Late February 1969
South Miami
“So Mac,” which is what he called me since I was wrapped up in a blanket on his birthday in the nurse’s quarters, the temporary hospital on Fort Richardson Army base in Anchorage, Alaska, just days after the most severe recorded earthquake in history in 1964, “What would you like to do for your birthday?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, now almost five, I said, “Ride with Uncle Bud!”
“Whoa, that will be fun, and Uncle Bud will like it too,” dad said, referring to Bud Cowins, the dozer operator-shaper who was shaping my very first golf course design on Miller drive just west of Galloway Road, Hidden Valley Golf Course, just two blocks from our house from where we could ride a Cushman Truckster to the job. Bud had often taken me up into the cab as the two of them bounced along over the legendary Dade County coral rock.
Dad's job was to stand nearby and watch the forms appear as they were drawn on the plan, which Bud understood down to the smallest detail.
It turns out that Bud would be instrumental in our lives. He made dad's courses come alive, three of them, and opened the door for a phone call from Jack Nicklaus three years later when Jack was forming his own design company where he would meet, work with and become lifetime friends with both Jack and Jay Morrish. Though I did not know it at the time, I was having a lifetime experience looking over the hood of that old D7 Cat in Bud’s lap, smelling the diesel exhaust, feeling the bumps and sensing the machine’s power as the coral fell away before it’s blade. And it wasn’t for ten minutes. I would often be up there for an hour or more. Maybe it was just me, but Bud seemed to be even more productive with me in his lap, my little hands on top of Bud’s, working the levers. It would be a fib to say we were not having fun.
When it came time for a break, dad would take me off of the track when Bud lifted him down, and I would spin in his arms to wave goodbye to Uncle Bud, who was always smiling when we were around. He was a special man, and he retired from Troup Brothers Construction a few years later after decades of riding the iron. He made the Cupp boys into better people and we remember him fondly.