JC Melrose Country Club

The same kind of benevolent paternalism that led to the founding of DuPont Country Club and McCall Field gave birth to a recreational facility shortly after World War I on what is today the Tookany Creek Parkway, in Cheltenham. This time it was the Curtis Publishing Company (Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Holiday) which provided its management and employees with a pleasant "country setting" for tennis, swimming, foot racing, baseball, volleyball, and the opportunity to whack golf balls around a rather short and simple course.

In 1926 a small group of men under the leadership of Robert Smiley, Wayne Herkness, and Malcolm Herkness bought the property from Curtis Publishing and organized the Melrose Country Club. Annual dues of $25 enabled a family to enjoy all of the club’s facilities.

A year later Perry Maxwell was commissioned to design a proper course. Kentucky-born and of Scottish descent, Maxwell lived most of his life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During his career he designed some 70 courses, the majority of them in the south, southwest, and midwest. The great eighteen at Tulsa’s Southern Hills Country Club, site of both U.S. Open and PGA Championships, is generally acknowledged to be his masterpiece. Maxwell’s trademark was boldly undulating greens, and his reputation such that he was hired to re-contour putting surfaces at Augusta National, the Maidstone Club, the National Golf Links, and others. Here in the Philadelphia area, his handiwork can be seen in certain greens at Pine Valley, Merion (both East and West), Philadelphia Country Club, Gulph Mills, and Saucon Valley’s Old course.

At Melrose, he took a limited and difficult—often abruptly hilly—parcel of land and developed on it a sporty layout which, though short, was challenging and diverse. The construction of the Tookany Creek Parkway would call for extensive revisions to Maxwell’s design by the Canadian architect Clinton E. "Robbie" Robinson.