A different kind of flag
Roberta McCain greets Arnold Palmer, Kit Palmer and “The Bachelor” Andy Baldwin at Tuesday night’s Lone Sailor Awards.
The enduring image of golf great Arnold Palmer is him striding up the fairway to yet another victory as his “army” of thousands closes in behind him. But on Tuesday night, Palmer was honored for a more humble role he played before joining the PGA Tour. The image of that era, few know, is one of Palmer running around the upper Midwest taking ID photos of Coast Guard members.
Palmer received the Navy Memorial Foundation’s Lone Sailor Award, along with Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley and the late steel magnate John McConnell. Also on hand at the National Building Museum: Roberta McCain, Tom Ridge, NBC’s Ann Curry and “The Bachelor” Andy Baldwin.
We caught up with Palmer earlier, after he had lunch with the other honorees at the Navy Memorial (yes, he drank his eponymous mixture of iced tea and lemonade).
“I could get in and the time was right,” he said of his decision to join the Coast Guard. He trained at Cape May, N.J., and stayed on to train new recruits, before transferring to Cleveland, where he ended his three years of service by traveling the district making IDs.
He won the U.S. Amateur Championship soon after he left the service, so he must have had plenty of time to practice while on duty, right? “My boss was a pretty good guy,” he said with a smile. “His father was the commandant. He was high on golf.”
We also couldn’t resist asking him which way his beloved Pennsylvania, a key swing state, would go on November 4. “It’s very important,” he said coyly. “I hope they go the right way.”
We think we know what he meant. Although he’s donated to Republicans and Democrats in the past, he did cut a check to John McCain this past June for $1,000.
According to Dicks, Palmer’s got a few opinions, too. At lunch, Dicks said that Palmer expressed his desire for a year of compulsory national service for every young adult.
As for Dicks himself, he didn’t serve in the Navy, but his father did, and he’s been representing the Washington State naval bases and shipyards for 32 years. He told us why his first feelings about the Navy weren’t quite so warm. When he was a star linebacker at the University of Washington in the early 60s, he said, Navy beat them 15-14 on a last-second field goal “and cost us the national championship.”
