Gan-Ed Inc. Invents the Kangaroo Golf Caddie
The first advertisement for a walker’s self-propelled bag-caddie, easily dismantled to fit in a car trunk, appeared in the Tryon Daily Bulletin in September 1970, from a new start-up. It was Gan-Ed Inc. named for business partners Bill Ganskopp and Carl Edney. Production began in Edney’s “rock garage” still standing west of Tryon on Highway 176, the major highway before the Interstate and now a pleasant Scenic Byway. Mr. Edney, a practical inventor with deep family roots in Polk County, had been a specialist in Volkswagen service and repairs.
Ganskopp jubilant with a trophy
The idea for the golf invention started with Ganskopp, engineering graduate of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, who’d worked for Esso Oil in Venezuela, the Netherlands and Australia before taking early retirement. He chose to retire in North Carolina to play golf year-round. At the time, Red Fox Country Club near Tryon was ranked among the top 100 courses by a national golf magazine. An avid athlete and confirmed walker for health, Ganskopp used a live caddie like when he’d played golf overseas. But when young caddies went back to school in the autumn Bill found himself lugging his own bag around the long and hilly 18-hole course. Lazier golfers just rented a riding cart. But Bill wouldn’t do that. He got the idea to put a motor on an ordinary pull-cart.
A vintage Pull-U
The idea was simple but the execution was not, in fact it had been tried before but never proved a commercial success. Previous motorized products were heavy and never compact enough to fit inside the trunk of a car, to carry home. American golf courses often were unwilling to store such contraptions, as they were happy to rent ride-on carts to enhance their revenues. Briggs & Stratton gas engines like used for lawnmowers were easy to get, so Ganskopp & Edney tinkered with tubing for a bag mount and steer-handle, an axle and some buggy-wheels. They figured out how to make the rig come apart to fit in Bill’s car, without using tools to reassemble, just a wingnut.
Carl Edney, co-founder
Edney’s Garage in Pacolet Valley
At Red Fox, their invention worked for Bill’s purpose. Other golfers saw and wanted one too. Without a real plan a new business came about. They called it the Pull-U. A total 87 eager buyers were soon walking with the noisy gas-powered motorcaddies, but Bill decided the business could only go big if they went electric. Two years of refinement resulted in Gan-Ed’s “Kangaroo” electric model, introduced in ’72 at the PGA of America annual trade show. Permanent employees were hired for work in the old rock garage at Tryon and the business took off.
In 1975 Gan-Ed moved its operations to a new location in Columbus, no site suiting Ganskopp near Tryon being available. Three undeveloped acres were purchased from Lucy and Jim Christopher fronting Highway 108 on a hill. The metal factory was built on a slab. There was no sewer service yet east of the town, nor natural gas. In front the partners planted a big lawn so sales prospects could test the pulling-power of their invention on the steep slope. A few years later the metal building was extended for a larger warehouse.
Exhausted by his unplanned start-up, Ganskopp retired to Florida in 1979 where he could actually retire and play golf. He and Edney sold their equity in the growing little manufacturing firm to a syndicate of Spartanburg investors. One of them was Walter Converse, avid golfer with background in the textiles industry, who served on-site as president and chief operating officer the next four years. Carl Edney stayed on to run manufacturing. In 1981 the Spartanburg syndicate sold out Gan-Ed to a leveraged-buyout group, one of the country’s first entities to do that kind of acquisition of small, independent manufacturers.
Eddie Taylor at West Coast branch facility
John Northway a manufacturing man in Michigan, John Reese an investment banker in New York City, and George Lemmon a finance mastermind in Philadelphia became the new owners. The three were enthusiastic, if not low-scoring, recreational golfers who were eager to own a golf company.
To help sales out West in 1980 employee Eddie Taylor, a Polk County native, was dispatched to Carson City, Nevada to run a small company branch there. Walter Converse’s nephew in England, a recent law-school graduate, was hired to establish and run a branch near Birmingham. Kangaroo’s motorcaddies were the first such product to be sold in Europe for several years and distributors were procured from Norway to Spain.
Volume was considerable because riding carts never became popular in Europe, but soon the Europeans began to manufacture their own motorcaddies. Tariffs and the dollar’s strength versus European currencies yielded a business situation that wasn’t profitable for Kangaroo exports. Eventually the company’s Australian distributor decided to sell it to the Americans, who hoped to manufacture profitably in that golf-mad nation and have a seasonal sales bump counter-seasonal to the April – June peak in the Northern Hemisphere.
Red Fox golf course circa 1980
Deluxe model with distance timer and Li’l Joey model with narrow rubber tires
Unfortunately for them, Kangaroo’s American management soon learned Australia’s golf peak isn’t during their summer, it’s during their winter. All this far-flung activity spanning the world’s time zones was conducted back in the days before e-mail or fax machines, when international telephone calls were expensive and mail could take a week at least to arrive. A telex machine was offered by a friendly neighboring manufacturer in Columbus. Communications were an awkward mess.
