(
By Tom Kraemer
Tom Kraemer began working with The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in February of 1994 as a contract designer for the ScienceWorks gallery. At that time Kraemer Design + Production, Inc. was formed and has been very fortunate to continue working with the museum throughout the past 24 years. The Riley Children’s Health Sports Legends Experience® is the latest on that long list of projects.
Working with Pete and Alice Dye was a dream come true for this life-long golfer! My father introduced me to the game when I was ten years old. It was a special connection we had and our way of spending quality time together. A year or so after that, I started caddying at a local club and continued to do that over the next six years. If you caddied on Saturday and Sunday, you were allowed to play golf at the club on Monday’s after 3:00 p.m. Great friends, fellow caddies, and new acquaintances would “tee it up” at 3:00 p.m. and not stop until a half hour after dark! I still play a handful of times a year with three best friends from those days.
Fast forward what seems like a hundred years and now I’m a design firm owner lucky enough to be working with the biggest and best children’s museum, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. We are currently working on the awesome 7.5-acre sports experience highlighting Indiana’s sports greats—with two of those greats being golf legends Pete and Alice Dye! To be asked, “Tom, can you meet with Pete and Alice Dye to talk about working with them on a design layout for a putting course consisting of 18 famous “Dye” designed scaled golf holes?” Are you kidding me?! Meet with the Dyes?!!! …I guess I can squeeze it in.
The first of several meetings happened at their Indianapolis home. Pete and Alice took us into their home office, which happens to be the dining room. Rolls of plans were all over the dini…office including a project from courses in Wisconsin and beyond. They kindly pushed these important plans aside and we dug into the current work at hand, laying out the new Pete and Alice Dye Putting Course!
At one point in the meeting, the discussion centered on what would make a par 4 challenging and keep the visitors from just whaling away and hitting the ball as far as they could. Alice and I moved from the dini… office and into their family room to quickly test it out for ourselves. We adjusted the furniture in the room and set up a short par 4. We created landing areas that made the layout of the golf hole playable if the player hits within those areas, no different from a full-size Pete and Alice designed golf hole. There were places you needed to aim for and hit or you could find yourself in a lot of golfing trouble!
And oh yea—as you would imagine—Alice showed off her skills and played our impromptu “family room” hole perfectly!
I will never forget the time I got to spend with Pete and Alice over the past several years. Whether meeting in their Indianapolis dini…office at their Florida home, or putting with Alice in her living room, and all of the details in between, these unforgettable moments will always remain special to me. They are two of the kindest, funniest, and most humble friends you will ever meet. And we know they can’t wait to see families playing on their first-ever putting experience, opening soon at the world’s biggest and best children’s museum!
The Pete and Alice Dye Golf Experience is presented by Henry and Christine Camferdam. The Riley Sports Experience® opens March 17, 2018 at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis!
