were no fire hydrants nearby, so the volunteer fire department had to pump water out of Holt Lake to fight the fire. I remember that one of the Smithfield Volunteer Fire Fighters, Ralph Ellis, stood in the freezing water of Holt Lake and held the hose so the water could be pumped out. Their efforts were valiant, but the clubhouse burned to the ground. I was at the Howell Theatre when Freddie Brink came in and told me that the Country Club had burned and a lot of Bo’s possessions had been destroyed.


Bo and I spent two years in South Carolina in the early 1950s where he was the assistant pro at the Florence, South Carolina Country Club. In the spring of 1954, when Agee left to go to Raleigh, the Johnston County Country Club contacted Bo and asked him to be the pro. Bo was excited to get back home to Smithfield. He had just won the South Carolina Championship....

As the golf pro, Bo’s duties were unbelievable. He had to run the pro shop, the golf course, the clubhouse, and put on tournaments. I was 21 years old and did not realize that many of the expectations for running the club fell on me. Bo and I had to coordinate all meals for the members at the club. I knew nothing about feeding two hundred people. I was expected to cook the food for the meals, and they paid me zero. I didn’t even get a tip! But we lived through it.

 

Bo worked so hard. He had to water all the greens by hand. He would go out every night and pull big hoses to connect to the water. We had no truck; we used our car to do all the work on the golf course. He had one tractor, and we used gang movers to mow the fairways. It was very labor-intensive. In the meantime, I had to help in the shop and the clubhouse. For all this work, Bo was paid and we were provided housing. We lived over the pro shop. There were four little rooms for us in that facility. We had our son, Neal, at that time, so there were three of us at first.
 

Bo was wonderful at teaching golf. He had golf lessons for men, women, and children. He got the women so excited about golf that he had 38 women on the Country Club of Johnston County golf team. This women’s team traveled all over eastern North Carolina. The competing teams never wanted the Johnston County women’s team to come because they always won the tournaments.

 

Because Bo was a PGA professional, he would have two-day PGA-sponsored tournaments at the Country Club. He had golf pros from all over North Carolina come to Smithfield to play in the tournaments. Avery Beck and Al Goodrich were leading PGA golfers in those days that came to the club to play. Those were wonderful days. There was always a big cocktail party and cookout. Everyone just loved coming to the Country Club of Johnston County.


Those days were, in my opinion, the heyday of the club. The membership was dominated by tobacconists from across the county. One of the members and great friends of the club was Mr. K.R. Edwards, who owned K.R. Edwards Tobacco in Smithfield.

At first, just nine golf holes
At that time, it was a nine-hole golf course. In 1956 or 1957, the course was expanded to 18 holes. I will never forget the day they started the work on the expansion. We were driving back from Raleigh, and we came into the Country Club through the back way, off Packing Plant Road. There at the entrance sat several pieces of earth-moving equipment. "They are here!" shouted Bo. He was so excited.

 

In the early 1960s, Mack McCormick bought several lots along Country Club Road past the club. That section of Country Club Road was a one-lane dirt road. Mack had the first house ... built as a party house for himself. He kept his golf cart there but never lived in the house. It was only for parties.


Mr. McCormick came to us and said: "I’m gonna build you a house." So in 1962, we moved out of the second floor of the pro shop and began renting the house where I now live. I was thrilled. I remember sitting in the den and looking down the hall of this house saying, "This is a mansion!" It was so much bigger than the four rooms we had lived in for so long.


The work that my husband, Bo Welch, did for the club went on for 38 years until Bo got really sick. He served the Country Club of Johnston County faithfully from 1954 to 1992.... The people of the Country Club were very good to Bo. They appreciated his talent and hard work. They tried to help him as much as they could. I remember the day he died: They closed the pro shop. He was the leading light of the Country Club; he was the life of the club.

 

Previous installments in this series appeared in these linked editions:
2-28-19 / 3-28-19 / 4-25-19 / 7-11-19 / 8-8-19>