Living History Series | Garnette Smith Turns Into World Traveler

By Leroy Bridges
Sports Editor
Just before midnight 65 years ago, Garnette Smith thought his life was about to get cut short.
Aboard a U.S. Naval ship in the middle of the English Channel, Smith was prepping for a four-hour watch duty. Then the ship was rocked by what Smith thought was a mine.
“I thought that was my last day,” Smith said.
Masked in complete darkness, Smith’s ship was nearly split in half by another vessel. The outcome was much less severe than first thought and it put Smith on land as D-Day approached in the summer of 1944.
“We were in dry dock for a big share of the big invasion,” Smith said.
Smith – now 91 years-old and living in Delphi – was in year number two at the time after joining the Navy in 1942. The lure of $50 a month pushed Smith into the service and at the time he thought it was going to be a one-year stint. Like many others, he was wrong.
“Everybody else was going at the time so I thought ‘I might as well go,’” Smith said. “It lasted a lot longer than I first thought but it didn’t bother me. It was a good experience.”
Waiting for him after his time in the Navy was Marilyn Holloway. The wedding plans were set and they were tying the knot. It was the classic high school sweethearts scenario from when he was a senior and she was a freshman.
“I fell in love with her and I just knew it,” Smith said.
With his service time behind him and now married, Smith was still searching for the right job. He had spent time at Alcoa before the service and ended up there again once returning but he didn’t like it. He knew there was something better.
“That’s part of the reason I went to the service because I figured it was going to get me anyway,” Smith said about working at Alcoa. “I just didn’t like the factory.”
The pay pushed Smith to keep the job but he found a long-term solution at the Delphi REMC using his business degree. For 22 years, Smith was the office manager.
“I finally used some of my bookkeeping skills,” Smith said. “I was always pretty good with figures so it was a good fit.”
With a steady job and some land that he and his wife acquired from her family, Smith took some inspiration from a golfing magazine to build a par-3 golf course. There weren’t many courses around, so Smith made it happen and opened the Hollow Acres golf course in 1960.
“We couldn’t figure out what to put down there on the corner,” Smith said. “I looked into it and built it. It did put me in some debt, though.”
Financial backing from both families helped Smith early on and he has no doubt that the investment paid off.
“I made a living on it,” Smith said of the Hollow Acres golf course.
The course put him to work during the days of his owernship. Smith left the REMC in 1970 and worked full time at the course for 16 years doing it all. He cut the grass, managed the money and fixed the problems.
“I was pretty hardworking until we sold it,” Smith said. “Anything and everything, I did. I did enjoy those years. I met a lot of people.”
His kids – Jeff Smith and Suzie Vogel – worked hard every summer at the course. Garnette said Jeff enjoyed running the place when dad wasn’t around but Suzie never enjoyed it.
“We had a good system,” Smith said. “It worked out pretty good.”
During Smith’s childhood, he never knew he was going to see as much of the world as he has. After graduating from Delphi High School in the late ’30s, Smith became a world traveler through the service and on his dime.
“I never really thought about traveling,” Smith said. “I was just trying to get a job for a while.”
He has spent time all across the U.S., in Europe and Africa. But he’ll never forget fulfilling a lifetime dream of travelling to Alaska. In 1987 when the course was sold, him and Marilyn loaded up a newly-purchased motor home and headed north for eight weeks.
“Every where you look is like a picture postcard,” Smith said. “We should have spent another month up there.”

Published in the Herald Journal in April 2009.