Former GCSAA staffer passes away

By |  March 10, 2014 0 Comments

Sad news hit my inbox this weekend.

Former GCSAA student services recruiter Lanie Griffin passed away last week. She was 60. Here is her obituary.

Lanie was my co-worker for 10 years, and she was a wonderful woman. She always was smiling. She was a proud woman, and took her job seriously, but also a kind woman who took the time to ask you how you and your family were doing. Those of us who knew her were enriched by having her in our lives.

One memory of Lanie: She asked me if I could help her create a GCSAA comic book that could be handed out to school kids (Lanie knew me to be a big comic book nut). The comic would describe what a golf course superintendent did. It would be a simple introduction for kids to learn more about the GCSAA and its members.

Well, it was cost prohibitive to hire a legitimate comic book artist for the project. So the next thing I knew, I was drawing the comic.

I like to dabble with art, but there’s a reason I became a writer and not an artist… I’m just not that good.

So I worked all weekend on some pages and brought them in to Lanie for her to review on Monday.

She looked at them, thought for a while… sighed, then thought some more.

“Seth,” she said to me, “some of this looks really good… but this panel here… this woman… do you think you could draw her to look more like… a woman?”

There’s a reason school kids around the country never saw the GCSAA comic book. One of those reasons was because I draw ugly women.

Lanie Griffin, however, was a beautiful woman. And she will be missed.

About the Author: Seth Jones

Seth Jones, a 25-year veteran of the golf industry media, is Editor-in-Chief of Golfdom magazine and Athletic Turf. A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Jones began working for Golf Course Management in 1999 as an intern. In his professional career he has won numerous awards, including a Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association (TOCA) first place general feature writing award for his profile of World Golf Hall of Famer Greg Norman and a TOCA first place photography award for his work covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In his career, Jones has accumulated an impressive list of interviews, including such names as George H.W. Bush, Samuel L. Jackson, Lance Armstrong and Charles Barkley. Jones has also done in-depth interviews with such golfing luminaries as Norman, Gary Player, Nick Price and Lorena Ochoa, to name only a few. Jones is a member of both the Golf Writers Association of America and the Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association. Jones can be reached at sjones@northcoastmedia.net.


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