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Weldon Bradshaw originally published this Reflections piece on the Collegiate School website on July 4, 2021.

Mike Stott was 19 years old in the summer of 1962 when he signed on with the grounds crew at the Indian Hill Club golf course located a short walk from his home in Winnetka, IL.
 
One day during lunch time, he was hanging out with some friends near the superintendent’s shed when the boss’s son, who was operating a front loader nearby, asked him to bring a tractor to the area where he was working.
 

“I’d never driven a tractor before,” Stott said. “Instead of backing it up a little so he could dump some dirt he had to move somewhere, I put it into fourth gear and let out the clutch. It took off really fast.

“I just missed a tree in the shed area. It took a hard left, then a hard right. I was headed toward the 13th green where some of our staff were putting sand in the sand trap. I didn’t know how to stop the thing because I didn’t know where the brake was, but I had the presence of mind to turn the ignition off, and the tractor rolled to a stop at the edge of the trap.

“The superintendent came flying out of the office and came up to me. He was a profane man and said some pretty choice words and told me I was never to drive another vehicle as long as I worked on the course. It must have been funny to watch, but it scared the bejesus out of me.”

That anecdote is one of many based on Stott’s personal experience and gleaned from his well of creativity that made their way into Too Much Loft, a coming-of-age novel – actually a trilogy – which he began three decades ago, revisited over the years when time allowed, and completed once he retired in May 2017 after 15 years as Collegiate’s swimming coach.

“I felt like I had a story people would enjoy because it displays the admirable traits and foibles of human beings,” said Stott, who in January 2019 earned induction into Collegiate’s Athletic Hall of Fame. “The experiences I had as a caddie (in ’60 and ’61) were the seeds for some of the tales in the book. Others are imagined but based on reality.”

The trilogy’s protagonist is Arlo “Looper” Litton, who works first as a caddie, then a grounds crew member, and finally a pro shop attendant at a suburban Chicago country club in the early 1960’s.

“There’s some of me in the book,” said Stott, who in ’62 was a rising sophomore at The College of Wooster in Ohio. “Looper ends up with more of a social life than I did, especially with the ladies.”

The first novella is entitled Mrs. Peck, which is the name of the 67-year-old woman, once the club champ, for whom Looper caddies.

“The summer before I got the job on the grounds crew,” Stott said, “I caddied for a Mrs. Peck. I don’t remember her first name, so I gave her one (Lucy).  She had a very unusual set of clubs. They were almost all woods. In the book, Mrs. Peck had all woods except for her putter. That was the nascence of the story.”

The second novella, entitled Mr. O, is based on the grounds crew chief, fictionally dubbed Otto Olson, who admonished Stott for his ill-conceived attempt at tractor-driving.

The third, The Pro Shop, details the way Looper (a slang term for caddie) uses his understanding of human nature and popularity with the members to navigate club politics.

“Initially, I felt like I had a nice story,” said Stott. “Then I finished Mrs. Peck and thought, there’s more I want to tell, more humor and interesting things, so I started on Mr. O.

“As I got into that and there was more substance to it in my mind, I thought, maybe this really is something. It occurred to me that my whole corporate life, I’ve been a communicator in one form or another. For almost 30 years, I was a public relations director, an advertising account executive, and a speech writer. Then I thought, if you call yourself a writer, you need a book. Old school thinking. Right?”

He finished the draft of Mr. O in the mid-90’s and thought his story might be complete, but with myriad vignettes still in his head, he eventually decided that a third installment was in order.

“I wrote a lot of it in longhand,” said Stott, for years a freelance writer for swimming and golf publications. “I remember writing some of it in an airport on the way to California. I wrote maybe 100 long legal sheet pages.

“Then it essentially went on the shelf. I really wasn’t clear where it would go. For about 10 years, a New Year’s resolution was ‘Finish the Book.’ Well, I never did. When I retired from Collegiate, I said, ‘OK, time to finish this.’ So I fired away.”

He completed the manuscript in early 2019. Then began the editing process. BookBaby, his publisher, released his work in June.

Stott’s rite of passage into the world of published book-author has given him a sense of pride in workmanship and joy in attaining a long-held goal and realizing a dream.

“What I relate it to,” he said, “is sitting on a bus late on a Saturday night, coming home from a swimming meet where we won the state championship and looking down the highway and having this warm feeling that the team did it and I was part of that team. I can link those together as moments of great personal satisfaction.”
~Weldon Bradshaw

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