Wind’s love of golf took root at Thorny Lea Golf Club in Brockton, Mass., south of Boston, where he was raised with four siblings in a Jewish household amid shoe mills. His father, Max, owned a leather company and a membership to Thorny Lea.
As a teenager, Wind became a regular listener of a radio program featuring Rice, the sportswriter, and Jones, the legendary amateur golfer, who in 1930 was the first to win the Grand Slam (which also was given its own memorable moniker, the Impregnable Quadrilateral). Their musings on golf were tutorials that tickled Wind’s intellect.
Wind was drawn to books and sports. He played golf in high school, basketball at Yale and rugby at Cambridge. In a 1933 journal that is part of Wind’s collection at the Yale library, an April 26 entry describes in detail one of his high school matches at Stony Brae.
“The course is rather short but its narrow fairways and mountainous layout make it rather a formidable course,” he wrote in neat, miniature cursive.
Wind praised a teammate, Bob Jordan, for his play on the back nine “when the heavy rain just about put me out of the running” before adding, almost as an afterthought, “I took an 84 and Bob a very helpful 87.”
The rest of the pages for the year are blank. A shadow of loneliness looms over the pages in Wind’s diaries and in his correspondence. Early in his first year at Cambridge, he wrote a review of the Marx brothers film “Animal Crackers.” After panning the movie, he wrote, “I might have been slightly prejudiced for I saw it in the afternoon alone with an empty theater around me and that was my first time.”
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