Gerald Fehr

Gerald F. “Jerry” Fehr
1955 team captain

In 1944, at age eleven, Jerry Fehr was caddying and playing at the Olympic View Golf Club in Seattle. Five years later he won the high school city championship. He then won the state junior championship in 1949 and 1950. He had planned to attend Stanford University, but the local alumni group recruiting for Yale won him over, and he came here on an academic scholarship.

Jerry Fehr (Class of 1955) found the Yale golf course a “great challenge.” He arrived with a “scratch” handicap, but could do no better than shoot 75 in his freshman year. He learned to play a high fade (instead of a low draw), and by his senior year, shot 66. In four years the team had three different coaches: Joe Sullivan when he was a freshman and sophomore, “Widdy” Neale when he was a junior, and Al Wilson when he was a senior. The varsity team won the Eastern Intercollegiate Championship in 1953, 1954 and 1955. He was the individual champion in two of those years. Perhaps his greatest feat was beating Harvard’s number one player, Ted Cooney, in five of five matches over four years. In the last match played at Yale, the medal scores were Cooney 68 and Fehr 66.

After graduation Fehr returned to Seattle and worked in the insurance business. But he didn’t forget the team and its success in the eiga Championship tournament, as attested by the 1958 telegram (below).

He is now a member of the Sand Point Country Club in Seattle, where he has been club champion 19 times. He won the Washington State Open in 1961 and the state senior amateur in 1990. He has played in the usga amateur, senior amateur and senior open. In 1984 he caddied for his son Rick in the US Open at Winged Foot, where Rick was the low amateur, as he had been in the Masters Tournament earlier that year.

Jerry Fehr has been involved in the Washington Junior Golf Association (wjga) since 1982. In 1993 he became the executive director. Presently there are more than 1,000 junior golfers in the program. Those who have come to play for Yale from the program are: Ellen Brophy, Lauren Ressler, Stephanie Wei, Andia Winslow, Ashley Patterson, Greg Hull, and Ken Rizvi.

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