Come Out And Enjoy The Links And Support A Great Cause

Marlinton, WV – Most avid golfers don’t need a reason to hit the links on a spring afternoon- but here’s a good one anyway. The first annual Pearl S. Buck Foundation Restoration golf fundraiser kicks this Sunday, May 1st, at the Pocahontas County Country Club. Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Executive Director Tim Vanreenan explains the reason for the tournament.

“The Pearl Buck Birthplace is going to be having a golf tournament with the main purpose to raise some restoration funds for our museum” says Vanreenan. “Right now, restoration is kind of an ongoing process to keep things from all deteriorating at one time. Currently we need about $100,000.00 worth of work to the house to ensure it will be open to the public for the next couple of decades to come.”

“So we are having a golf tournament; $30.00 a person to play in the tournament. Registration starts at 12:15 and the tournament kicks off a little after 1[pm].”

He says this is the first fundraiser of this type for the Buck Foundation.

“Fundraisers in the past have been really handled here more in house, and we’ve had good results with those, but trying to kind of open our fundraising efforts up to a larger group of people” he says. “And of course, golf is a great pastime for many Americans. Also, beautiful weather like we’ve been having for the last couple of weeks, everybody’s itchin’ to get outside after a long winter, so we really hope the golf tournament will be a way to do that. The Country Club right now is the only golf course open in the county, so that’s a much added benefit for us as well.”

Vanreenan describes some of the work needed at the Buck birthplace.

“Right now the windows all need to be re-glazed, re-caulked and put back in just to insure we don’t have any water infiltration that way” he says. “We need to do a painting job which seems very simple to do, but since we are an historic landmark and fall under those parameters, of course the house has to be dealt with differently and that creates a larger investment as far as painting goes.”

In addition to preserving Pearl S. Buck childhood home, there’s another reason for the restoration activities – bringing the Buck manuscripts, including the original manuscript for her Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Good Earth, back to Hillsboro.

“Last fall we did have an appraisal of our manuscript collection done that is currently housed at West Virginia Weslayan” says Vanreenan. “Our appraiser Willis Van Devanter, is world renown for many of the works he’s done, and he gave us a figure of $1,150,000.00 of the entire collection which includes The Good Earth. We are now assimilating plans to get The Good Earth back here with the rest of our manuscript collections, and to actually build a place on the property to house the entire manuscript collections, so individuals can come and research those as well as just look at them for tourist information.”

The first annual Pearl S. Buck Foundation Golf Tournament is Sunday, May 1st. Cost is $30.00 per person and registration begins at 12:15pm. You’re invited to come out and enjoy an afternoon on the links while supporting a great local cause.