ABOUT US
Ed with his father in 2011 at Oklahoma City Golf & Country Club at the
conclusion of his Maxwell tour that was the impetus for this project
The PERRY MAXWELL ARCHIVE is, and I hope always will be, the collaborative effort of many individuals devoted to golf architecture and historical research.
That being said, I believe it is important that viewers know who is behind the curtain. That would be me, Ed Oden, and this website is the culmination of a long journey that I never expected to take. I am a transactional attorney by day and golf junkie by night. Golf captured my imagination at an early age and never let go. Ever since I've been fascinated by golf courses, what makes them tick, and the designers who brought them to life. That fascination ultimately led me to tour Oklahoma and Kansas in 2011 to see as many Perry Maxwell courses as I could. I documented my experience on that pilgrimage in this thread on GolfClubAtlas.com.
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Not long thereafter I came up with the half-baked idea that I would start a Perry Maxwell Society. My plan consisted of nothing more than teeing up a rudimentary website and then letting more competent people take over. How hard could that be? I thought I needed some historical information on the website, so I reached out to Chris Clouser, whose 2006 biography, "The Midwest Associate," was the leading resource on Maxwell. Chris could not have been more generous with both his time and his sources. So much so that I started doing a little digging of my own. To my surprise, I realized that I didn't care that much about creating a Maxwell Society - mostly due to my inability to grasp the basics of Dreamweaver. Rather, what I really enjoyed was the research; a passion that grew commensurate to the elusiveness of a website to share the results.
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In the many years since, the journey has witnessed the tribulations of separation and divorce, the realization that the burdens of single parenthood are powerless in comparison to its rewards, the gift of love from a woman who stirs my soul, the unexpected death of a brother followed shortly by the loss of my father, the greatest man I have ever known. All of those life events have coalesced into what you see here. Thankfully, the passage of time coincided with a sea change of technological advances which dumbed down website development to the childproof level needed for me to get this site off the ground.
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So that is the condensed story of how the PERRY MAXWELL ARCHIVE came into being. The more detailed version involves many other people. The following individuals have contributed to the content of the PERRY MAXWELL ARCHIVE:
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Joe Bausch
Mark Bourgeois
Chris Buie
Chris Clouser
Neil Crafter
Craig Edgmand
James Finegan
Brian Finn
Jim Kennedy
Ran Morrissett
Tommy Naccarato
Sven Nilsen
Jeanne Oden
Tom Paul
Pete Trenham
Sean Tully
Jim Urbina
Dunlop White III
Phil Young
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This website and the information about Perry Maxwell available on its pages would not exist without them. My deepest thanks for their support. If I have left anyone out, the omission is unintentional. Just let me know and I will correct any oversight. My fervent hope is that this list grows and grows as more and more content is added.
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All the best,
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Ed
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