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Henry Chandler Egan most likely left Chicago to get away from his father, who thought golf was “unseemly.” He had been pressing “Chan” into a distasteful struggle to become a successful man of business. “My father was torn between duty and pleasure,” remembered Chan’s daughter, Eleanor.
Chan was one of the nation’s most talented golfers , Amateur National Champion in 1904 and 1905, and silver medal winner in the 1904 Olympics.
He had loved golf from the first time he learned to swing a club in the cow pastures of Illinois.
He had married a well-connected Chicago girl, whose father was a brother of Andrew McNally, co-founder of the Rand McNally map company.
A month after their daughter was born in April 1911, Chan arrived in Medford and purchased an orchard off Foothill Road.
There he personally designed a pine bungalow on the property.
With his new home built, Chan returned to his wife and daughter in Chicago and announced he was moving permanently to the Rogue Valley and giving up golf for good.
The move was permanent; however, golf was too important in Chan’s life.
In Medford, he found former Harvard classmates Alfred and Leonard Carpenter, who were in the process of building the town’s first golf course.
They asked for Chan’s advice, and he was hooked on golf all over again.
A few years later, when that first course failed, Chan went to work to design another and better course on Spring Street.
It marked the beginning of a new career as a golf course architect.
Over the years he would design over 30 courses nationwide, help to modify and improve the famous Pebble Beach course in California, and still find time to design and build Medford’s Rogue Valley Country Club.
Between construction projects, he continued to play competitive golf and managed to win a number of amateur tournaments.
When he went up against the pros in tournaments from The Masters to Pebble Beach, his skill embarrassed quite a few.
He played so competitively into his 40s that many called him “the grand old man of golf.” Some would laugh at his golf clubs, saying they were “old enough to vote.” These were the same clubs he had carried since he was a teenager and, indeed, they were older than most of his caddies.
In late March 1936, while walking a course he was designing in Everett, Washington, Chan, 52, collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where he died April 5 from a severe case of pneumonia.
A year later, in August 1937, a memorial celebration was held at the Rogue Valley Country Club.
Golfing greats, including the immortal Bobby Jones, his personal friend, were on hand to dedicate a water fountain to Chan’s memory.
Designed by the same architectural firm that had recently designed the new state capitol building in Salem, and fashioned from Southern Oregon granite, the fountain reflected the simplicity of the man with a only a bronze likeness of the beloved sportsman mounted to its base. “It’s a shock to know that so grand a fellow and so fine a golfer is gone,” Bobbie Jones said during the memorial service. “We will all miss him terribly.” San Francisco Chronicle sports editor Harry Smith said Chan “was always a gentleman with character.
He played golf for the love of the sport.
In that he was a good loser when things went against him and the best sort of a sportsman when he won.
He is one of the finest gentlemen I have ever known.” Chan’s ashes were scattered near the Medford home he loved.
Writer Bill Miller is the author of five books, including “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories.