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practice, began playing with friends on the public courses in the Wethersfield area. By the time the kids were born, he and Natalie were both playing a lot of golf and they were looking for a place where the kids could spend time in the summer. So they decided to join Wethersfield Country Club.
    Wethersfield wasn’t a rich man’s club by any means, but it was a comfortable place with a very good golf course, one good enough to host a PGA Tour event. The Insurance City Open had been launched in 1952 at Wethersfield and, under different names it would stay at Wethersfield until 1983. When the Edwards family joined the club in the mid-1960s, it had become the Greater Hartford Open. Soon after the family joined the club, Bruce began to caddy there during the summer. He played golf too, but right from the start it was caddying that he enjoyed the most.
    “Part of it was the money,” he said. “When I first started, you could carry double at four dollars a bag. Throw in a dollar tip for each bag and you made ten dollars a round. Some days, if there were enough people there, I’d go thirty-six. That added up to pretty good money for a thirteen-year-old kid. Plus I met a lot of guys that I really liked, other caddies. Most of them weren’t the kids of club members, and I felt very comfortable around them right from the start. Maybe if I’d been bitten by the playing bug it would have been different, but I never was.”
    Jay Edwards thinks both his sons—Brian followed Bruce into the caddy program—might have been more interested in playing if Wethersfield’s pro had encouraged juniors more. But he didn’t, and both Edwards boys ended up spending most of their summers as caddies.
    “What really made it fun, though, was knowing that there was that huge bonus waiting for you at the end of the summer if you did a good job,” Bruce said. “That was what we all really pointed for, because it was such a cool thing.”
    “That bonus” was the Greater Hartford Open. In the 1960s, there were only a handful of full-time tour caddies. Most clubs that hosted tour events didn’t allow them to work anyway, especially the summer tournaments, where one of the allures of the caddy program was the chance to work in a tour event. The GHO was always held in those days on Labor Day weekend. That’s what made it the end-of-the-summer bonus for the Edwards brothers and the other Wethersfield caddies.
    Bruce’s first GHO was in 1967, a few months prior to his thirteenth birthday. He was assigned the bag of Dick Lotz, a solid pro who would go on to win three times on tour. “I was only in my third year on the tour, and I couldn’t afford a full-time caddy,” Lotz remembered. “So at most of the clubs I would go to the caddymaster and ask for a local caddy, preferably someone who played golf. At Hartford, the caddymaster told me he would find me someone and I went out to practice. When I came back, he said, ‘I’ve got someone for you,’ and brought this very slight youngster out to me. I looked at him and said, ‘Young man, I don’t think you’re any bigger than my bag.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, sir, I can do the job.’ I told him we’d try it in the practice round the next day and see how he did. Well, a few holes in I knew I had someone special.”
    What Lotz remembers most is Bruce’s passion for the job. “He knew exactly what he was doing and what was expected of a caddy,” he said. “Clearly he loved doing it. And he was such a nice kid. I met his family during the week and we really struck up a friendship. They were good people.”
    Lotz played well during the week, finishing in a tie for twelfth place. That earned him a check of $1,200. From that he generously paid his caddy 5 percent—the going rate at the time was 3 percent. Bruce took the $60 check, had it framed, and put it on the wall in his room.
    From that weekend forward, there was no doubt in his mind about what he wanted to do when he