By Dan Irvin
My siblings and I have a great time at reunions going over all of the expressions that our parents – mostly my mother – used so much that they became common usage for us and our kids as well, even though their common usage by the world at large is almost gone now.
One of these is the phrase “Too big for your britches,” meaning not that you’re literally too fat for your pants, but rather that you’re kind of stuck up or forgetting your humble origins.
Highland Park Municipal Golf Course just west of South Main Street in Bloomington was always humble. I think maybe there was a Highland Park before there was a golf course there, but the Bloomington Parks Department fashioned some temporary links there in 1922, upon which you could play for free if you could come up with a ball and something that would serve to knock it around.
Things became more formalized over the ensuing year, and with improvements to drainage and such, it was opened as a public course charging admission on the 4th of July 1923, with the Mayor striking the first drive.
In the 60s we kids were allowed to play there for 65 cents on Tuesday and Friday mornings. The fairways had grass about the length of the first cut of rough at the country club, but nobody cared. We enjoyed the game.
I was never any good and I don’t play at all anymore – haven’t played at Highland Park for probably 25 years.
I know that times are tough for American cities big and small. I appreciate how hard a job it is to decide how to spend our limited resources.
I just hope a way can be found to preserve humble little Highland. Its future is probably in doubt because it got a little too big for its britches. Well, maybe it wasn’t the course itself but us that got too big.
But we are all where we are because of the foundation of tradition upon which we built. I really hope we can preserve what little of it we have left.
Dan Irvin is Vice-President of the Bloomington Public Library Foundation Board, and a member of the Heartland Community College Foundation Board.
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