Gerald Witt Reports on Golf Auction

"When former members heard that the Jaycees were about to auction hundreds of items from the archives of the Wyndham Championship, they dug in their heels. They didn't want one-of-a-kind pewter goblets from past tournaments, old scorecards, programs, art prints and unique memorabilia to disappear.

But there aren't glass cases to differentiate between the nice stuff and the expendable things, so the auction is on hold until club historians can determine what can go.

"There's a lot of handcrafted GGO memorabilia out there," Randy Harris, a former Jaycees president and one of the main drivers behind gathering archives for the Jaycees and former Greater Greensboro Open.

"If you looked into the room it would look like a big pile of junk," Harris said. "There's so much stuff that there's no place for it."

Harris was one of the historians of the golf tournament who launched an outcry against the intentions from the Jaycees executive board to auction some of its goods, though duplicate and low-value items were proposed. Harris remembered a similar cleaning in the 1980s, he said, when minutes noting the tournament's 1938 inception were nearly thrown away.

And he'd rather not see that happen again with other historically significant memorabilia.

Until 2006 the group primarily ran the golf tournament, and offices for the current tournament are still there.

Harris and another past Jaycees president have gathered so much memorabilia that it's hard to tell what's on loan, what's valuable and what isn't.

"They recently opened a resource room and what I noticed was, stuff that they pulled out of the archives, I'm looking at one-of-a-kind items that I know came from archives," Harris said."

This excerpt was taken from the following link.http://www.news-record.com/content/2010/04/21/article/golf_auction_on_hold_after_resistance
Golf auction on hold after resistance
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
By Gerald Witt
Staff Writer