Sixty-six years ago, Mo Burke began building the 36-hole miniature golf course by himself when he was just 15 years old. As Cape Cod has exploded in growth, the land on which the course is located is now worth over $1 million, but Mo and his wife Sylvia refuse to sell.
Sandwich (Mass.) Mini Golf, which was built 66 years ago and is run by Maurice “Mo” Burke and his wife Sylvia, is located on land that is now worth over $1 million, but the couple, beyond the age of traditional retirement, refuses to sell, WBUR-FM, Boston’s NPR station reported.
Sandwich Mini Golf is wedged between Rt. 6A and a salt marsh. A bubbling brook flows under the course’s many bridges, around a simulated giant lily pad and past a white whale and a tiny lighthouse. The land on which the course is built has been in Mo’s family for about a century, WBUR reported.
“My grandfather had a kind of little farm on the edge of the marsh, and it had a cranberry bog,” Mo said. “In 1930, the state decided to put a super highway through. And it split up the cranberry bog. So it was just a few cranberries left. Enough cranberries to eat, but the swamp had no real value at the time.”
As a kid, the only thing Mo spent money on was mini golf. So he came up with a plan. In 1950, at the age of 15, he began work on a course, single-handedly, WBUR reported.
“It was swamp reclamation, so it took a few years just to fill in the swamp,” Mo said. “My dad had an old truck, so I could get five loads of sand in an hour if I shoveled really fast. My first goal was to get nine holes.”
Cape Cod tourism grew steadily in the 1950s and ’60s, so Mo had every reason to believe his course could be a money-maker from the outset, even in sleepy, traditional Sandwich, a town that has always maintained tight control on development. Mo knew his mini golf would have to win the approval of tourists and town fathers, so he focused on the land’s natural features, WBUR reported.
“I was just kinda working along the stream and then another hole that came quickly after was Treasure Island, when I diverted the stream and we had to dig all these tons of mud and dirt and sand out to make an island,” Mo said. “A lot of people thought I was crazy. ‘That’ll never work!’ Luckily, when my wife married me, she didn’t put her foot down and say, ‘What are you doing?'”
Though Sylvia didn’t want to be part of the interview, when Mo started talking about their lives and their golf course, she couldn’t help herself, WBUR reported.
“I believed in him, even when the mini golf only had nine holes,” Sylvia said. “We had a sign: ’18 Holes.’ And people would say, ‘Where are the other nine?’ I said ‘Well, you play these twice.’ And that’s the way we started.”
“We’ve been married for 59 years this summer,” Mo says. “She’s gone through the good times and the bad. When I opened, there weren’t a lot of customers. If I took in $10, that was a lot, because we only charged 50 cents. I just had faith that if I built it, someone would come.”
They didn’t come to the Burke’s putting greens of dreams. Not right away. But Mo and Sylvia had another kind of faith. So, while they waited for their business to take off, they took missionary jobs in South America. By the mid-70s, Cape Cod’s tourism industry had exploded. There were more attractions everywhere, including bigger, glitzier mini-golf courses. But Cape Cod is a summer destination, and the Burkes felt there was more missionary work to do overseas. They went to Taiwan for 12 years, WBUR reported.
“We would just come home in the summer,” Mo said. “But usually every summer, I would add a hole. So by the end of our stay in Taiwan, which was ’96, I think we had it well underway towards 36 holes.”
After more than three decades, the Burkes retired from teaching. They remain in the mini-golf business. As parts of Cape Cod have gone the way of mega-malls, shopping outlets and gated condo villages, their throwback mini golf has endured, quaintly and defiantly. Mo is now in his 80s. He and Sylvia could sell the course, pocket the million dollars and just relax. But they won’t sell. After 66 years of working on the course, Mo just doesn’t seem to know how to stop, WBUR reported.
“Even in the winter, he’s repainting,” Sylvia said. “In the evening hours, he’ll be busy carving signs. Every sign that’s on the mini golf is all hand-carved by him.”
Some of those brown and white signs depict little smiling whales that indicate hole number. Some contain rules, directions to the next hole or snippets of Psalms. There must be 200 of them. Mo said he plans to give the business to his son, David, but for now, there are customers on the course, WBUR reported.
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