“Captain Kangaroo” McCue at the HQ
Mike McCue was hired as President by the three Northern investors in September 1983, with an MBA in marketing and manufacturing and professional management background in consumer goods. He soon recruited the firm’s first purchasing manager, and Tim Pope who became vice president and business partner for the next three decades. Pope earlier had trained to be a course golf professional; he eventually won the Red Fox club championship twice and competed in USA and British senior amateur tournaments. McCue and Pope saw that new-product development was key to Kangaroo’s future. Harold Minick from Michigan, a retired industrial designer in Tryon, introduced them to Machen & Montague, a start-up industrial design firm in Charlotte.
Hillcrest model with stainless steel tubing and bag yokes, lightweight Lexan chassis and RIM urethane tires on structural foam hubs.
Dismantled instantly by two latches into three parts, for compact transport.
The New Frontier: Humanizing Technology industrial design national awards exhibition, Dallas 1988
A fast-track design project brought about an entirely new motorcaddie model, the Hillcrest, so well-designed it won the first prize ever awarded to a golf product by Industrial Designers Society of America. The firm’s next goal was to engineer a steerable remote-control option. CaddieCommand radio control, deploying a patented radio-controlled front-wheel steering mechanism, was achieved and proved a market success despite significant competition from European and Asian manufacturers.
A foursome of Happy Golfers with their ‘roos
K. Hilmann’s motorcaddie at St. Andrews, Scotland
Only 4% of American golfers play golf regularly. Golf shops didn’t want to stock a specialty product like a motorcaddie. So ads in golf magazines reached prospects in Kangaroo’s early days, with inquiry coupons to mail in for complete literature packets, like catalogs. Turn-around time was up to two weeks using snail-mail. Most buyers filled out order forms and enclosed checks mailed to the factory, another week. Then process the order, ship out and have orders delivered by United Parcel Service to the buyer’s location. Presto, consumers were informed and satisfied in less than a month! Toll-free 800 numbers became popular during the 1980s, to request literature and then to take orders, and increasing use of credit cards made it possible to save time mailing in checks. Still, the process of direct-selling took time, and sales reps had to be trained to staff the phone lines capably at Kangaroo’s Columbus call center.
There was a period when contract call centers could be hired to take simple inquiries for literature, specializing in service nights and weekends, but their reps weren’t able to speak intelligently with golfers who had any but the simplest questions. Fax machines grew in popularity for business-to-business, but fax never penetrated the home market – and many prospect golfers were retired, so they never had access to fax machines. When Kangaroo began television advertising on the new Golf Channel, the fluctuating volumes of consumer interest coinciding with TV spots became increasingly difficult to handle well.
In 1986 more headquarters offices were built behind the Columbus factory.
Kangaroo’s advertising agency in Asheville believed the Internet was a fad that would go away. McCue invested in office terminals so Kangaroo folks could do e-mail, but the agency head preferred phone calls or personal travel. And despite employing design professionals, the agency did not choose to offer Web-design creative services. So Kangaroo produced its first Web site internally. John Raines the company’s long-time IT employee hand-coded it all, no canned software then being available. In 1999 Carolie Bartol was hired as first staff designer at the company, learned to code for Web too, and self-taught how to use digital design tools. The Year-2000 IT crisis was a turning point in American business practice. Kangaroo invested in newly available hardware and software to save massive amounts of labor-intensive work in accounting, purchasing management, and manufacturing planning in addition to sales and marketing work. The Internet gradually became adopted worldwide, making it vastly easier to conduct international business.
Creative plant employee Willard Pace, well-known musician, woodcrafter and author of Return to Baileytown, a memoir of growing up in Polk County
Pope tests a caddie
In North America the market for golf products is strongly seasonal, peaking during just four months April to July. McCue and Pope struggled during the other months and the Northern investors became increasingly anxious. They attempted other new non-golf products but sales failed to materialize enough to keep Kangaroo’s factory in Polk County profitable off-season. In 1995 they found another small company, for sale in Ohio, with a counter-seasonal product line.
It was Condar Company, a manufacturer of catalytic converters and thermometers for woodstoves. They bet the future of the Polk County enterprise on the acquisition of Condar, without any background in the unrelated “hearth” industry. After running Condar six months at its Ohio location, all its equipment and inventory were moved to the Polk County factory. No Ohio employees chose to relocate to North Carolina, but employees in Columbus were cross-trained. McCue and Pope developed a new business model for Condar abandoning many long-standing practices in Ohio, and emphasized export sales growth. They added new “hearth” products by acquisitions and by internal new-product development. By the end of the 1990s Condar’s sales and profits equaled those of Kangaroo Golf.
Steve Henderson molding tires on wheels at Reaction Injection Molding machine. After work, he practiced on his unicycle around Kangaroo’s parking lot.
Henderson performs at Columbus Christmas parade dressed as a clown on his unicycle.
During the ‘90s John Northway died and John Reese divested from his North Carolina holdings. In 1999 George Lemmon was diagnosed with terminal cancer; his last major business move was to sell the remaining equity in Kangaroo Golf, Condar Company, and the Polk County factory property to McCue and Pope. Thus the firm founded at Tryon thirty years prior by local management became, again, owned by local operating managers.
