‘A job that taught far more than it paid’

One summer day, about 40 years ago, it rained so hard nobody felt like golfing.

But the “bag boys” were still on duty at the Wyoming Valley Country Club in Hanover Township, with post-tournament clean-up duties to perform, stomachs growling for pizza, and a wish for some sort of vehicle bigger than their bicycles.

Author Kevin Kaminski was 14 that summer, so he was too young to drive. But he remembers going on the pizza run with a co-worker who “borrowed” the keys to the shiny new Cadillac that a car dealership had sent to the country club as a tournament prize if any golfer should get a hole-in-one. (No one won it.)

“Driving that Cadillac off the thirteenth tee remains one of the most surreal five minutes of my entire teenage life,” Kaminski wrote in his recently published book, “Real Life Caddy Shack,” subtitled, “My Summers at the Wyoming Valley Country Club.”

The boys traveled slowly, “driving with the exaggerated, over-careful precision of people who understood exactly how much trouble they were in if anything at all went sideways.”

They bought two pizzas and returned to the country club. “Somebody jogged the keys back to their hook in the pro shop, and within another ten minutes, the four of us were sitting back in that soggy bag room, eating pizza, drinking the last of the tournament’s abandoned beer, and absolutely nobody on that entire property had the faintest idea that a hole-in-one Cadillac had just made an unauthorized lunch run to town and back.”

That escapade is just one of many recollections Kaminski shares in his book, which is available on Amazon’s website and described there as ”equal parts coming-of-age memoir and love letter to a job that taught far more than it paid … a warm, funny, unflinching look back at the summers, the mischief and the unlikely friendships that shaped a life.”

For Kaminski, who now lives in Bradenton, Fla., and plays in several amateur golf tours, working at the country club seemed like an ideal job.

“My dad first put a club in my hand when I was 3 years old,” he said in a telephone interview. “He cut down the shaft of a 7 iron and put masking tape on it to act as a grip.”

Kaminski’s late father, Edward Kaminski, was a member of the club and, during his own youth, had worked as a caddy — carrying golf bags for golfers as they walked and played the course.

By the time Kevin Kaminski was ready to work at the country club, the job of caddy no longer existed, because golfers rode in golf carts. But there was still work for “bag boys,” who carried clubs to the carts, restocked shelves, ran carts up from the barn and prepared them for the next trip, “wiping down the seats and dashboards with a rag that never seemed to actually get clean.”

While he didn’t actually work as a “caddy,” Kaminki used “Caddy Shack” in the title as a nod to the 1980 movie that starred Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield. The author saw it several times.

“That’s a movie you don’t just see once,” Kaminski said. “You see it again and again.”

For Kaminski, the $3.75 per hour he earned at the country club may have been the reason he took the job, but the best part of working there was the lessons he learned about life and human nature.

“You learned who the club pro actually respected and who he just tolerated because their name was on a plaque somewhere in the hallway that went nowhere,” he wrote. “You learned, without anyone teaching you directly, that money and manners don’t always travel together, and that the men with the loudest laughs in the grill room were not always the ones who tipped, and that the ones who tipped best were sometimes the ones who looked, from a distance, like they had the least to spare.”

While membership at the club held a certain prestige, Kaminski said, his father and uncle, though men of modest means, enjoyed being members.

There were some other people, the author remembers, who managed to play on the country club golf course without ever bothering to join. The course abutted their Korn Krest neighborhood and, Kaminski said, “In those days there was no fence,” so in the evening those neighbors would “walk on and play it like they owned the place.”

“It was a local legend,” he said with a chuckle.

Kaminski expects people who read his book will find it sparks memories of their own first jobs — and he concludes his story with the hope they enjoy the reading “half as much” as he enjoyed the remembering.

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