George C. Thomas Jr.

George C. Thomas Jr. was a golf course architect, born on October 3, 1873 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was a partner in the investment bank Drexel & Company, and Thomas himself worked there until 1907. He never made course design his trade, and took on his work as an amateur. Beyond golf he was known as a breeder of roses, raising more than a thousand varieties and writing two books on the subject. In the First World War he served as a captain in the United States Army Air Service.

He began as a designer at home in Philadelphia. In 1908 he sold a course he had built himself to a group of golfers, and that course is the Whitemarsh Valley Country Club of today. Spring Lake Golf Club in New Jersey is among his other early work, and he is counted, with A. W. Tillinghast and William Flynn of the same city, as one of the architects of the Philadelphia School.

After he moved to California in 1919 he designed more than twenty courses in the state, beginning with La Cumbre Country Club at Santa Barbara. His best work is the North Course at Los Angeles Country Club (1921), and, with William P. Bell as his partner, Bel-Air Country Club (1926) and Riviera Country Club. Riviera opened in 1926, and the club’s own site relates that Thomas took on the design without a fee. Riviera staged the U.S. Open in 1948 and the PGA Championship in 1983 and 1995, and it is known as the home of the PGA Tour’s Genesis Invitational. The North Course at Los Angeles Country Club was restored in 2010 to the design Thomas gave it in 1921, and in 2023 it held the U.S. Open. In 1927 he published Golf Architecture in America, in which he set down how he thought about design. He died at his home in Beverly Hills on February 23, 1932.

See the other golf course architects here.