By the time he has spent a day or two there and has
found that, in spite of the three courses open, it
is wise to post his time the day before or he is likely
to kick his heels around the first tee for a couple
of hours before he can get away, and when he looks
over the crowded dining-room at night—well,
he comes to the conclusion that most of the school
have deserted and are playing truant, too!
THE GOSPEL OF FRESH AIR
A generation ago the people who preached the good
gospel of fresh air were still viewed askance, although
the new doctrine had begun to make some impression.
The early settlers in this country lived an outdoor
life perforce, and undoubtedly found all the excitement
of a football game in fighting the Indians; consequently,
they attained proper physical development. The
descendants of these settlers still retained a good
deal of the outdoor habit, but in the third generation
the actual drift city-ward began. This meant
the absence of incentives to outdoor exercise, so
far as life and the pursuit of happiness were concerned.
Hence, it became necessary to preach the gospel of
fresh air.
“Oh, the joy with which the air is rife,”
sang Adams Lindsay Gordon, one of the early preachers
of this doctrine, and to-day thousands and tens of
thousands are appreciating the truth of the saying.
Not alone the boy at school or college with his football,
baseball, and rowing, but the middle-aged man with
his golf and tennis, and the old man tramping through
the woods with the rod and gun, as he used to do thirty
years ago, and as he will do to the end—all
these know what fresh air means. Sunshine, through
the medium of golf, has come to the life of thousands
of middle-aged wrecks formerly tied to an office chair.
No one can estimate the number of lives, growing aged
by confinement in close rooms, by lack of exercise,
and by the want of cheerful interest in something
beside the amassing of dollars and cents, that have
been saved and rendered happy through the introduction
of this grand sport whose courses now dot the country
from Maine to California, from the top of Michigan
to the end of Florida.
Twenty years ago in this country a man who came to
his office in a golf suit would have been regarded
as demented, to say the least. To-day the head
of the house in many a large business refuses to permit
anything to interfere with his Saturday on the links.
And this means that he and all the officers in the
departments under him, instead of viewing with concern
the interest of the men in outdoor sports—their
devotion to baseball and football, to tennis, golf,
and track athletics—are glad and willing
that the great outdoors should have a real place in
their lives. It is good business policy.
Something must make up to the later generations for
the loss of the open air and outdoor work which the
exigencies of the olden times demanded of our ancestors,
and that something has come in the shape of physical
exercise. But golf and long vacations are for
the comparatively rich. They are makeshifts rendered
possible only by circumstances.
