Harry Joseph Curl

Harry Joseph Curl
1929-2018

Harry Joseph Curl departed Earth on Feb. 3, 2018, just in time to make his dream foursome in heaven, where he teed off from the tips at Paradise Golf & Country Club with Arnie Palmer, Ben Hogan and his greatest hero throughout his long life, his big brother John.

Curl, who went by Joe (and often joked that his father — whose lineage stretched back to the days of the MacCurleys — didn’t see anything wrong with “Harry Curl”), was 89.

Joe had a life full of accomplishments — an ever upward career arch, a loving wife for 59 years, three wonderful children and six grandchildren — but more than anything, he loved golf. He began playing at age 10 with his brother John and fell in love with the game. Over his long life, he’d have six holes-in-one and shoot in the mid-60s a dozen times. Sure, he was a major player in the integration of Georgetown University Hospital during the 1970s after race riots ripped across the country, but it was always golf.

With a one-piece swing as smooth as butter, he carried a single-digit handicap for most of his life — shooting his age well into his 80s. In his 20s, he even tried to break onto the PGA Tour, when he held a +2 handicap. He played all around the world — Scotland, England, France, Italy and Germany. And Joe golfed his way across the U.S., too, playing the likes of Pebble Beach, Riviera, Oakmont, the Golden Horseshoe, Greenbriar, and his most favorite, Pine Valley.

Joe had a system with putters. He kept dozens lined up against the wall of his garage. When the putter in his bag decided to stop working, he’d replace it. “Here,” he’d say as he placed the wayward putter against the garage wall, “Let’s see how you like it out here.” Then he’d shuffle through his old tried-and-true putters, pick a replacement and say — “OK, you’ve been out here long enough, you can come out to play again,” as he put the revived putter in his bag.

That was Joe in a nutshell — a dry and wicked sense of humor, but always with a tinge of pure optimism. For him, the glass was never half full (and his glass was also rarely half full!). He was stylish, too, on the golf course (although he was a victim of the Sansabelt Atrocity in the 1970s). He’d often buy the very latest technology in the game, always with the hope that it’d bring those extra few yards.

Longboat Key golfers might know Joe from the LBK Club Harbourside, where he started The FRIARS Club in 1996 (which stands for FRIday Afternoon Recreational Society). The FRIARS started with 25 players, and Joe wanted to make sure the game was on the up and up. In a letter to potential players, he wrote: “Players using an incorrect handicap will have their property confiscated and sold to atone for their sins and to recompense other players for their losses.” 

“Upon completion of play,” he wrote, “there will be a brief gathering of players on the Harbourside porch to allow the losers to comment on the fundamental unfairness of the game of golf.” Each year, Joe served as master of ceremony for the year-end awards, regaling his golfing buddies with spot-on impersonations of their golfing tics and mannerisms. 

Joe and his wife, Janice, were also big dancers, going out nearly every weekend to cut the rug. And they were huge fans of the big bands of the era, especially Count Basie and his Orchestra. One night in the 1950s, they attended a show at a black church in Peoria, Illinois. They were the only white people in the audience. At an intermission, Count Basie himself, along with singer Joe Williams, joined them at their table. Basie had recognized Joe — in his distinctive black horn-rimmed glasses — from a show a few years before in a small Dallas club. Joe says they shared a drink and some laughs — and Joe and Jan drew lots of stares from other concertgoers the rest of the night.

Joe was born in Hinckley, Minnesota, on Jan. 6, 1929. The worldwide Depression would begin just 10 months later. But his father, Charles, was lucky to work for the federal government as a meat inspector who also inoculated cattle against disease, and his mother was a nurse, two professions not extinguished by the Depression. The Curl family — Joe had four siblings, Edith, John, Charlotte and Charles, who died young of rheumatic fever — moved around the Midwest, living in Columbus, Nebraska, and Peoria, Illinois, before settling in Rushville, Illinois. There, Joe was a star athlete throughout his high school days: Quarterback of the football team, co-captain of the basketball team, and he ran track (hurdles) to boot. “A natural athlete,” said his yearbook. Oh, and he was named “Best Boy Dancer.”

Joe graduated high school in 1946 (he’d luckily miss World War II — but not the Korean War) and headed off to St. Louis University, where he graduated in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in science. But before he could get started on his career, he joined the Navy to serve America. He served from 1950 to 1952, and he and his crew mates aboard the USS Donner (LSD-20) pulled some pretty brutal duty: They helped in the early preparation to set up the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line in the far northern Arctic region of Canada.

The shortest route for a Russian air attack on North America is through the Arctic, across the North Pole. The DEW Line was built at the beginning of the Cold War to give early warning of a Soviet nuclear strike, so the line reduced the chances that a preemptive strike could destroy U.S. strategic nuclear forces. 

He got to see the wonderful tourist destination of Greenland and he secured the unofficial — and rarely awarded — “Blue Nose” Navy certificate, which showed he crossed into the Arctic Circle. But his crew also pulled some cake duty, sailing down to the Caribbean to protect America from delicious rum.

When he returned stateside, Joe met a little lady, Janice Charlene Sawall. The two married in 1957, and would be married until Jan’s death in 2016 — some 59 years. Joe started off in business as a traveling salesman for the American Hospital Supply Company. And they had three children in two-and-a-half years: Michelle in 1958, and twins Joseph and Christopher in 1960.

They’d move around a lot in the next decade: Dallas, then a slew of places in Illinois, including Wheaton, Park Forest and Hinsdale. Joe wanted more, so he returned to school, this time at the esteemed University of Chicago School of Business, and earned a master’s degree in Health Administration in 1967. That would set the course for the rest of his career.

Joe first worked for Loyola University Hospital as associate hospital administrator until 1970, when he became administrator of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. There, he helped integrate the 2,000-strong staff. He left in 1977 and joined up for several years to run the Sisters of Mercy Generalate chain of hospitals. Then he and Jan moved back to the Midwest, where Joe became executive vice president of the American Hospital Association. Throughout, Joe held faculty appointments at three universities and served on numerous boards and committees for local, state, national and international health organizations.

After retiring, he joined Korn Ferry, where he conducted executive searches, and he and Jan moved full time to Longboat Key, where they had owned a summer home since 1983. They bought a house on Bayou Road in Bay Isles and joined the LBK Club, where they were members for 30 years.

He stayed busy, too, serving in several official capacities for the community, teaching reading to Russian immigrants in Sarasota through playing chess. Plus, he made handcrafted stained-glass lamps and mirrors, as well as devouring biographies of men such as Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and Churchill.

Joe and Jan had three children, Michelle, Christopher and Joseph, and six grandchildren, Travis and Jessica Czopek, Christopher Mitchell and Laura Elizabeth Curl, and Conor and Kelsey Curl.

A celebration of Joe’s life will be held on Saturday, March 17, 2018, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the John Ringling Room at the Longboat Key Club, 220 Sands Point Road on Longboat Key. If you knew Joe, please drop by. 

In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to the National Kidney Foundation. 

SERVICE:
Saturday, March 17, 4PM - 6PM
Celebration of Life
John Ringling Room, Longboat Key Club
220 Sands Point Road
Longboat Key, FL 34228

DONATIONS:
In lieu of flowers please consider donating to the National Kidney Foundation.