Editor’s Note: This is the first in a two-part series about Shenvalee Golf Resort in New Market, which celebrate 85 years in business this year. Part II will be published next week.
NEW MARKET — Blair Dellinger can still see Shenvalee the way it used to be, back when he was a kid and his life revolved around the place.
In many ways, his life still does revolve around the place.
Seated in a golf cart in front of the historic hotel, Dellinger, 77, points out the home of his childhood, located across from the golf resort’s sign on U.S. 11. And then he points two houses over to his current home.
With the exception of a 25-year career in the U.S. Air Force, Dellinger has lived within hailing distance of the front nine. So the longtime member knows the Shenvalee golf course in all its incarnations, from its nine-hole simplicity back when he used to be a caddy to the 27 holes of today.
The resort opened in 1927. The Dr. Casper Otto Miller family, which purchased the Shenvalee property in 1935, were only its second owners. When Dellinger was a boy in the 1940s, the grounds still retained the vestiges of the farm it had once been. He recalls a springhouse, flocks of wild guineas and an expansive apple orchard behind the farmhouse-turned-hotel.
John G. Miller, a newspaper publisher and owner of the Henkel Press in New Market, managed the property. His wife,
Katherine, was a “fine cook,” Dellinger said, and many guests booked rooms for the entire summer to enjoy her cooking and the Millers’ hospitality.
Miller always arranged for local boys who wanted a job to work in the hotel or on the course in the summer. Dellinger had several jobs at the resort over the years.
Caddies earned a quarter for every nine holes (it took about two hours to play, he said) as well as tips.
“There were about six to 10 caddies working every day and you were a free agent, so you hoped for the best,” Dellinger said.
The best could be pretty good. Guests with enough leisure time and money to play golf had the potential to hand out a nice tip.
Dellinger says he doesn’t remember many celebrities coming through, but they were there.
One time, though, he finally got curious.
One golfer “always wore a straw hat and a white t-shirt, and he looked like a local farmer,” Dellinger said. “I finally asked who he was and it turned out it was Mr. Vanderbilt.”
Young Dellinger knew enough to be impressed by that last name. Harold Vanderbilt, the great-grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, bought the Mt. Airy estate in Mount Jackson, when he was 56.
He dressed like a farmer because he was one—and not just a gentleman farmer. When Vanderbilt bought the farm, he knew nothing about agriculture. Two years later, the same man who had won the most prestigious yachting race three times and invented contract bridge also won the state corn-raising championship for growing the largest number of bushels of shelled corn per acre.
Those brushes with fame and fortune passed Dellinger by.
“I had pool to shoot and golf to shoot and I had all these other things to do,” he said, laughing. “I didn’t pay attention, to be honest with you.”
In addition to caddying, boys were paid 50 cents an hour to work on the grounds. Using a handmower, with one boy pushing and one boy pulling, “it took us all day one day to mow nine holes and it was hard work.”
With none of today’s discriminating herbicides available, he was also hired to weed the greens.
“We used to have a kitchen knife and when we were finished, the blade was worn down. I sat on that green many a day and did nothing but get crabgrass out of it,” Dellinger said. “I didn’t really think about how hard it was. That was good money in those days.”
Dellinger says his family wasn’t poor, but they weren’t wealthy, either. His mother, Alma Newland, was a waitress at the resort and local restaurants such as Waybrite’s and The Team Room before she owned Mother’s Kitchen just a few blocks from their house.
In high school, Dellinger worked as a night clerk in the hotel. To “prove you were there and to keep you awake,” he and other night clerks were required, at prescribed times, to turn a key in boxes located around the 12-room hotel.
“I never went to school on Monday mornings,” Dellinger said. “Everyone knew what I was doing … I made 50 cents an hour. That doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but boy, I want to tell you, that was wonderful…we were very meager people and that meant a lot.”
