WESTON, Mass. – Pine Brook Country Club, a prestigious private golf club founded in 1924 in the Boston suburbs, has retained Strawn & Sampson to plan, produce and publish its centennial book.
In anticipation of the upcoming 100th anniversary, club leadership has followed a 10-year, master-planned schedule of renovations and new construction. “The idea was for 2024 to arrive and find the club at its peak of excellence,” said immediate past president Jeffrey Baron, “with every amenity in place and with nothing left for the members to do but celebrate.”
The century of sporting competition and camaraderie enjoyed at Pine Brook began the same year Boston opened its first airport, the Boston Bruins hockey club was formed and George H.W. Bush, who would become America’s 41st president, was born just 20 miles away in Milton, Mass.
John Strawn and Curt Sampson will bring their skills as golf historians and course-design experts to this appealing challenge, assisted by lead writer on the project David Gould.
“We specialize in centennial books for elite private golf clubs,” said Strawn, author of Driving the Green (1991) and former CEO of the architectural firm Robert Trent Jones II. “There is always a unique set of discoveries that will emerge from the research and give us what we need as storytellers to produce a compelling narrative.”
The site chosen by Pine Brook’s founders provided a sublime landscape for golf, close to the city but tucked away in dramatically contoured parkland. Golf architect Wayne Stiles and design partner John Van Kleek took full advantage of the site’s topography in routing the course.
Stiles’s technical skills produced fairways and greens that could, with proper management, be maintained in flawless condition—which indeed would become an enduring hallmark of the club. On the social-history side, Pine Brook did much to commence an era of club-building in the U.S. by prosperous Jewish businessmen and professionals keen for golf but with no existing clubs open to them.