Mini golf course near Floyd Monument remembered as 'a masterpiece'

The Floyd Monument Miniature Golf Course (also referred to as the Floyd Park Miniature Golf Course, the Siouxland Miniature Golf Course and probably other variations), 2701 Highway 75 S., opened in 1954. The area was then on the far southern outskirts of town. 

Its proprietor, Leo Tracey, had witnessed the tremendous popularity of mini-golf, then a relatively new phenomenon, when he lived in California. 

Born Leo Trasowech (he later changed the last name) in Sioux City in 1913, Tracey spent most of his formative years in California. Having decided at some point that he wanted his own mini-golf destination, Tracey built one on his parents' pasture land in the early 1950s.

Something of an artist, he had visited a number of mini-golf courses to observe how they were designed. 

Tracey designed the course, leveled off a hill on the property and built (with the help of contractors) an 18-hole mini-golf course with a spectacular view off the bluff. There was also a 19th hole, which, if completed successfully, won the player a free round.

The course, according to Tracey's daughter Andree, became an overnight sensation, popular with the young and old alike. 

"We've found that it is most popular with young people -- college kids and high school kids out on a date," Leo Tracey told the Sioux City Journal in 1990, when he was 76 years old. "There are others who come -- older people and families out for a good time." 

Al Sturgeon, a Sioux City attorney and former state representative and senator, became a fan of Tracey's mini-golf course starting when he was a child in the early 1960s. He later took his own children to play there. 

Get him to start reminiscing about the course and -- well, he's got no shortage of things to say about it. 

"I didn't appreciate how fantastic that place was until I started going around to other cities and playing miniature golf courses, otherwise known as putt-putts, and I thought, 'You've got to be kidding me, that's all you've got?'" Sturgeon said.

"I mean, once you played the Floyd Monument golf course there wasn't a close second. Because it wasn't one of these, you know, felt-type fairways with cheap, wood frame -- I mean, this thing was rather a masterpiece." 

The course's unusually high-quality, concrete, sand and limestone construction was the work of Tracey's own design. Music was piped over the course, and even people who didn't like mini-golf reportedly enjoyed the course's flower garden, snacks and soft drinks. Horses kept by the Tracey family grazed close enough to the course that patrons could sometimes pet them, to the delight of children. 

"There was atmosphere to that place that was just so delightful," Sturgeon said. 

Weekends were very busy. Andree Tracey wrote that customers sometimes had to make reservations, and the highway was often backed up with lines of cars trying to get in. Players' mini-golf scores appeared in the Journal sports section during the yearly tournaments Tracey held. 

Though it's been decades since he last played the course, Sturgeon remembers the contours of the individual holes. The fourth hole had a replica of the Floyd Monument, while hole 10 had a musical windmill. 

"You had to hit the ball to the right, through a fairly narrow chute, to get over the hump to the other side," Sturgeon said of the Floyd Monument hole. 

After Leo Tracey's parents died, decades after he opened the course, he and wife Marcia moved into his parents' former farmhouse, which was adjacent to the course. 

The course shut down after Tracey sold it in 1994 (according to advertisements from the late 1980s, Tracey had apparently planned to retire and close the course six years earlier). Today the wide-open property, its mini-golf course, clubhouse and the farmhouse long gone, is part of the Floyd Monument park. 

In retirement, Tracey spent his days making sketches of people he saw at the Southern Hills Mall before moving to Minneapolis, where he died at age 100 in 2014. Prior to his death, he reportedly attributed his longevity to chocolate, good friends and exercise, according to Andree Tracey. 

The Floyd Monument Miniature Golf Course and the Floyd Monument itself likely enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship -- perhaps the 118-year-old sandstone monument would see more visitors today if it still had a lighthearted attraction next door. 

"I think that is probably a parcel of land, that, I wouldn't say neglected, but I'd just say it's been put on the back burner and... I mean it still has potential," Sturgeon said.