A large part of his success came from his willingness to reinvent his game and himself. For instance, he overcame country-club prejudice against immigrants by redesigning his name, changing it to the less-Italian-sounding Gene Sarazen. (For a while, he even tried passing himself off as a Scottish MacSarazen.)

Another innovation came in the late ’20s, with his invention of the sand wedge—a club found in any respectable golf bag today.

For years I had been afflicted with that dread malady of the links which, for lack of a better term, I call “trap phobia.” It’s a virulent plague that strikes at the hearts of men and turns them to stone… Nearly every championship is decided in and out of traps, with the result that you either master your niblick before a title event or you might as well start back home and save the caddie fees.

A “niblick,” for the great majority of us who don’t know, was a club with a slightly angled face resembling a modern nine iron.

Personally, I wasn’t able to save anything—neither fees nor strokes nor reputation. I lived through some pretty desperate years that way, and then, suddenly, the answer came at a time and place when I wasn’t thinking about golf at all.

The scene is Roosevelt Field, Long Island, the year 1928; I was idly watching the planes land and take off, without the faintest thought of golf… I had noticed that as the pilot started to take off he lowered the rudder to get the plane in flying position. And within a few moments I was murmuring absently to myself: “How about a rudder on the back of my niblick?”

The result was a special niblick with the rear edge one-quarter of an inch lower than the front edge of the blade… it is designed with a rudder like an airplane, and its effect was amazing. I don’t fear the traps now.

Sarazen also designed a four wood that enabled him to make one of the most famous shots in golf history. It was during the 1935 Masters tournament, and he was approaching the fifteenth hole three strokes behind the leader, Craig Wood, who had completed play. Sarazen still thought he had a chance to catch up over the next three holes. In fact, he completely passed Wood with his next shot.

I found myself with a downhill lie, one of the toughest of fairway shots, but I still had a hunch up my sleeve or, rather, in the bag, to cover the situation. That was my club especially designed to offset the effects of this awkward shot. Selecting this club, I stood slightly ahead of the ball and toed the club head in at address. Then, as I came down into the shot, I drew the face of the club slightly across the ball in order to get it high enough to carry the water.

The ball sailed over 230 yards, clearing the water hazard, onto the green, and into the cup.

It was called the greatest shot ever made in a pinch; also some other things not quite so complimentary, there doubtless being an element of luck in holing a 230-yard shot from the fairway… What was I thinking of? Somebody asked me that after the round, and the answer was simple enough. “I was thinking of getting 230 yards,” said I grimly. “And I got it exactly to the last inch. Lucky? Oh, yes; quite lucky. But it was a good shot, hit exactly the way I wanted to hit it.”

More impressive than his mastering of the game, though, was Sarazen’s mastering of himself.

Straight as an arrow. Watching the ball fly down the fairway for a birdie.

At that time my temper was inflammable and quite beyond control. A bad shot was something to drive me into a tantrum, with the result that my reputation for club-throwing somewhat exceeded my prestige as a golfer. I recall, for instance, that I used a member’s putter during one round of the course in which I missed all putts from three to thirty feet.

The first thing I did was to head for the pro’s shop. The next was to put the putter in a vise and saw it into sections. This sounds crazy as I tell it now, but it actually happened. The third thing was to leave the sawed-off sections in the member’s locker. I later paid him for the club, but I hardly think he appreciated the spirit of the thing. It didn’t seem to occur to me at the time that he might have cherished the club.

Anyhow, I was so boisterous around a golf course that everybody got a laugh when I was paired with Bobby Jones for the first two rounds of the national open championship at the Columbia Country Club, Washington, D. C., in 1921. They thought we would wind up in each other’s beards, Bobby being quite a man for temperamental outbursts in those days. The result was that we made a private bet, whereby each was to forfeit five dollars to the other every time he threw a club, and the funny thing was that not a dollar changed hands for the two days. I don’t know what this did for Jones, but it convinced me of one thing: If it was going to cost me money, I wasn’t the man to lose my temper.

That was the beginning. The finish of Sarazen-the-fanatic came through my wife, Mary, and Walter Hagen, an arch-opponent. My wife shamed me into a degree of decent behavior on a golf course by telling me how the gallery murmured inaudibly and then walked away in tacit disapproval after one of my periodic outbursts. “Every time you get riled and show it,” she said quietly, “you lose some friends. I know you’re only mad at yourself. They don’t. They think you’re a bad sport.”

I’m not insensible to the importance of the men and women who pay for the show and thus make my living possible. It occurred to me, in fact, that I had as much privilege to step out of my part and rant at destiny as would an actor onstage in suddenly abandoning his character and haranguing the audience.

