Love percolates in the heart. Sometimes it seeps into the voice and you can hear it in spoken words. On other occasions you feel it in a smile. Then there are those times when you see love spread atop a dining room table and you are captivated by its splendor.
Photographs, a thick scrapbook, signed documents, photographs, files of clippings from newspapers that have yet to find a home in the scrapbook. Some are faded, some have corners that are curled, but all of them touch upon different chapters in the life of the late and truly great Col. Robert Wood Magee.
“It’s a labor of love,” said Jeffrey Magee.
Now 76 and the youngest and only surviving of six children born in Newton, Mass., between 1928 and 1948 to William and Kathryn Magee, Jeffrey is on a quest that personifies his character.
It is not to lobby for a statue or to plant seeds for a book, nor does Jeffrey dream of any sort of monetary award. His motive is far more personal: “My brother Bob is my hero and sharing his extraordinary story has always been a passion of mine.”
To absorb a great chunk of Col. Robert Wood Magee’s life one need only study a solemn photograph that is prominent in Jeffrey’s scrapbook. It is of an understated white marble headstone from Arlington National Cemetery:
ROBERT WOOD
MAGEE
LTC US ARMY
KOREA
VIETNAM
APR 1 1931
NOV 11 2018
SILVER STAR
BRONZE STAR
PURPLE HEART
PRISONER OF WAR
To digest all of that is to appreciate the magnitude of what is Jeffrey Magee’s reverence and should be a nation’s gratitude. True, there are sentences which jam in more characters than the 97 featured in these 11 lines. But, so too, are there novels that won’t deliver as impactful a story as the one you can envision by reading Col. Magee’s headstone.
Korea, Vietnam, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Prisoner of War.
It isn’t so much that as a member of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, Col. Magee performed “halo” jumps (high-altitude, low-opening) and was part of Special Ops and Special Forces, or that he and his family lived in Germany and Japan and nearly a dozen different Army bases in the U.S. over a 27-year stretch.
It’s not even that at the age of 40 Col. Magee was held for three months as prisoner during the Vietnam War or that only some of the shrapnel that he absorbed during his service was ever removed.
To Jeffrey, who was 17 years younger and never truly knew his brother until he was a teenager, the magic of Col. Robert Wood Magee’s story intertwines golf throughout. “To me, he was a war hero. I knew that much,” said Jeffrey.
“But when I finally got to know him and got snippets of what he did in golf, it always struck me: How did someone get to be both a war hero and a champion golfer?”
If Jeffrey’s other brothers, William and John, weren’t as fascinated with Robert’s life, likely it’s because they weren’t golfers. Ditto sisters Melinda and Martha. Ah, but Jeffrey, who would go on to earn a golf scholarship to Ohio University . . . well, he still gets emotional when he remembers the first time he truly got a chance to see into his older brother’s world.
It was 1963 and Robert Magee, then 32, had lived a soldier’s life for 12 years already and was back for a rare visit to Newton. To his 15-year-old brother Jeffrey he asked, “Do you want to go to the golf course?” Of course he did, and 15 minutes later, much to Jeffrey’s surprise, his brother’s car turned into The Country Club.
Robert Magee, then a Captain who was stationed in Kentucky, had shot 69-70 two weeks earlier in a qualifier in Cincinnati so this was a day to play a practice round for the U.S. Open. Jeffrey was awe-struck. He was 3 years when his brother had joined the service and barely had he gotten to know him.
“My brother played a practice round with Bruce Crampton,” said Jeffrey. “I’m saying to myself, ‘I know Bruce Crampton, but I don’t know my brother.’ ”
The late Col. Robert Wood Magee was passionate about competitive golf.
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Oh, how that would change because if you were to peel back the layers to this story, the flavor is richest where you study a brother’s love for his family’s legacy and the admiration he has for an older brother. Jeffrey has pored over newspaper archives and listened to tapes of conversations with his military hero brother. He has done his best to compile a chronology to a competitive golf journey well played, with just some of the highlights:
* Stationed at Fort Bragg, Lt. Magee qualified for the PGA Tour’s Azalea Open in 1955 and finished 61st.
* He also qualified for the ’55 U.S. Open but was transferred to Germany and couldn’t play.
* While stationed in Germany, Lt. Robert Magee reached the semifinals of the 1959 British Amateur, losing to Bill Hyndman. Jack Nicklaus and Charlie Coe were heralded American entrants who didn’t make it that far. (“The Great Magoo” screamed a headline in the London Observer as British scribes were enamored with this “gregarious, insuppressible, and loquacious American.”
* In 1958, Magee went to the semifinals of national amateurs in Italy, Germany, and France. Later that year he won the Italian International Foursomes.
* He was low am in the 1956 German Open.
* Against a field that included future U.S. Open champions Orville Moody and Lou Graham, Magee won the All-Army Championship in 1961.
* He finished as State Am runner-up in both New Hampshire and Tennessee.
There is more, so much more that Jeffrey’s diligence has uncovered. For instance, a letter from Francis Ouimet to Bobby Jones, asking if his good friend William Magee (he and Ouimet had gone to grade school together) could stop in at Augusta National with his son Robert in the late 1940s, or the trip to a Masters practice round when older brother called over a competitor to meet his younger brother. Jeffrey Magee shook his hands with Chip Beck, who credited Robert Magee for giving him putting lessons.
“I’m standing there just thinking, ‘Who is this man, my brother, who I know so little about.’ ”
An avid golfer and a Ouimet Scholar, Jeffrey Magee concedes that he has been passionate about the game forever and he takes pride in knowing that like Robert, he too was a caddie for many years at Charles River CC. The game has been central to his life, but in recent years nearly all his free time has been spent with painstaking research into Col. Robert Wood Magee, who died in 2018.
“Thank you for helping to bring his story back home where it began,” he said.
Likely Jeffrey wouldn’t see it this way, but it is he who deserves the thanks. What rivals Col. Magee’s story in a most poignant way is a younger sibling’s love of family and his commitment to not letting go. More than ever, heroes need to be remembered.
