Josh Clark

But he's very frequently overlooked.

And his name is Thomas McCulloch Fairburn, McCulloch Fairburn.

Yeah.

And he invented a really cheap and easy technique for creating artificial putting greens that could be used for miniature golf courses.

Yeah.

It was crushed cottonseed hulls, oil.

You would dye it green, and they would come in these big rolls, and you just roll it over this foundation of sand.

Yeah.

Boom, you've got an easy way basically to sort of franchise these things with these prefab kits that they had.

And people loved it because it was, you know, when it was, they called it midget golf for a little while.

Not a term we would use today, but that's what they called it in the 1920s.

And this factors in to a lot of the stuff we've been talking about in the 1920s lately, just these weird fads that would pop up.

And Tom Thumb Golf was one of them.

It was.

And part of the reason that it got out from Lookout Mountain is because the Carters and Fairburn kind of joined forces and used his technique for making these greens very cheaply and used their kind of like touch of whimsy, packaged it together and started selling it, prepackaged sets or prefabricated sets.

that could be franchised out to anybody who wanted to start their own Tom Thumb golf course.

And so they spread really, really quickly.

And like you were saying, like the 20s, they were just looking for whatever craze could come along.

Crossword puzzles, dance marathons, flagpole sitting.

Well, apparently miniature golf was the king of them all as far as the 20s crazes went.