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Spooner resident has long worked to preserve the history of golf.
By Jerry Poling
 To get to Frank Zadra’s house outside of Spooner, a visitor first must pass a piece of Wisconsin golf history: Spooner GC, the original nine of which was designed by Tom Vardon, brother of the celebrated English golfer Harry Vardon.
It’s fitting that Zadra lives not only so close
to a golf course – one that he plays regularly
– but to a course that is connected to the
history of the game. Outside of playing golf, which he still does quite well in retirement
with a single-digit handicap, Zadra loves few things more than the history of golf.
His passion for the game’s past is easy to
see once inside his home, which is about a quarter-mile from the first tee at Spooner
GC. Zadra and his wife Bobbi have a golf-
themed den that seems a small version of
the United States Golf Association’s Golf House museum.
The den walls are lined with racks of some
of the game’s rarest and most unusual clubs,
some of them predating even the Vardons, shelves of classic books, a case of old troph-
ies and a handsome wood box with early versions of the golf ball.
Where did all the tangible pieces of golf his-
tory come from? Why are they in Spooner,
a small northwestern Wisconsin city known for its rail-road history and Spooner Lake?
It’s all because Zadra was bitten, mildly at first, by the golf bug in the mid-1940s in Ironwood, Mich. Zadra caddied at Gogebic CC there. One day, when he was 7, the pro asked him to find some shag balls. He found 20. Zadra’s payment was his first golf club, one with a hickory shaft. With that club, already outdated with the rising popularity of steel shafts, Zadra began to play golf.
“It was something to do,” he said.
When he attended college in Superior from 1955 to ’59, Zadra was good enough play on the golf team. By the 1960s, he had fallen in love with the history of the game’s implements.
For the next 30 or so years, he bought every old club he could find, about 9,000 of them. “I had no idea what I was buying. The cheapest ones I found I bought,” he said.
He joined the Golf Collectors Society in 1976 and studied up on what he was collecting, eventually getting rid of most of his common clubs and hanging on to the best of the lot – long-nosed woods from 1830, now outlawed deep-groove irons from the 1920s, one-piece wood clubs made in the U.S., rut irons from Scotland, a rack of classic and strange putters.
Zadra branched into other golf collectibles, such as rare books, balls, tees and art. He became one of the country’s pre-eminent golf collectors and experts.
He was president of the GCS from 2002 to ’04. He remains an active member and plays in the group’s annual hickory-shaft tournament.
Zadra was a teacher in the Prescott and Spooner school districts and principal of Brillion High School before returning to Spooner as the district’s business manager for 30 years.
In 1996, about the time he retired, he was invited to join the USGA’s Library and Museum Committee, a volunteer commitment he has honored ever since.
“I’m very proud of the fact I could contribute something. It’s a way to give back,” Zadra said of his USGA involvement.
He is excited about a major renovation and the Arnold Palmer addition underway at Golf House, the USGA’s headquarters in Far Hills, N.J. Golf House is currently closed for renovations.
“It’s the largest golf library in the world,” said Zadra, who for a time wrote a column on collecting for Wisconsin Golfer magazine.
Zadra’s love for playing hasn’t abated either. He tees it up – and breaks 80 – regularly at Spooner GC. He enjoys other regional courses that he and other members travel to on Tuesdays in the summer when it’s ladies’ day in Spooner.
He has played in Chippewa Valley Golf Association and WSGA senior events, and he still tinkers with clubs in a workshop lined with many more old clubs and an office that has his first-ever club.
“It’s the only club I won’t sell,” said Zadra, pointing to the common wood-shafted club, lovingly mounted on a wall, that helped ignite his passion for golf more than 60 years ago.
Minocqua CC member knows golf and has a nose for business.
By Rick Pledl
 Bill Hopper has had a variety of successful business interests over the last 45 years or so, but through it all he has maintained a rabid interest in golf.
Hopper, 68, is retired, but he still owns a 50-percent interest in a string of auto dealerships in Illinois. Hopper calls himself a silent partner in that venture. However, he was anything but silent in the Hopper family’s original business, Hopper Papers, a specialty papers company headquartered in Taylorville, Ill. The company was founded by Hopper’s grandfather, and his father also became company president at just 24 years old.
Hopper called the company, which had mills in Taylorville, where Hopper grew up, and in Pennsylvania, “a tremendous family business,” but the family sold out to paper industry giant Georgia Pacific in the early 1960s. Hopper worked for GP in the Hopper Papers Division for a few years, then looked for another opportunity.
“I just didn’t like working for a big company, and I
had an opportunity to buy a controlling interest in a small bank in Taylorville. It was about a $33 million footing and we grew it to $150 million.”
The bank then merged with another banking firm in Springfield, Ill. When that combined company grew to $2 billion in assets, it merged once again with another bank, and that’s when Hopper sold out. He’s been retired for about the last 12 years.
Hopper lives four months of every year in northern Wisconsin, four months in Scottsdale, Ariz., and four months in his native Taylorville, Ill. For obvious reasons, the residence in Vilas County, just north of Minocqua, is the preferred locale in summertime, and Hopper tees it up often at Minocqua CC, where he is a member with an 11.9 handicap index.
He’s also a member at The Estancia Club, a prestigious private golf club in Scottsdale.
Hopper was intimately involved with the project a few years ago which transformed Minocqua CC from a old-fashioned nine-holer into a championship golf course. He was instrumental in getting architect Ron Garl involved with the project, and all parties concerned seem happy with Garl’s work, which officially opened in summer 2001.
Golf was a family game for Hopper growing up in Illinois. His mother was a talented player, and his grandfather on the other side was a top amateur competitor in Michigan. But Hopper’s own game has always been held back by a damaged left shoulder, the result of a bout with polio when he was 7 years old. Hopper played with a paralyzed left arm for most of his life – he even tried left-handed to remedy the situation – and got his handicap down to the 7 range for a period of time several years ago.
And he played a fair amount of competitive golf in his life; that is, until he hurt the same shoulder more severely about 10 years ago in senior tournament in Illinois when his club hit some hard turf.
“That eliminated any type of competitive golf,” Hopper said of the injury. “I was decent for a one-armed guy, but never great.”
Hopper expects to stay active in the game for a while longer, and to that end he was recently appointed to the board of directors for the Wisconsin State Golf Association Foundation.
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