Since I'm at a loss for posting blather material, I thought I'd pull something from "Bogies and Billygoats: A History of the Albany Municipal Golf Course".......available at fine online booksellers
Frank Cummings
The trophy was three feet tall, the younger Frank Cummings said.
Somewhere along the line, it simply disappeared. Frank lives in Albany and plays golf every now and then. His father, the senior Francis Cummings, was a bit more serious about the game. In the 1930s, Frank Cummings was the first three-time city golf champion and the first to retire the Mayor Thacher Trophy, a feat that would be accomplished by only three other golfers throughout the years.
“It was a big trophy, I remember, but it’s probably long gone by know,” said the son. Cummings Sr. pulled off the feat in three consecutive years – 1933 through 1935 – but he and his twin brother, John, would remain competitive throughout the 1930s in the Mayor’s Cup tournament that would soon be considered the Muni’s annual championship.
John Cummings was involved in the only disputed tournament final on record, although the story is a bit second hand. Jack Vogel, a generation younger than the Cummings twins and a student of the game himself, was compiling a list of past city champions in the late 1950s. He wanted some recognition for those who had won the city title and, finding the clubhouse bar empty of such, he set out to comb the newspapers. “I asked Mickey Marcy. I said ‘If I can get these all together, would you put up a plaque or something?’ So I started working on the list. The only year that I couldn’t find was this one. John Cummings and Clare Graves played in the final, and I asked Jerry Dwyer about it and he said there was no winner. I can’t remember exactly what he said happened, but there was some kind of penalty called and they never resolved it,” Vogel said.
According to his son, Frank was a CHristian Brothers Academy grad, class of 1925. He worked for the telephone company most of his life, retiring in 1971. Frank married later in life so his younger years were often spent around the golf course. Marriage came and the golf became secondary.
His son remembers his father telling him about playing on the tour for a while, and that’s quite possible. To enter most tour events in those days all one needed was a handicap below two and the entrance fee. Money winners, of course, would have forsaken their amateur status.
“He tried to teach us when we were kids. We would go out to the old Muni course or Western Turnpike,” younger Frank said. “These days, I get out when I get a chance, maybe three or four times a year,” said Frank. “I’m a typical hacker. I’ll never get any better.”
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