Aaron Skidmore

Aaron Skidmore isn’t your typical professional. In fact he never really was a pro golfer, except that he is and always will be a pro to me. I can’t remember what his swing looked like and there isn’t one swing tip I remember him passing on to me. He gave up the game out of necessity long before I took it up.

But still I consider him the one who handed me the baton. It was he, whose passion for the game somehow found its way to me and surfaced about three years after he passed away. I came by it honestly because Aaron Skidmore was my Grandpa.

Grandpa Aaron was into sports. He loved horseshoes, baseball, golf, pinochle, and just about anything that offered competition. I can remember him out in the backyard with us grandkids playing croquet.

He had an awesome little house with a backyard big enough for croquet and secluded enough to attract an occasional deer. That was before things grew up around Grandpa and Grandma’s place.

The downstairs rec room was my favorite. His old desk was full of odds and ends. I can still smell that old pipe he had sitting on the glass top and I’m sure he had a cigar humidor sitting around there somewhere. Little boys like that kind of stuff.

The family room had a TV and what had to have been one of the first remote controls. It had two buttons. I never knew how to work it. I think it had broken before I got my mitts on it.

I remember when he gave me a cut-down iron and what must have been a three-wood. I can’t remember exactly because I wasn’t much of a golf fanatic at five years old. I don’t know what happened to the wood. The iron survived for a long time but it’s gone now. I mostly used it as a rifle when fighting whichever evil forces were afoot.

After Grandpa retired from the Army at Fort Lewis he would play the Fort Lewis Golf Course. There are currently 27 holes on the forest-lined course which has, in recent years, opened to the public. Occasionally you can hear the squeaking of metal on tread as a tank rumbles through the woods not too far from the course. I was putting to the sound on the elevated third green a couple of summers ago.

Whenever I’m on the course, I try to picture in my mind where Grandpa and I must have been when he took me golfing one summer. I’m sure he wanted to show me the game. By that time, I had to have been just shy of a teen and there was plenty for me to learn. I don’t think I hit too many shots nor could it have been successful from a golfing standpoint. But there was Grandpa playing the game he loved with one of the grandkids he loved.

Whatever love for the game he had was passed to his youngest son. That’d be Uncle Mark. I wish that I could have golfed with the two of them. Uncle Mark and I get out on the course together as much as we can. Since moving to Washington, I’ve gotten a few rounds in with him in the Evergreen State and even a round in Oregon. There is more than a little of Grandpa in the two of us. So I guess he’s there after all.

He and Bob Terry would play together until Grandpa’s stroke took the clubs out of his hands. Pinochle, Solitaire, and other games took over where golf left off.

I will always appreciate that Grandpa Skidmore held a club long before I did. I wish that I could have that summer round with him again right now. I’m sure I’d be more attentive to how he swung the club and what the score was at the end of the round.

There have been a lot of other people in the meantime who have played the game with me and taught me what they know. Some of them I still play next to from time to time. But I’ll always consider Grandpa Skidmore as the father of the game to me. Thanks for life. And thanks for that afternoon at Fort Lewis, Grandpa. I picked up where you left off.