Secret in the Palms

When the wind blows strongly enough along the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains, the skirts of the California fan palms at O’Donnell Golf Club shake loose golf balls from every decade of the past century. Lodged into the fronds by amateurs, pros and celebrities of generations past, the often yellowing golf balls stamped with the logos of brands long defunct can make a morning round after a blustery evening feel like a trip to an antique shop.

From the streets of downtown Palm Springs, O’Donnell looks like a park. Tamarisks line much of the nearly rectangular property, grass blankets the ground, pink and yellow flowers top the clusters of cacti sprouting alongside what might be a footpath. Then a golf cart whizzes into view. You pull out your phone to find your bearings and realize that what you’ve just stumbled upon is the oldest surviving golf course in the Coachella Valley.

When I first stepped foot on the private nine-holer, it was mid-April and the season was drawing to a close. Most of the members had fled to cooler climates, so I was invited to show up at noon and go around as many times as I liked.

“Grab yourself a soda pop,” assistant pro Jim Prusia told me, gesturing toward a mini fridge inside the Spanish Colonial Revival–style pro shop while strapping my clubs to a cart.

As I prepared to tee off, an unexpected member shuffled in from the parking lot. As a retired Berkeley physicist, he was surely aware of the latest advancements in equipment technology, but he carried a cleek in his bag anyway.

Having the course to myself would have been a treat, but the pairing came as a relief. Golf can get lonely for single women playing at a single-digit handicap. After a stint on a Division I college team and a few years away from the game, I joined a golf and social club with a membership consisting almost entirely of men who tended to invite other men to play. As a result, I’ve become accustomed to solo golf trips.

Sticking a tee in the ground on the first, I commented on the long rows of palms crisscrossing the course, and the physicist told me about what happens during windy spells. What I would come to understand, however, is that they’re more than just decorative obstructions. The 20 gangly palms lining the left side of the fifth, for example, provide a set of targets for those standing on the tee box, where an outcropping of the crumbling mountainside renders the shot completely blind.

It’s not the sort of blindness you experience on a Dell hole—there is no fuzzy hill curled up like a sleeping pet at the front of the green. Here, a slice of rock juts up and out of the valley floor about 35 yards ahead of you, climbing higher and higher as it merges with the rest of the mountain range. Launch the ball an inch too far to the right or an inch too low, and it’ll nick a stone or shrub and ricochet God knows where.

But the green is small and covered with Bermuda, so if you manage to clear the rugged slope and send it toward your chosen palm, you’re more likely to catch the front bunker or roll off the back than you are to stick it.

There’s no bell, either, so…be quick about it all.

Before you go thinking that nothing 130 yards could ever be that difficult, know this: Former head pro Koll Farman invited 40 golf professionals from the Desert Chapter of the Southern California Professional Golf Association to play 18 holes at O’Donnell back in 2022. One of the members, who’d planted her lawn chair on the fifth, swore to me that “no more than a few people parred it.” Which makes sense, considering only two players broke par that day, and one was Farman.

But the tricky fifth is not impossible: Joseph DeLuca, now 92, aced it in the spring of 2024. The Italian nonagenarian told me he usually ends up around the front bunker, but when his group rounded the base of the mountain, they spotted only three balls. DeLuca checked the cup and found his gleaming Srixon. “My first hole-in-one took me 65 years,” he said while sipping a glass of lemonade. “My wife had her first in 1988, but I guess the Lord wanted me to suffer for longer.”

The fifth certainly intimidated me. I play a draw so incorrigible I can barely get a fairway metal to fade, let alone a short iron. But if I were to use anything lower than an 8-iron for the sake of straightening my ball flight, I’d raise my risk of clipping the jagged partition or flying the green.

If anyone could have calculated the solution to my problem, it would have been the physicist, but he seemed eager to finish nine and join a group of members gathering on the clubhouse patio—and perhaps check in with the hostess famous for parking her red vintage Mercedes off the sixth fairway, behind a little fence shielding it from errant drives. He’d pointed it out to me from hole one with a smitten grin.

“All you can do is aim, shoot and go see what you get,” he said, and took a step toward his cart. He didn’t come to O’Donnell to score.

I pulled the 8 and aimed directly into the rocks.

Architecture experts say that Spanish Colonial Revival style was born in San Diego in 1915. A few years later, the trend hit Palm Springs, and it lives on with O’Donnell’s clubhouse.

That a dusty moonscape like the Coachella Valley could morph into a golf mecca in a matter of decades is nothing short of astounding. The native Cahuilla spent roughly five millennia building a way of life around the few warm-water springs, only to watch settlers arrive and plant the most unnecessary and thirstiest of foliage. While developers brought railroads, electricity and other innovations to the area, the sustainability of it all remained—and remains—questionable.

