56 lessons in Boston at the Museum of Fine Art, so I did that. My brother and I could go and get into trouble in Boston, but I learned I can draw. I sketch what’s there, and I can then draw the green in. It’s easy for me. You don’t want the bulldozer guy to draw, you want him on the bulldozer, but if you can show what you want in a sketch, it’s easier to understand.” He met his wife, Sally, in 1949; they were married three years later and travelled the world together for 68 years until her death in January 2020. “In the winter, we’d head south to Florida; my dad was working down there, and he introduced me to various golf architects,” he says. “I got a connection to Dick Wilson from my dad. Wilson was doing a job at Riviera in Coral Gables, Florida, where he lived. Bob von Hagge was doing most of the work. Wilson was hard to know. His favourite drink was Dubonnet and soda, and he started into it pretty early in the day. Somewhere in the early 60s, there was a centrefold of Wilson and Robert Trent Jones. Jones was in a button-down shirt and a blazer, and Wilson was on a tractor in work boots, with straw in his hair. That summed up the difference between them. I think Wilson was a genius at strategy. I watched what he did at Doral and was really impressed.” After Wilson, Kirby went to work with Jones, the most successful golf architect of the era. “I was doing some work at Paradise Island in Nassau, and the pro from Nassau CC called me and said Jones was staying there and I should meet him, so I went over there. He was interested in what I was doing with hydraulic fill. We had pumped in 40 acres of sea bottom sand and he was fascinated by that. He told me he was building a team, and if I wanted a job, here was his business card.” Kirby says he held Jones in very high regard, even though he could be hard work. “I really loved him,” he says. “At the 1963 US Open, which was held at the Country Club at Brookline, I had arranged to meet him at a dinner. I borrowed my mother’s car to get there, but he sent me a message that he wouldn’t be there, and instead I should meet him at the Yale Club in Manhattan at 10 the following morning. Imagine, I’m in Boston and he says, ‘Meet me in New York tomorrow morning’! Later I learned that wasn’t unusual for him. So, I took the Eastern Shuttle, and got to the club. Roger Rulewich was sitting there, Jones was in a phone booth. He slid the door open and said, ‘Ron, I’ll be with you in a minute’. The doors went back and forth, and he told me that I needed to go to Fort Lauderdale and I should talk to a particular guy about buying a house, and I should be ready to go to California. But they were the greatest seven years of my life. I met so many powerful people, it was a real eye opener. One day he said to me, ‘We have a lot of work in Europe, you I NTERV I EW Photo: Kristopher Streek Kirby has sketched throughout his life and continues to sketch his design ideas to get them across to shapers and construction crews
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