GE a huge influence on golf in Peterborough
As the news of General Electric’s pending departure from our city ripples through our neighbourhoods, it would be easy to get caught up in the corporate bashing that so often goes hand in hand with being such a large fish in a small pond.
Like many other global companies born in the industrial age, GE will have a legacy fraught with both significant gestures of goodwill, citizenship, and communitybuilding, as well as employee lawsuits, environmental misdeeds and claims of abandonment when they decide to close up shop.
My own personal connection to GE is all about my father and his contemporaries who built careers, families and communities with the paycheques they received in return for hard work and loyalty that lasted in many cases 40-plus years. The photo shown here is of the painting that hangs proudly in my home reminding me of my hard-working blue collar roots.
No doubt most Kawartha GCCC membersknowofGeneralElectric’s role in the birth and development of the Clonsilla Avenue club. It is perhaps one of the best examples we have locally of corporate success leading to off-shoots within the community that simply could never have happened without the resources that such business success makes possible.
It is also worth reflecting on GE’s gift of land that enabled Trent University to be born, and even to this day it’s a corporate gift that keeps on giving as the university expands beyond its early footprint on that very land.
While it has been almost 35 years since KGCC formally severed ties with the company and the membership purchased it outright, GE’s involvement in the club’s first 50 years can still be felt to this day. It is relatively unheard of in a city our size to have two premier member-owned Stanley Thompson golf courses, each less than five kilometres from downtown.
The presence of GE in this town made it possible, and feasible to have two such clubs which has had a lasting impact on the local golf scene. It enabled the game to be accessible to a much wider audience than would be possible in most similar size cities—think Oshawa, Kingston, Brantford, Guelph and how all of these places had just one private or semi-private club.
The recently published book by Ed Arnold and Roger Self certainly paints the picture of a city that has been greatly enhanced by the outsized footprint of these clubs. While I never joined KGCC despite being the son of a long time GE employee, I was the exception versus the rule. The blue-collar roots of Kawartha are a proud legacy that GE enabled, and both recreational and competitive golf circles have benefitted greatly from KGCC being very accessible to the athletic sons and daughters of plant workers.
But I find it impossible to think about GE’s departure from our city without thinking that it’s a perfect example of something happening that a couple decades ago would have seemed unfathomable. Unfathomable is happening in a lot of industries these days, and not just in the large electric motors that GE once shipped hundreds of per week to every corner of the globe. The world is changing at a frightening pace.
Where will this modern, postindustrial shake-up leave the golf industry, and most important to us here, what is the future of the private clubs in a town our size? Is it possible that even a growing Peterborough won’t be able to support two such fine, top-ranked and historically significant golf clubs in their current form?
The dynamics of who’s playing golf and who’s buying memberships might be as depressing as the order book for GE motors. Who knows. We have been blessed here in Peterborough to be able to learn the game of golf and fall in love with it on two spectacular pieces of property, all within our city limits. We should be grateful of that each and every time we get to experience it.