Old Man and the Tee Are Separated: He Was Selling Too Many Used Golf Balls

Behind the gleaming irons and beside the cotton cardigans in the pro shop at the Wilson and Harding golf courses in Griffith Park stands a basket of used golf balls. They’re selling just fine now.

But they weren’t, shop workers say, until Alfred Kelly left the park.

For more than 15 years, Kelly, a grizzled, 72-year-old homeless man, sat on a weathered girl’s bike at his regular spot--between the fourth green and fifth tee of the Wilson course--and sold used balls for 50 cents, half the shop’s price.

Kelly was an institution around the park. Maintenance workers often stopped to chat with him, and rangers report that he was always along the bridle path, where stray balls would sometimes come to rest. He would be wearing an old red sweater and a pair of tattered pants while he hawked the balls he found near the golf course to customers who had known him for years.

Price Was Right

“The price was always right, so I’d pick up a few beauties and shoot the breeze with him a bit,” said Harley Outten, who has played at the municipal course for 40 years.

No one knows precisely where Kelly is now, but it’s no secret what prompted his departure from the park.

After years of ignoring his unauthorized vending--which Kelly three years ago told a Times reporter netted him about $4 a day--park rangers in January asked him to leave.

The problem? Kelly, it appears, was too enterprising for his own good. In recent months his selection of balls had expanded from about a dozen in a basket on the front of his bike to hundreds--some say 1,000 or more--on a wooden stand he set up, much like Charlie Brown’s lemonade counter.

Fewer in the Water

At the same time, something started to worry golf pro Tom Barber, owner of the clubhouse shop, whose contract with the city gives him rights to balls lost in the water hazards on the two adjoining golf courses: The diver he hires to retrieve the balls was bringing back fewer of them.

Park officials theorize that Kelly’s stand had become a kind of used golf ball retail outlet, as he recruited homeless young men to dive for the balls in the water hazards.

“It was just a little bit much,” said Barber, who charges $1 to $1.50 each for the used balls in his shop. “Just a little bit too much.”

Last fall, Barber told city Department of Recreation and Parks officials that Kelly was becoming a thorn in his side.

“I’ve known of his presence on the golf course, but I just overlooked it,” Barber said. “Here’s a poor old guy who had a dozen or so balls out there. All of a sudden he has this huge inventory--some very high quality balls. I’m missing balls. It was quite a coincidence.”

In a convoluted way, city officials said, Kelly’s growing business was also costing the city money. Under Barber’s contract, he pays the city 10 cents for every ball his diver retrieves--an average, he said, of 4,000 balls a month. At that rate, the arrangement nets the city almost $5,000 a year.

A park ranger who has known Kelly for years got the assignment of asking him to leave, parks supervisor Richard Ginevan said. Even as he did so, the ranger bought Kelly’s remaining balls with his own money.

“It’s one of those duties that I’m sure the park rangers didn’t want to do,” Ginevan said. “He was a fixture, but the fixture was getting bigger and bigger at the city’s expense.”

Dorothy Cramer, 72, was one of the first to notice Kelly’s absence. She and her husband Louis, 79, have been driving through the park every morning for four years. “It’s sort of a warm little thing we do, and Albert Kelly was a part of our life,” she said. “Poor old man. He didn’t look too bright. Who’s helping him now?”

Park workers say they have heard rumors that Kelly lives in a homemade shelter somewhere in Elysian Park. A maintenance worker at the park said he saw Kelly the other day, one pant leg rolled up as always, riding his bike down Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. Before the ranger could stop him to talk, Kelly rode off. He was headed away from Griffith Park.