Our Story
On one side of Bob Swanson’s boyhood home in Springfield, New Jersey, was a commercial nursery. Bob’s father, Swedish immigrant John Swanson, worked at the nursery to support his son and his eight other children. On the other side was Baltusrol Golf Club. It was here at Baltusrol, as a caddy, that Bob began his lifelong love affair with the game of golf.
Bob, who passed away in 2008 at the young age of 85, worked as a caddy at the famous Baltusrol as a youngster and there picked up the fundamentals. He later played golf in the military, as a college student on the GI bill, and throughout his career as a civil engineer, eventually improving to a scratch handicap.
With his wife June, young children Cynthia and Bobby, he accepted an engineering position in a small town in South Carolina, which to his delight boasted an excellent golf course. Here he was an avid tournament player and made a hobby of setting up amateur golf tournaments. One of these was interstate rivalry pro-am Carolinas Classic, which is still played today.
When Bob retired from engineering in 1977, he started the Senior Golfers of America, getting together friends and acquaintances at Pine Lakes Country Club in Myrtle Beach. This little group grew into today’s SGA, which holds more than one dozen tournaments each year from coast to coast and in such international spots as St. Andrews, Italy, Switzerland, and the Caribbean.
After a career as a first-grade teacher, Bob Swanson’s daughter Cynthia joined the SGA staff in 1982 and is still bringing her own Southern style of friendliness and hospitality to the tournaments. Cynthia’s daughter Catherine began working with SGA in 1999 and is proud to continue her grandfather’s legacy.
”Bob, as I called my grandfather, always tried to be the best in everything. We work to make the SGA the best in every way in his memory.” says Catherine. “Somehow we seem to attract the finest, most interesting, outgoing people to SGA, and they attract other people much like themselves. It is a great honor for me to work with our wonderful members.”
In non-pandemic years, SGA events are scheduled virtually every month, and even in this chaotic year of 2020, the group has kept to its domestic schedule. The events, which are both competitive and non-competitive, are a mix of lavish and demure: “Lavish” as in Christmas at The Cloister in Sea Island, GA, or a few days at Hotel Royal and the Crans sur Sierre Golf Clubin Crans-Montana, Switzerland; “demure” as in The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama and Linville Lodge in the North Carolina mountains. Somewhere in between lie such stalwarts as Pebble Beach and Torrey Pines, both on the schedule for mid 2021. I hope to attend the group’s Lobster Festival event next year in Boothbay Harbor, ME, a leisurely four-hour drive from my home in Connecticut.
You might get the feeling, at this point, that membership in this club is exclusive and that you will have to take out a second mortgage to afford it. Au contraire. Annual membership for a single is just $135, for a golfing couple $195, for a golfer with a non-golfing spouse, $160, and for a social member (no golf) $110.
The only requirements for membership, besides being a lady or gentleman and adhering to the written and unwritten rules of golf, is to be 50 years old or older.
If you would like to learn more, contact SGA Director Catherine Powell at catherine@sgagolfers.com.