The potential healing properties of the dry yet fresh desert air attracted many transplants, including Nellie “Mother of Palm Springs” Coffman, who opened a sanatorium there in 1909. She’d eventually name her cluster of cabins and tents the Desert Inn—the first hotel in the Coachella Valley.

One of Coffman’s loyal guests was oil tycoon Thomas O’Donnell. Born in Pennsylvania and tempered in the mines of Colorado, he found work in California with Union Oil, climbing the ranks until he was operating alongside Southern California drilling pioneer Edward L. Doheny. He eventually gained such stature that President Woodrow Wilson consulted him in energy matters. Golf was catching on among elites at this time, so it’s unsurprising that O’Donnell would pick up a club in 1900.

When the oil magnate arrived in Palm Springs in the early 1920s, however, the closest thing he could find to a driving range was a patch of dirt in front of the Desert Inn. With Coffman’s blessing, he and his associate, John Kline, set their sights on a nearby clearing, mowed the wild burr clover with a horse-drawn sickle, and by 1924 had set up a nine-hole mashie course. It was as much of a hit among inn patrons as with the desert critters curious enough to wander over and watch O’Donnell and his wife chip and putt in the evenings.

But the mashie course left O’Donnell unsatisfied. He missed real golf but loved the desert too much to move back toward Los Angeles. So, he consulted with architects, who told him a regulation course couldn’t be built in the desert, ignored them and purchased a tract of land at the foot of the mountain range—a total of 34 acres, on which he and architect William Charles Tanner would build a Spanish Colonial Revival–style house called Ojo del Desierto, a reservoir connected to Whitewater Canyon by a 14-mile pipeline, and his golf course.

Kline would later tell The Golfer that the site was “nothing but a cactus patch and a dump ground.” But he and a team of local workers managed to clear the boulders, greasewood and cacti before grading the site and turning the soil with a horse-drawn plow, providing O’Donnell with a blank canvas.

Oilman and colleague J.F. Lucey got started on the design in 1926, hitting drives from proposed tee sites, then a couple of iron shots, and placing fairways and greens wherever the balls ended up. They put down two sets of tees so players jonesing for a full 18 had the option to go around again on a slightly different course and use every club in the bag. The final product was a par-35, nine-hole course named Desert Golf Club. Locals called it O’Donnell’s.

Final touches included a row of alternating red and white oleanders between the fifth and eighth that would later succumb to a pest infestation, and 130 palms uprooted from Redlands and replanted between and across holes—a choice that would cost the greatest portion of the $200,000 he’s said to have spent building the course. None of the palms died in his lifetime, as he’d boast from his deathbed, and almost all of them remain today.

Though O’Donnell had already laid down his first few holes, developer Walter H. Morgan won the race to open the first golf course in the Coachella Valley, welcoming players onto a nine-hole track at La Quinta in February 1927. O’Donnell finished his nine a few months later. But while the original La Quinta course has since been lost and replaced, O’Donnell’s can still be played.

Being the passion project of a non-architect, O’Donnell’s golf course is anything but derivative. The first hole is straight, short and narrow, with a tiered green at the northern edge of the property. “This is our Amen Corner,” the physicist explained. “If you slice your approach, you’ll ring the bell of a Catholic church across the street; hook it, and you’ll hit a Jewish temple at the back left of the green.” A good opportunity to pray for some of the luck you’ll need on the fifth.

No. 2 makes me think O’Donnell had jokes. It’s a straight par 4, but the green sits behind a wall of four equally spaced palm trees, so no matter where you end up off the tee, at least two of them are in play. To approach the pin, you’ve got to fly it straight between two palms, or shape it around one, or take it directly at one, banking on your inability to hit anything you’re actually aiming for.

That playfulness carries over to the blind fifth, where my plan of aiming straight into the rocks imploded. I swung out of my shoes trying to get the ball up fast enough, shifting my weight—and the hosel of my club—forward at impact, and shanked it in the most onomatopoeic way possible, into the side of the mountain. Figuring I’d drop a ball somewhere around the green, I got in the cart and reminded myself that pros shank it all the time. Right?

Yet another display of O’Donnell’s sense of humor is found at the junction of No. 7 and No. 8. The two holes were designed to cross each other. Originally perched on a hill near O’Donnell’s carriage house, the eighth tee required players to hit the ball over the seventh green—and anyone putting on it— but the club moved it to ground level and several yards south after, a member told me, there were “one too many beanings.”

