Golf Courses, Bob Hope, and Internment Camps
One of the most attractive parts about me, according to my wife, is that I’m not a golfer. Don’t own clubs. Never had a tee time. Can identify maybe five golfers by face and some of those are probably dead by now. There are no long afternoons out on the course with my buddies, chugging High Life’s and talking shit. She’s seen how people lose their husbands–and childcare–for a day or two a week to the sport. When people talk about golf, her eyes glaze over as if you were telling her about a particularly dull dream from the night before.
If I was a golfer, however, I’d live in a spectacular location. Our house is within walking distance of two golf courses and an hour from Pinehurst, which golfers tell me is a big deal. Instead, as I walk our son to school, past a course that stretches out to the horizon, I get really fucking annoyed. Because we live in Chapel Hill, there is little affordable housing, and when they do build, it’s 1–2-bedroom apartments that start at 2k (but you get a granite countertop!). So the golf courses seem like a waste: it’s a lot of land being used up for just a few, mostly wealthy people to enjoy.
This resentment has long festered, because I grew up in Los Angeles, where amongst the snaking freeways, 57 golf courses take up large swaths of land that could be better used not only for housing, but public parks, of which Los Angeles has very few. But at least they pay their taxes, right? At least they’re contributing to the public good in some way? Of course not. That’s not how rich people roll. And specifically that’s not how Bob Hope rolled (yes that one). Back in 1960, he led the charge to pass a law that allowed courses only be taxed as a golf course rather than land “based on its highest and best use,” such as housing or small businesses, according to The New Republic. By doing this, golf courses basically get to hold on to this land and pay hardly any taxes. If they had to be taxed like everyone else, they’d quickly go out of business.
Beyond the economic and social reasons, I never understood the joy people found in the game. I even tried, once, back when I was 12 at the Verdugo Hills Golf Course, in Tujunga, a town on the edge of Los Angeles where I grew up. It was a par-3 golf course (i.e. small) nudged against the hillside near the 210 freeway. I was pretty bad at it and never really returned to the sport or thought about that particular course again until a few years ago when I found out it had closed and my mom mentioned off hand that there had been some sort of controversy surrounding it. I figured it was over environmental concerns because it was up against some rural areas, but when I turned to Google to see what it was all about, I found something that was surprising, but not shocking.
Before the greens and sand traps were ever laid out, the property was an internment camp during the Second World War. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Tuna Canyon Detention Center housed “more than 2,000 "enemy aliens," primarily Japanese,” who were “detained there before being sent to internment camps elsewhere in California and the West.”
Tuna Canyon Detention Center
I wasn’t shocked because the history of Los Angeles is full of terrible moments like these, from the water wars to Rodney King to the building of Dodger Stadium and subsequent displacement of Chavez Ravine’s residents, but what surprised me was that I had lived in Tujunga until I was 18, had driven past the course a thousand times, and never knew this. But then again, I was a kid who went to a public school where they never told stories about Manzanar, the most notorious Japanese internment camp, located just 200 miles north. The whole internment tragedy was all vague in our minds. I do, however, remember, my grandmother, who grew up in downtown Los Angeles, once mentioning seeing people being taken away.
“It was so awful,” she said, but she was 10 and poor and only saw glimpses of it. No one else–and certainly none of my teachers–ever talked about it.
Fortunately, the Manzanar Committee and the Japanese American National Museum refused to let others forget. The latter even put together an exhibit about Tuna Canyon that you should check out. They, along with the Tuna Canyon Detention Station organization, were also able to get the Los Angeles City Council to designate the site a “historical-cultural monument.” It’s good that this is now acknowledged, but it’s the least surprising Los Angeles act ever to cover up a site of evil with a golf course.