Hagen did the rest—by precept. I have played many a round with him and don’t mind conceding several points, including the fact that there is no great devotion between us. But in one respect I have to move well back and let him stand alone. As a golfer who can take the good with the bad, he’s a positive standout. I’ve seen him get the worst breaks a man ever had and never for a moment betray the fact that he had noticed anything out of the ordinary. To one of Hagen’s sublime self-faith, the alibi is simply not to be thought of.

This may be regarded as a surprising tribute, coming as it does from a man who openly stated before the 1933 championship at Chicago that Hagen belonged in an armchair and who, in turn, had to accept the ignominy of a rather grim jest by Hagen before the end of the tournament.

He waited, in fact, for the final round and the certainty that I was to get nowhere on those abominations known as the creeping-bent greens. Then he called a clubhouse attendant, gave him five dollars and an armchair and told him to take the latter out to me on the fifteenth tee.

Read “I Play Hunches,” by Gene Sarazen, August 31, 1935 [PDF].

The Old Masters: Gene Sarazen Reinvents His Clubs and Self The Saturday Evening Post

In boom times like these, oil companies had little time, and scant interest, in planning. As a Post writer observed in 1929,

“Authorities all agree that the United States has developed and produced its oil too rapidly… For ten years now, despite the increasing multiplicity of its uses, oil has been found faster than it could be consumed. All the time there has been more of it above ground than the market demanded. ["Taming Wild Oil Wells," Oct 19, 1929]

“The presence of too much of any commodity leads inevitably to its waste… The record of all time for the waste of a national resource has been broken in the past decade in the oil fields of the United States.

“In the state of California, for example, it is estimated that the loss of natural gas alone has been sufficient to have paid off the national debt.

“Of the oil that is in [the typical oil pool], it is believed that not more than 20 per cent is usually recovered before the flow ceases.

“In the interest of prolonging the life of the field, no gas should be allowed to blow off at random or before its full quota of work has been performed. Gas which cannot otherwise be used obviously should be pumped back into the ground so that the life of the field may be prolonged.

“Finding that they owned land over an oil dome, its possessors…  should have agreed to develop the field as a unit and split the returns in proportion to their holdings.”

They “should have” agreed, but they didn’t. Instead, the industry kept drilling for quick oil, taking the crude that natural gas pushed to the surface, left the more difficult oil, and natural gas, behind.

Oil companies showed no signs of moderating themselves, and critics were beginning to wonder how it would all end.

“In view of the now familiar oil over-production, with its unnecessary drain on the natural reserve, the question of future supply become increasingly acute. People are beginning to wonder if the carriage manufacturer is coming back to his former prestige, and whether the faded letters “L-i-v-e-r-y  S-t-a-b-l-e,” now supplanted by the more aesthetic “G-a-r-a-g-e,” on endless buildings, will have to be restored. Is a nation on wheels, as it were, going back to the hoof so far as daily transport is concerned?” ["After Petroleum — What?" Isaac F. Marcosson, March 3, 1928 (PDF)]

“There is more truth than idle speculation in this surmise. Although it may be postponed longer than we think, the time is inevitable when we shall be obliged to depend for motor fuel on imported crude or a synthetic liquid distilled from coal, lignite or shale.

“How much oil is left in the ground for our future needs? Like every other features of the business, this is uncertain. All predictions so far have been in error.

“As recently as 1921, statisticians maintained that our domestic output would be at its peak when 500,00,000 barrels were obtained. Yet last year… we produced 900,00,000 barrels. Despite the pessimism, the supply of oil proved greater than anyone could have predicted.

“The wells drilled during the last three years have already yielded considerably more than 1,000,000,000 barrels of oil and their productive life is still largely in the future. This makes the total reserve from all proved sources nearly 80,000,000,000 barrels. At the 1927 rate of production, this would last thirty-three years.”

They were off by a decade; as you can see from the graph below, domestic production began falling in 1970, while imported oil rose sharply to cover the difference.

Not knowing when the easy oil would give out, critics repeatedly called for conserving oil — long before there were any environmental considerations.

One of the strongest proponents for conservation was former governor and Director of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot. He fiercely opposed the unrestrained drilling for oil on federal lands. Conservation, he argued, was essential to the public interest. The restraint of one generation would be the inheritance of the next.

“The conservation policy grew out of the idea that public resources held in the public hands should not be wasted, but be made to serve the public to the utmost, both in the present and in the future. ["Ships, Oil and the Ten Commandments," May 17, 1924]

This chart shows how sharply oil imports rose as domestic production fell. (Wikipedia Commons)

“It was introduced to the people of the United States through the meeting of governors in the White House in 1908 — the first meeting of its kind in American history, and by far the greatest — and met with instant general approbation.