These quirks prevent the members of O’Donnell from easily conquering it, and they’re what many of them appreciate most about the place. There may be no higher demonstration of love for golf than a non-architect creating a course based purely on what they find challenging, amusing or beautiful, rather than a set of perceived design norms. When players respond to that demonstration, whether it be with pleasure or frustration, we communicate with the architect as though we’re interpreting a piece of music or following a recipe, an exercise that becomes even more precious after a creator has passed on.

I wish I’d joined the physicist in the clubhouse to ask him and some of the other members if they felt the same way, but when he invited me, I felt a sudden pang of social anxiety and declined, explaining that I needed another shot at the fifth. It may sound backward, but prioritizing golf over being social had helped me cope with the isolation I’d felt in my own club. But what if that had just been contributing to the cycle? And was I continuing that here? I tossed that thought around in my head while rethinking my strategy for conquering the rocks.

An early Desert Golf Club scorecard features an illustration of a barrel-chested Thomas O’Donnell standing on a green, wearing nothing but white shorts, white shoes and a white newsboy cap.

But it wasn’t all shirtless golf for Tom. He helped build the first library, hospital and school in Palm Springs, planted palm trees along the road entering the city from the north and even set out garbage cans downtown. Too wealthy to feel the impact of the Depression, and inspired by the Works Progress Administration, he hired 25 local men to craft a triangular platform on a ridge overlooking the golf course. Each December, he’d install massive speakers atop the stone structure and blast Christmas music.

By 1932, O’Donnell was allowing local homeowners to play for a greens fee, and with many celebrities living or vacationing in Palm Springs, the course became an intersection of Hollywood and golf. Bob Hope, Kirk Douglas, William Holden, and Clark Gable all joined the club. Bing Crosby and Phil Harris were frequent guests. The course itself played a starring role in All Star Golf—one of the earliest made-for-television golf shows—hosting a match between Billy Casper and Bob Toski in 1957.

The club also hosted the area’s first professional tournament, the Palm Springs Invitational, in 1935. Twenty-one players, including Walter Hagen and Horton Smith, made eight loops around the course in two days, battling for a $2,000 purse offered by residents and local businesses. Fresh off a win at the inaugural Masters, Smith shot 20 under and won by a stroke in a playoff.

The Invitational remained the only annual professional tournament in the desert until the mid-1950s, when Thunderbird Country Club began hosting a separate one that would eventually evolve into the PGA Tour’s Bob Hope Classic. (In fact, it was during a casual round at O’Donnell that Hope agreed to host the new event.) But the O’Donnell tournament remained popular among pros and amateurs into the 1960s, drawing players like Marlene Bauer Hagge, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Al Geiberger, Betty Hicks, Gene Littler, Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward.

Professionals and celebrities rarely hang at O’Donnell anymore, but current members seem content to invest in community and intimacy over notoriety. Many have joined after noticing the course on the walk between their Rancho Las Palmas homes and downtown Palm Springs, or spying it from a hiking trail.

Only around 160 of O’Donnell’s 235 memberships belong to golfers; the rest are offered on a purely social basis. But golfers and nongolfers intermingle via activities like trivia, bingo, karaoke, line dancing, live music and car shows. During the season, 10 to 15 members can be found chatting inside the clubhouse at any given time. “Nobody eats alone,” one member told me. “There are no cliques—there aren’t enough people for it. If we happen to see someone we don’t know, we introduce ourselves.”

Jan Harper moved to the area from Seattle without knowing a single person or how to swing a club. Her realtor recommended joining O’Donnell, and she now chairs the membership committee, playing about four times a week with a group of women of similar age and ability. The club not only allows social members to try golf but encourages them to stick with it and convert to a golf membership.

After retiring from the hotel industry, John Williams relocated to Palm Springs and picked up the game, and he now serves as club president. He and his partner consider the members of O’Donnell their primary social circle. “It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, gray, Black or white,” he explained. “The management makes everyone feel welcome. It’s a sophisticated crowd. Parties are often half gay, half straight. That’s the nature of socializing in Palm Springs.” About a quarter to a third of the members belong to the LGBTQ+ community. The club also welcomed Jewish members during its early years—a time when other clubs in the area prohibited their inclusion.

During an age in which most golf trips to the Coachella Valley include stops at corporate multicourse complexes designed to accommodate grandstands, or country clubs lined with the mansions of celebrities who come to town once a year for festival season, joining a historic nine-holer with a culture of human connection borders on an act of rebellion. As Sally Mahoney, former longtime general manager of O’Donnell, told me, “The board has never wanted O’Donnell to be something it isn’t. It’s a local golf course meant to serve the community of people who live in Palm Springs.”

