Four Frames of Floyd Farley
Conversations about rebuilding the seventh green at the Country Club of Lincoln started around the late 1940s.
Sandwiched between the Club's northwest border along Woodsdale and the shallow drainage creek that paralleled the curving Boulevard, the existing seventh green was shapeless except for the one foot rise around the perimeter. This subtle plateua green, a remnant of the 1929 reconstruction, looked more artificial each year as more courses removed the features that were created by a horse and plow.
Action to fix the green, which would later make the 7th at CCL one the most celebrated holes in the city, was finally taken in September of 1958 when a 51-year-old golf course architect named Floyd Farley arrived to inspect the nuisance putting surface. Farley, an Oklahoma native with a growing portfolio of original designs and successful remodels in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, agreed to rebuild the 7th green, as well as the 13th and 14th greens, at a rate of $500 per green. Work was underway on the 7th in 1959 with an expectation to be ready for member play in the spring of 1960.
A bad winter and a city wastewater issue kept Mr. Farley from returning to work on #13 and #14 in 1961, and eventually, the work fell upon another Midwest golf architect—an up-and-comer from Urbana, Indiana, named Pete Dye. - but that is a story for another day.
Floyd Farley would never return to build the two other greens at Lincoln's oldest private club. But over the next two decades, he would design, build, and seed over 60 new greens in Lancaster County alone, contributing to one of the most impactful legacies in public golf in Nebraska. And it all started at…
Miracle Hill - 1961
Despite his renovation work at The Country Club in Lincoln being cut short, Farley kept himself plenty busy designing new golf courses in the Cornhusker State. While contracted at CCL, Farley teamed up with an Omaha golf promoter to create a course a new course on a 225-acre cattle farm in west Omaha. The vision for the course was made clear by Farley's partner, Harold Glissman, who would operate the Club, and Herb Davis, Jr., who inherited the grounds and investigated whether a new golf course would be a positive financial improvement to his grandfather's land.
Davis, an Omaha investment banker, was not kidding about ensuring the golf course would make financial sense. In fact, he employed the most popular golf magazine of the day, Golfdom, and the National Golf Foundation to "determine whether the city of Omaha was in need of additional golf facilities and if a public-fee type course would be profitable."
The answer was yes, and Omaha, with a population of around 400,000 in 1961, would have it's fifth public golf course built a mile outside the city limits at 120th and and Blondo.
Considered "somewhat of a miracle in the golf business" because of the detailed market investigation that would preceded the financing, design, construction, and opening of the new course, Miracle Hill sustained it's popularity because the golf course design was as thoughtful as the business approach. His involvement at Miracle Hill introduced Floyd Farley to the public-friendly design approach that became a staple of all of his projects in Nebraska.