Encanto Park Golf Course

ONE GLANCE at the scorecard indicates Encanto Park Golf Course is not what we've been conditioned to expect from a desert course. The par is 70, not the symmetrical 72 with a mix of 3s, 4s and 5s. The holes are spooned together on a rectangular piece of land bisected by a city street. The fairways are lined with mature trees, not a zigzag of grass through scrubby desert. There are three sets of tees, not a scattering of boxes. And even at its tippy-top distance of 6,386 yards, Encanto Park is dwarfed by the slugfests architects have erected around town.

Encanto Park does not make exaggerated claims in an attempt to elbow its way to the forefront in the Valley of the Sun. It was the first municipal course in Phoenix, becoming as reliable as mom's casserole long before Scottsdale and the northern deserts bloomed as playgrounds. Encanto Park and its regulars are a contented family; have been for years.

Bill Dickey is typical of Encanto Park's players, smiling on the first tee as part of his regular foursome. The three-plus decades that have passed since his Air Force days have done little to tarnish his physique; he's the type who fools the age-and-weight guessers at the county fair. Dickey was a people organizer long before the trendy called it networking, and he has formed more civic-minded groups than most people join in a lifetime.

Dickey and his friends know the value of a clubhouse, and not just as a refuge after four hours under a cloudless sky. They understand that golf is as much social as recreational, cultivating a personality that reflects far beyond one's 18-hole total. They have known that since their group-within-a-club, the Desert Mashie Golf Club, took its first steps nearly a half-century ago.

"Bill has been the backbone of this organization for many years, and has been one of the members that has been around the longest," says Ed Knox, who has more than 20 years of his own in Desert Mashie. "Without him, much of what we do definitely would be just a dream."

Just like Encanto Park, which brings to mind a different era, the Desert Mashie was born of a time when its members were not openly welcomed at other clubs. Dickey and his peers, mainly black business professionals, were deeded an organization started in a segregated time when black golfers were shunned by many courses. The Mashies adopted junior golf as their focus in an effort to grow the game among minorities through instruction and tournament play.

That is what brings Desert Mashie members to 1021 East Washington Street, an address about four miles from Encanto Park. The two-story building on the 50-by-140-foot lot had seen its better days long before the summer of 1993, when the Desert Mashies saved it from demolition and began its gradual restoration.

Anyone zooming past on the broad one-way street toward the heart of downtown Phoenix might not notice the recent transformation. In their own way the Desert Mashies hope this clubhouse will capture a chapter of the city's history in the same way Encanto Park provides a glimpse at bygone course architecture and community dynamics.

When the work is completed, probably sometime in 1998, Dickey and his fellow Desert Mashie members will take their junior pupils to the building, a combination museum and library. They will tell them the story of Golden and Elvira Swindall, who opened their home at 1021 East Washington as the Swindall Tourist Inn, one of the few places that blacks could stay in Phoenix before integration opened the hotels.

"We have been told (by longtime neighborhood residents) that Jackie Robinson stayed at the Swindall house during a trip to speak at one of the local high schools," Dickey says from the front yard at 1021 East Washington. "And that Willie Mays stayed at the Swindall when he moved from New York in the early '50s. Other ballplayers also stayed at the home." And businessmen. And laborers. And newcomers.

Those bits of history are being gathered by Desert Mashie members, who have already entered the Swindall house on the National Register of Historic Places. Combining cash and in-kind contributions of members with municipal and civic grants, the Desert Mashies are on a $300,000 path to turning the Swindall house into a home again.

It took a year to buy the property for $40,000, with the group making a 50-percent down payment, and move 1021 East Washington off the city's demolition list. The next year brought grant applications and the initial fundraising. In the last few months came the hidden but costly work of shoring up the foundation and removing asbestos. Lastly, there was a facelift for the front: coats of paint, porch repairs and a new fence that gives the Swindall home a spiffy look it has lacked.

"Some people say it was too old a house, that we could have taken some money and bought some land and built something new," Dickey says. "But that would miss the entire point."

