The Coral Gables Times

Recreation OUTDOORS How Our Town Bought a Country Club Once private, Westport's spectacular Longshore Club Park is now open to all — and the

ON THE SUNNY MORNING of Saturday, September 5, 1959, a day I'm not likely to forget, I received a telephone call. The caller was Herbert E. Baldwin, First Selectman of the Town of Westport, Connecticut. My town, 50 miles from New York City, of which it was rapidly becoming a suburb. Since I had served for six years on the town's Board of Finance, Mr. Baldwin was calling to tell me that the Longshore Country Club might possibly be available for purchase. He was deeply interested in even a mere possibility. Longshore was a beautiful spot along Connecticut's lovely shore, which had long been a kind of enclave, a privately owned club. The town would dearly love to own it. Would I be good enough to look into this rumor, discreetly, and report back to him? I said I would. Longshore contained 191 acres on Long Island Sound, a large clubhouse with restaurants, bars, locker rooms, 19 bedrooms, an 18-hole golf course, seven tennis courts, a beach, senior and junior swimming pools, 54 cabanas, boating facilities, 11 summer-rental cottages, and seven or eight other houses and apartments equipped for year-round use. Quite a package! I won't bore you with the details of the negotiations. They took four and a half months and were difficult. At first, the owner didn't want to sell at all. Following several months of persuasion, he was ready to listen, but for $3,000,000! After innumerable meetings and endless Oriental rug-trading, we finally got the price down to one I liked and thought the town would, too: $1,925,000. But we weren't yet out of the woods. I still had to have an option. "Option?" asked the owner. "What option? Bring me the money." I pointed out that he wasn't selling to an individual with millions in the bank; he was selling to a town, and it had many legal procedures with which we had to comply. We needed at least 30 days to clear it through town machinery, to say nothing of building up town interest through the newspaper, word of mouth, and so on. All I could get from him was 17 days. But one great Friday night I raced to the train with my homemade option signed and reposing warmly in my pocket. I felt nine feet tall. Next morning I met with the town fathers. We were all jubilant. Although a 17-day limitation was tight, perhaps impossible, we did some figuring and decided to try it. As it turned out, the most important thing we did that morning was to phone Elwood Allen of the Elwood Allen Organization in Bennington, Vermont, possibly the country's greatest expert on the planning of public recreation facilities. He was so interested in our story, he flew right down in his private plane and spent the better part of three days studying Westport's existing recreation facilities and the attractions of the Longshore Club. The upshot of his report: the greatest facility he'd ever seen available to a town of our kind. And in a confidential aside, he said, "If you guys don't buy this, you're crazy!" Various volunteers got to work to assemble data for the case I was to present to the town authorities and the townspeople. In quick succession, we won approval of the Board of Selectmen, the Planning and Zoning Commission, and the Board of Finance. The pay-off was the presentation to Westport's Representative Town Meeting, a legislative phenomenon which in larger New England towns replaces the outgrown Town Meeting. Nevertheless, this one turned out to be more like an old-fashioned Town Meeting. A huge crowd grabbed every seat—early. An unprecedented overflow tucked itself around the edges. THE STAFF and committee work had been excellent. Allen's report was powerful. My presentation lasted almost two hours and was replete with facts, figures, charts, graphs, and a big map of the beautiful club. The presentation itself fell naturally into three parts. I began by phrasing their first question: "You're probably wondering why we need Longshore." I pointed out that, although the town was a privileged community and everybody owned some grass and trees, there were other reasons for having a park. As the Allen report made clear, Westport was actually underequipped with park

10 Suburbia Today, June 1962