Gannon Municipal Golf Course

Origins

The course exists because the city of Lynn needed work for its unemployed as much as it needed a golf course. Plans for a municipal links inside the little-used Lynn Woods Reservation had been discussed for more than a year before the 1929 stock market crash, and some in the city dismissed the idea as absurd once the Depression set in. Parks superintendent John Morrissey and park commission chairman Albert Comstock pushed ahead anyway, convinced a public course could support itself the way one Comstock had helped build in Wilton, Connecticut, had.

The Welfare Department, under Joseph Cole, supplied the workforce: roughly 800 men on relief, growing to 1,500 as construction ramped up, were put to work building the course and clubhouse under a special act of the Massachusetts legislature, allowing them to earn their welfare payments through labor rather than a handout. The course opened for play in 1931 on land assembled over the years through city purchase, donations, and annexation of swamp and pond acreage. It was named Lynn Woods Municipal Golf Links, with "Happy Valley" as an informal second name taken from an old parks-department reference to the site, a name that stuck until the course was renamed Larry Gannon Golf Course in 1975.

Design Philosophy

Wayne Stiles, a Boston-based Golden Age architect working in the same era as Donald Ross, routed the 18 holes through the wooded, pond-dotted terrain of the reservation rather than reshaping it heavily. The layout plays to a par of 70-71 depending on tee, stretching to about 6,110 yards from the back markers, with water coming into play on the 14th and 18th holes.

Development

The course had no irrigation system for its first three decades and depended on natural rainfall until the city funded a $60,000 system that came online in 1965. Tees went from dirt to Astroturf in 1968, before the park commission hired its first accredited superintendent in 1976: Steve Murphy, a Stockbridge School of Agriculture graduate who replaced the artificial turf with 18 grass tees, added roughly 20 bunkers to bring the course to 23 total, and dredged the ponds on the 14th and 18th holes. Murphy remained the course's superintendent for decades afterward.

Recognition

The course hosted the 1941 Massachusetts Public Links Championship while still known as Happy Valley. Two of its earliest amateur standouts, Les Kennedy and Sam Videtta, went on to careers as New England club professionals; Kennedy later led the 1949 U.S. Open after the first round, played in the 1950 Masters, and was inducted into the New England PGA Hall of Fame in 1998.

Today

Gannon Municipal Golf Course remains city-owned, operated by Golf Facilities Management Inc., and continues to combine seasonal memberships with daily-fee public play. The clubhouse's function room is used for weddings and other private events alongside the golf operation.