The CSGA Links Volume 3 Issue 6 September 2015 | Page 15

The Orange Hills property, at 389 Racebrook
Road in Orange, was first used as a golf course in
1927. It was then called Rolling Ridge Country
Club.

In 1930, the club was sold and it became
Orange Hills Country Club. According to the club’s
website, one of the three men with “financial
interest in the ownership” was Walter H. Smith,
Bud’s father.

“My dad was a golfer,” Smith said. “He gave
some money to help them keep it going, to carry
it through the winter. He also owned a dairy in
New Haven, C.E. Smith & Son.”

Smith said he “grew up affluent” in Westville
but things changed abruptly when he was a junior
in high school and his dad encountered financial
problems.

“I went to work instead of college,” Smith
said. “That was character-building.”

Some more “character-building” came after
World War II broke out and Smith went into the
U.S. Army in early 1943. He was in an infantry
unit at the Battle of the Bulge and was captured.
For five long months he was a prisoner of war.

Smith doesn’t like to talk about his war
experience, so we agreed not to go into the
details.

When the war ended and he came back
home, he earned a degree in engineering at
UConn. He graduated in February 1949.

“By some freaky circumstance, my dad had
access to the golf course again,” Smith said. “That
was in the fall of 1948. When I graduated, he
wanted me to run the golf course.”

The club had a heavy debt at the time but
Smith said that year-by-year, “We squirreled away
the money. It took us seven years to work off that
debt. In 1955, my dad became the sole owner.”

But the late 1940s were not gravy years
for golf course operators. “When I started, you
needed binoculars to find a golfer.” He said in
1949, the club charged just $35 for a full year’s
worth of golf. (However, Orange Hills has always
been a public course; Judy Smith noted “you just
www.csgalinks.org

show up and pay as you go.”)

After the lean years during World War II
and immediately afterward, Smith and his father
began to notice a welcome change. “From 1949
to 1955, I saw the growth of golf,” Sm