Theodosia country club has new owner and new name

The former Theodosia Country Club has a new owner, Joe Edwards, and a new name: Lost Woods Golf Course.
"We're working on the logo," Edwards said Monday. "It will have a big word, ‘Lost,' and a big word, ‘Woods,' and in between, in little type, will be the words ‘in the,' because when I play golf that's where I spend most of my time, lost in the woods."
Work began last month on repairing, remodeling and updating the facility. Edwards has already replaced some of the greens equipment, he said, but the same greens keeper, Matt Shockey, is staying on.
Edwards himself will serve as general manager.
"It's going to be an open, public golf course, no more country club. But we'll have tiers of payments because people ask for that. You can pay for nine holes, 18 holes or unlimited play for a day, or unlimited play for a week or a month or whatever; the longer the term, the greater the discount," he said. "We're trying to keep fees reasonable."
The official schedule has the course closed from the end of November until the first of March, Edwards said. But unofficially it's open in good weather. As has been customary in recent years, there's a box for fees, and golfers are expected to abide by the honor system by inserting payment into the box when the clubhouse is closed. On Monday, when temperatures in Ozark County reached the low-60s, 20 people were out on the course, playing golf, Edwards said.

<strong>Remodeling under way</strong>
He's hoping enough work can be completed so the restaurant can be open for Super Bowl fans on Sunday, Feb. 5. "But for sure we'll be open March 1," he said. "That will be when the course officially opens for the season."
The restaurant will serve "standard golf-course fare," he said, "hot dogs, pizza, things like that."
Meanwhile, work is under way to update and remodel the facility.
"We want it to be more than a golf course; we want it to be a very nice place to come to," he said. "We're remodeling the clubhouse. We've already gutted it, and we're replacing the floors and putting in new carpeting; we're also putting in insulation and sheetrock. We're remodeling the kitchen, and we've already vaulted the ceiling," he said. "We're updating the men's restroom. The women's was already pretty nice, but the men's was in bad shape."
The clubhouse will be available as a rental site for weddings, family reunions and other large gatherings. "If people pay fees by the year, they'll get a break on the rental fee," he said.

<strong>Built in the 60s</strong>
The $250,000 sale of the facility was completed in December when approved by the former owners, an LLC consisting of 30 mostly local residents who in the mid-1990s had purchased a total of 200 shares in the 71-acre property, which includes the nine-hole golf course and a 6,600-square-foot clubhouse and pro shop.
Jeff Nash, president of the board of the LLC group, said the vote to approve the sale was "160 shares to zero." The owners of the 40 remaining shares declined to vote, he said.
"Some people said it was worth more than that, but with the economy the way it is, and a lot of people wanting to see the golf course stay open, it was a win-win situation for everyone, as far as I can tell," said Nash.
Ralph Brown, owner of Bryant Plastics and one of the LLC share holders, helped recall some of the club's history. The golf-course country club, with an aircraft runway through the middle of it, was part of the original Theodosia Hills housing development, which began in the mid-1960s.
Brown, who worked in sales for the development company for five years, thinks the golf course was built in 1967.
"It was owned by the Theodosia Hills Corporation, and when you bought a lot in the development, you got a year's membership in the country club. It was semi-private. It had members, but it was also open to daily play," he said.

<strong>From golf course to hay field and back</strong>
When Theodosia Hills went under in the mid-1970s, Brown said, "the golf course went under too. I think someone rented it, and they may have run cattle on it. They cut hay off the fairways. I remember for a while there was a pit on the No. 5 hole where they had mud runs for pickups. For a while someone lived in the clubhouse. It went through 15 to 20 years when it wasn't a golf course."
Al Eckilson bought the property in the early 1990s, Brown said. "He used to fly his own twin-engine plane in there. He owned it four or five years and reopened the golf course, but it never did much good."
When Eckilson expressed plans to put it up for sale as a potential horse farm, Brown said, "some of us formed the LLC and bought it in 1995."
The group of 30 investors paid $210,000 for the property, plus they agreed to grant "$50,000 worth of memberships," Brown said. "Eckilson owned some of the lots around the course. The deal was if he sold a lot, the buyer got a membership, but that deal expired, and he didn't sell any lots."
The LLC couldn't afford the liability of a runway running through the middle of the golf course, so it has been closed, Brown said. "You can still see it out there, but we put Xs on it so planes can't land."
The golf course has been a popular place for locals, summer residents and tourists over the years. "We had a lot of help from volunteers, everything from tree trimming, to building walls and pouring concrete paths," Brown said. "A lot of people spent a lot of time out there keeping the golf course going. We owe those people a big thank you for all the hours they put it."

<strong>Life after Katrina</strong>
New owner Joe Edwards said he started to play golf on the course "a few years back." He started coming here back in the mid-1970s after his parents, the late Cal and Meta Edwards, retired in Theodosia from their former home in St. Joseph, where Joe grew up.
Joe Edwards worked in California for the phone company and then ran his own technology company there. He jokes that he "started working on computers when they were still made out of wood."
He lived on a sailboat docked at Harbor Island in San Diego until he met the woman he calls his "partner-in-crime," Sharon Lee Brown. When he retired in 1993, he and Sharon bought a farm on Spring Creek, east of Isabella. They lived there until 2003, when they moved to Waveland, Miss. While they were remodeling their house on the Gulf Coast, they also bought a house on Janian Point, near the Theodosia golf course, so they would have a place to come in the summers to visit their many friends in the area.
Two days before Hurricane Katrina hit the coast in 2005, Joe and Sharon evacuated back to Theodosia. "Everything we owned there we lost," he said. "We had taken all our personal things down there, and everything was gone but the concrete slab, the driveway and a flag pole, and it was knocked down. Basically, we don't own any antiques now; they all went swimming."
For a while they tried to return to their life in Mississippi. "I made 19 trips down there in 2006 with trailers full of stuff. Friends helped us. I took a tractor down there and worked, helping our friends there. It was a big mess. We bought another house back from the beach that survived the storm, but we decided it's just too hard to live down there and we're too old. Our house in Mississippi is for sale now," he said.
Edwards, 68, and Sharon are happy to be in Ozark Countians again; they enjoy visits from the three adult children in their blended family, two in California and one in Kansas, and their five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Now Joe says he's looking forward to overseeing improvements at the golf course and running the facility's day-to-day operations.
And there's one other thing on his to-do list, he said. "I need to learn to play golf. I'm pretty poor at it."

<p>A major remodel is under way at the former Theodosia Country
Club, now Lost  Woods Golf Course. New owner Joe Edwards hopes to
have things ready to host Super Bowl events on Sunday, Feb. 5. The
full remodel is expected to be completed this spring.</p>