Preston’s keeper of the green has lawn goal — winning turf
CAMBRIDGE — Richard Bullock, soon to be 69, marched 120 feet, back and forth.
The lonely, flatland Sisyphus — wearing summer shades, khaki shorts and a K-W Cambridge Bassmasters fishing cap — pushed a heavy vertical mower across the green of the century-old Preston Lawn Bowling Club in Thursday’s midday humidity.
The mower blades sliced into the bent grass turf.
Clumps of dug up wet thatch clung to the treads of Bullock’s shoes. He shook off the mossy remnants and laughed.
Only four more hours of this tender, loving lawn care to go on this day.
A mow of the dried clippings and a trip to the dump, to be followed by a rolling of the entire 100-by-120 foot patch of at the corner of Dover Street and Queenston Road.
Then, the healthier green will be thicker and quicker for the evening’s interleague event.
Twenty bowlers from Kitchener’s Heritage Greens were coming over to tread the city-owned green located behind a still-inuse Bell switching station, in the construction-clogged heart of old Preston.
“The players can look good on good greens,” said Bullock, goateed greenskeeper of the 60-member Preston club for a decade and a titleholding competitor back into the 1980s.
“And they can look bad on bad greens. Every time, every day, you’re always trying to create a better green.”
A better green. A better sheet of ice. A better burial plot.
This is this Galt resident’s three-pronged life over much of the last four-plus decades. Keeping lawn bowling greens, first at Soper Park and later at Preston. Crafting perfectly pebbled ice for the curling clubs of Galt and Guelph. Tending the New Hope Cemetery in Hespeler as a city staffer, now retired.
Green keeper. Ice maker. Grave digger. In all three endeavours, the surface work is never done.
Perfection is never achieved. There’s always another hole to be filled, patched or dug.
“In ice-making, you get problems but you don’t get diseases,” said Bullock, lamenting the faint yellow appearance of dreaded “dollar spots” on his Preston patch of greenery.
“You get the same damage to the ice and to the greens. People dropping curling stones or dropping their bowls. They can chew up a green quick or they can chip up ice in a hurry.”
The problem in grave-digging is people simply dropping in, sometimes by choice.
That bothered Bullock. One poor soul took pills to take his resting place. He recalled how another man set himself alight in 1998 in order to occupy an empty family grave he decorated with a black headstone 15 years earlier.
“I had enough of those,” Bullock said.
That same year, the city-supported community renaissance and restoration of the Preston Lawn Bowling Club, which had grown dormant with a green filled by waist-high weeds, took root. These days, the green stretching beneath six rusty light towers is under Bullock’s constant care and the crisplypainted clubhouse is in pretty decent shape.
“Can you imagine having a cottage like this?” asked Bullock, showing off the mosquito screened viewing veranda with ceiling fans and cafeteria-style seating.
But cottages and lawn bowling greens are hard work that never ends.
Bullock says he has sprinkled and poured 100 tons of sand onto the Preston green over the past decade. But the base of the lawn remains mostly troublesome topsoil, which doesn’t drain as well. The transformation beneath the blades is excruciatingly slow, just like bowls wobbling across the Preston green.
Ideally, in these parts it takes about 12 seconds from let-go to stop, Bullock said. But Down Under, the bowls can go for 24 seconds on Australia’s legendary fast greens. So Bullock, whose wife Marilyn urges him to keep busy, wants to see that for himself. He’ll go to Australia in January to study their clubs and greens for six weeks.
“Their grass is so much quicker,” he said, while clutching a 1940s textbook on the cultivation of turf grass. “I want to go there to see how they do it.”
And while there, he can entrance the Aussies with his allCanadian tales of laying a curling sheet on the crooked floors of Preston Arena in the mid-1970s.
Tales of short grass, pebbled ice and unfilled graves.
And pushing the vertical mower back and forth, back and forth.