Lindsay Sharp bought The Golf House in the ’80s and renamed it Sharpie’s Golf House. In his interview he talks about his background in professional and retail golf, the sky sign, and the business’s heyday. In the excerpt below he discusses The Golf House’s origins in a music store and pawnbroker’s, and new and second markets for golf clubs.
In those early days [pre-WWII] they were two separate shops. There was Harry Landis’ music shop and Jack [Landis] had a pawnshop next door and over the years he found that every time he’d pawn a set of golf clubs they were the first things he could sell easily. So, he just gradually got into the golf side of things and turned it into a second-hand golf shop [1950s?] and then eventually turned it into a full retail golf shop and then when Harry moved uptown – I think to Park Street, moved his music shop up – Jack knocked a hole in the wall and made it one big shop and just developed it from there. In those days it was the only place to go because we used to stock stuff, equipment, that no one else did. We used to import it from overseas and everybody got to know that if you wanted something different, that the Golf House was the place to go. We used to sell the Callaways and the Pings and all of those, you know, right at the start, before they became the real fashionable golf clubs, but the other thing was we kept a huge stock of second-hand golf equipment and it was a situation whereas if you lost a golf club, you’re looking for something that was rare or that you needed to fill in a set of golf clubs, we were the place to go because we had thousands and thousands of second-hand golf clubs. I’d go up to Queensland and go to all of the golf shops and stuff and buy whatever they didn’t want; we had people who’d ring us and bring them in and whatever, yes.