As Thomas O’Donnell aged, the hike between Ojo del Desierto and the golf course became increasingly difficult, so he enlisted Tanner to build him another custom home, on the edge of the seventh fairway, in 1936. From the den window or the patio, he watched people play his course and found himself hoping it would never end.

So, in 1944, O’Donnell tasked 25 friends and associates with forming a board of trustees that would “perpetuate and maintain the club.” The oilman asked them to “foster and provide social intercourse” among members and “encourage the playing of the game of golf.” Before his death, O’Donnell willed the property to the city of Palm Springs, on the condition that it would lease the land back to the club for 99 years (until 2043). Upon expiration, the city can either renew the lease or take it over for public use and rename the tract Thomas A. O’Donnell Municipal Park.

The approaching lease-expiration date inspired preservationists and members to see about landmarking the club. In 2019, landscape historian and Palm Springs Preservation Foundation (PSPF) board member Steven Keylon led a successful charge to get the Palm Springs city council to change the club’s status to a Class 1 Historic Resource.

In 2020, preservation architect Susan Secoy Jensen, joined by Keylon, took it to the California State Historic Preservation Office, arguing that the club’s structures and landscaping, golf course included, are one of the only vestiges of the city’s early years. The Desert Inn was eventually demolished, the El Mirador Hotel was repurposed as a hospital and stripped of its nine-hole course, and the original course at La Quinta perished, so preserving O’Donnell meant preserving the history of Palm Springs. Their efforts were successful. The commission approved the designations, listing all of O’Donnell’s buildings, including the clubhouse, pro shop and lookout, as well as the landscaping and golf course, on the California State (and therefore the National) Register of Historic Places.

But the preservationists remain vigilant. Harper served as club representative during the landmarking process. “This landmark designation is crucial to O’Donnell’s survival,” she says. “If the city doesn’t renew the lease, the club will be subject to change. The designation helps protect it.”

That fear of change is not unfounded. Some residents consider a private golf club, however small, located in the center of a community an inappropriate use of space and resources, and oppose the renewal of the lease.

The row of tamarisks at the edge of the property in some ways symbolizes the conflict: Those who are not in favor of the lease renewal view them as a wall of thirsty, non-native trees planted to keep out anyone who can’t afford to join the club, but members insist they were planted to shield pedestrians from wayward golf balls.

Both sides have voiced their concerns at city council meetings, but the lease doesn’t expire for another couple of decades, and local politicians seem hesitant to discuss it, lest they alienate potential voters any sooner than necessary.

A commitment to sustainability might be the only path toward the club’s continued existence. So, its management has worked with UC Riverside to plant new species of hybridized, drought-resistant grasses. As for the buildings, Jensen explains, “Rather than knock something down and rebuild something new, using precious resources in the process, we’ve repurposed existing structures. And that preserves the charm of the club and the city.”

A group of about 40 honorary members benefits from this commitment to preservation and sustainability perhaps more than the official ones: the bighorn sheep who live among the San Jacintos. The club’s ungulate neighbors mosey down the mountainside around 11 o’clock each morning to watch a little golf and do a little grazing. Shooing them away is prohibited by state law, so they’re treated like immovable obstructions until they grow bored and climb back up the slope, passing O’Donnell’s lookout on the way.

Few nonlocals know this, but inside the stone observation deck, a hollow shaft burrows 35 feet down into the earth until it reaches a small room. O’Donnell likely envisioned the crypt as his final resting place, though he never officially stated so. Interment on private property was and remains illegal in the city of Palm Springs, so he was laid to rest near the Los Angeles hospital where he died in 1945. A memorial was held on the eighth fairway of his golf course and generated quite the gallery.

Bob Hope held similar feelings about the place. The famed comedian had access to any private course in the country, if not the world, but preferred to spend the final years of his life cruising O’Donnell in his golf cart, saluting fellow members and occasionally crooning “Thanks for the Memory.”

By the time I finished my third loop, the sun had sunk behind the peaks, casting a shadow over Palm Springs, so I headed toward No. 5 to make one final attempt at conquering the rock. Crossing the first and ninth fairways, I noticed a white dot zigzagging down the mountain—the flashlight of a lone hiker. I wondered if they noticed me, a lone golfer.

Punching a tee into the hardened desert turf, I heard rubber on sandy pavement and looked back to find Lowell, a music producer I’d met between rounds, pulling up in a cart. He’d asked me to record a voice note of encouragement for his teenage daughter, who was interested in playing college golf, and was now inviting me to join the family for dinner at their home, walking distance from the club.

It was a second chance to join the community, and this time I wasn’t going to pass it up. “I’d be honored,” I said. Then I picked a palm, set up square to the outcropping, swung easy and cleared it.