“This was the more remarkable because it was then commonly believed and openly asserted that, since posterity had done nothing for us, we had no reason to do aught for posterity. Let posterity paddle its own canoe. This theory conveniently forgot that our ancestors gave us the only canoe we have to paddle; that they discovered and conquered for us our continent; that they founded and preserved for us our nation; that we, who are their posterity, are living our safe and reasonably comfortable lives because of what they did for us who came after them; and that the only way we can pay our debt to them is to play fair in our turn with those who will come after us.

“From the beginning, conservation has meant wise use in the public interest, and it means wise use today. This generation has a right to all it needs, but no right whatever to waste what it does not need. Our children have their rights as well as we. If there was ever a policy since this world began that was simple, sound and filled with common sense, it is the policy of conservation.”

Read “After Petroleum — What?” Isaac F. Marcosson, March 3, 1928 [PDF]
Next: Teapot Dome

The Common Wealth of Oil The Saturday Evening Post

“I’ve been going to the same barber shop for fourteen years,” he said harshly, as I sat down. “I went to it for the last time today. I took off my coat and necktie the way I always do, and then I noticed there were three women sitting there in the waiting chairs and looking at me as if I’d committed a crime. Mad at me for taking off my coat and collar in a place where they had no right to be themselves! I thought probably they were them to solicit for a charity or something; but just then old George called ‘Next!’ And my soul, if one of those women didn’t get right up and march to the chair and sit down in it !

“That wasn’t the worst of it. The person that had just got out of the chair was wearing boots and breeches, but it wasn’t a man. It was a girl—one that had been a nice-looking girl, too, until she sat down in that chair and had three feet of beautiful thick brown hair out off. She was my own daughter, Julie, nineteen years old. I didn’t my a word to her—not then; I just looked at her. Then I told old George I guessed his shop was getting to be too co-educational for me and I put on my things and went out. I’ll never set foot in the place again!”

“Where will you get your hair cut, judge?”

“I guess we’d better learn to cut our own hair, we men,” he mid bitterly. “There really isn’t any place left nowadays where we can go to get by ourselves. Coming home from Washington the other day, I was in the Pullman smoker—what they call the club car — and I’ll eat my shirt if four women didn’t come in there and light cigarettes and sit down to play bridge!

Never turned a hair—didn’t have any hair long enough to turn, for that matter. They won’t let us keep a club car, or any kind of club, to ourselves nowadays;

they got to have anyway half of it.

“I said when we let ‘em into the polling booth they’d never be contented with that, and I was right. Remember all the fuss they made about their right to vote? Well, they’ve proved they didn’t care about that at all, because more than half the very women that made the fuss don’t bother to vote, now they know they can. They just wanted to show as we couldn’t have anything On earth to ourselves. They haven’t left as one single refuge.

“It used to be a man could at least go hang around a livery stable when he felt lonesome for his kind; but now there aren’t any more livery stable. He can’t go to a saloon; there aren’t any more saloons. [Written in 1929, nearly a decade into Prohibition] Once he could go sit in a hotel lobby, because that was a he place; nowadays hotel lobbies are full of women sitting there all day. When I studied law there weren’t three women in all the offices downtown; now you can’t find an office without a bob-haired stenographer in it, and there are dozens of women got their own offices—every kind of offices.

“That’s another thing I’ve been having it out with Julie about. She’s not only cut off her hair; she wants to go into business as soon as she finds out what kind she’d enjoy most. She’s like the rest—the one thing that gives her the horrors is the idea of staying home.

“What’s become of the old home life in this country anyhow? Everybody seems to have to be going somewhere every minute. There’s the car in the garage: it’ll take us anywhere—let’s go! ‘Let’s go’ is the unceasing national cry.

“I understand there’s a great deal of what they’ve now invented a horrible new word for—’necking’ — while they’re on the road between parties and movies and end-of-the-night breakfasts. But it’s always, ‘Let’s go—let’s go anywhere except home!”

He paused for a moment, while his bushy gray eyebrows were contorted in a frown of distressed perplexity: then he looked at me almost with pathos and speaking slowly, asked a question evidently sincere: “Does it ever seem to you, nowadays, that maybe we’re all—all of us, young people and old people both—that maybe we’re all crazy?”

Read the full story, “The World Does Move,” from July 7, 1928 [PDF].

How America Is Falling To Pieces Around Us: 1928 Version The Saturday Evening Post