The work changes course now. One front wages a fundraising campaign to find more than $150,000 to keep paying the bills -- the Phoenix Thunderbirds are kicking in about $50,000 to help the pay-as-you-go project. The other goes into weekend remodeling sessions, with members bypassing prime playing time at Encanto Park to become dust-covered, gutting rooms and erecting new walls.

The Swindall house has served as a way station since its construction in 1914, when the original occupants housed German immigrants. The Swindalls bought the property when they moved from Oklahoma, and enlarged the home to its present 3,800 square feet. They offered 15 rooms, rented out by the week or the month, through the '50s and '60s.

With passage of the Public Accommodations Bill in the 1960s, the house and its brethren became dinosaurs. When Golden and Elvira Swindall died in the early 1970s, the building remained in the family but its tenure as a rooming house ended. The population emptied from downtown Phoenix for other parts of the valley. The home fell into disrepair.

Dickey knew of the building when the Mashies went looking for property a few years ago. He was an insurance and real estate broker until retiring in 1982; that year he began the National Minority Junior Golf Scholarship Association and opened an office a block east of the Swindall house. That group was itself an offshoot of the Desert Mashies and its parent organization, the Western States GA, a coalition of about three dozen black member clubs dedicated to tournament play and instruction for juniors.

Dickey, as the last paragraph shows, is not one for idle time. He's been Desert Mashie president five times and led the WSGA in the early 1980s. He built the Minority Scholarship program from the ground up, patiently assembling a 10,000-name mailing list by unearthing, one at a time, minority junior programs and individual players scattered around the nation. What began as one man's dream -- that more black men and women become prominent members of the golfing community, especially as highly visible touring professionals -- has led to more than 300 minority students receiving in excess of $400,000 in scholarship funds.

"Everything we do now is geared toward his program," Knox says. "If he wants to bring scholarship recipients in and house them, we'll do it."

Knox can vouch for Dickey in part because he has been his playing partner so many times at Encanto Park. The course is the dominant feature of a park that is not only one of the closest to downtown, but one of the largest in the entire City of Phoenix system. It includes softball, tennis, picnic pavilions and an amusement park. A few holes on the front nine abut the kiddie rides, with a dragon roller coaster within shouting distance of one green.

What is now known as the Encanto Palmcroft Historic District remains a tony neighborhood, with the homes around the first nine on the downtown side still some of the nicest in the city proper. Although shadowed by a dozen tall buildings known locally as the uptown district, Encanto's streets are quiet and residential, a textbook of architectural styles accompanied by towering palms that one would envision growing in Hollywood. The course has several citrus trees along the property line, with branches hanging over out-of-bounds stakes.

While its comparatively short length (6,167 from the regular tees) gives the impression of a pushover, Encanto Park plays much longer than its yardage due to the length of the five par-3 holes (three exceed 185 yards) and greens loaded with subtle breaks that require local knowledge. Walkers outnumber riders, and carts are almost non-existent on the adjacent nine-hole course that's the breeding ground for junior programs and beginners.

Encanto Park is a magnet for golfers. It has a terrific practice area, and plenty of people rush over during their lunch hour, wearing ties or skirts and carrying bags, chipping and putting on one of the region's largest practice greens. The first tee hums from sunup to sundown, and the pace of play is brisk.

Dickey started playing the game in 1968, when he was 28, and made Encanto Park and the Desert Mashies his second home; for many years he lived in a moderately sized house just across Thomas Avenue from the 12th tee. He knows every nuance of every hole, and that is an advantage for someone whose nature already makes him a natural to lay up to the proper angle at the 292-yard 10th, where the temptation is to blast the drive over the tall face of the bunker guarding the green.

Those temptations don't trip Dickey, who has spent many patient years building the Minority Scholarship Association, the WSGA and Desert Mashies. They are a gift, like the Swindall Inn, that will serve a generation that could otherwise overlook the Encanto Park Golf Courses of the world.

-- Brett Avery