She called the new “Double Circle Golf Course” a novel design, with the front nine starting and ending at the clubhouse and the second surrounding the first in an even wider ring. Near the Pacific, “it will be the only country club hereabouts that can boast ocean plunges within five minutes, the Santa Monica sea proving no small adjacent asset.”
In the January 1916 Los Angeles Daily Times feature about the Brentwood Country Club’s prospective opening, the 350 charter members were all described as matriarchs of a type, including “important financial mothers, shining legal mothers, ordinary millionaire mothers, distinguished tennis mothers, starry golf mothers, shrewd business mothers (and) numerous British bowling queen mothers.”
Alma Whitaker, a prolific and pioneering reporter, could layer on the hyperbole thicker than Rudy Valentino’s makeup.
Very little about Brentwood’s origins would exist without Whitaker’s spirited journalism. She also chronicled its opening later that year. Starting with nine holes, the “debutant country club,” as she put it, also used three private tennis courts, “available by the magnificence of President Thomas Bundy.”
By Jay Stuller