It is Wednesday evening. Tomorrow we load up the car and drive to Detroit for the 90th AYF Olympics. It is wonderful to return to Detroit, where I grew up, for the Olympics. It is good to be driving instead of flying. It is good be in a revitalized Detroit in a downtown hotel. It is even better to see family and friends and experience the AYF spirit in the special way that happens only at the Olympics.
I should be packing. But instead, I am writing the first of my daily articles.
This is my 10th year as part of the team to which Tom Vartabedian passed the Olympic reporting torch. 2014 was the first year I started reporting in earnest, and that Olympics was also in Detroit. A year or two after that, I began the daily articles and haven’t stopped.
Okay…so I did a little packing. Truthfully, it was not packing in earnest but more collecting shirts and hats for the photos in this article. Friday, for the golf and tennis, I will sport my Kharpert Country Club shirt. Sunday at the track and field events, it has to be the AYF logo shirt that Michael Kazarian had made, if memory serves me correctly, for the 2014 Detroit games.
Saturday? Well, I will be in Michigan, and it is the University of Michigan’s football opener against Fresno State that evening. So there is no question about it, I will be maize and blue all day. I actually have tickets to the game, and it is so very tempting to go to Ann Arbor, but I cannot and will not shirk my daily reporting duties.
And the Kharpert Country Club shirt? Where did that come from? Was there actually a country club in Kharpert? There never was when Armenians thrived there, and a Google search verified there are no golf courses in the region today. This notion of the Kharpert Country Club is part of our family lore. I wrote an article about it in a September 6, 2013 Armenian Weekly article. Since, I started a column in the Weekly called “Into the Archives,” it seems appropriate to dig into the archive and present an except from that article on how the notion of the Kharpert Country Club came about.
The story begins in 1986. When our daughter Armené was baptized that year, we had the dinner at the Pine Lake Country Club in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It was a very lovely place and a warm gathering of family and friends. A good family friend, Vartan Agbabian, performed selections from Aram Khachaturian’s Album for Children on the piano. Everyone enjoyed themselves. At the end, I got up to say a few words, to thank everyone for coming and to reflect on the day. I decided to add a little levity by beginning with “Thank you everyone for coming to Armené’s baptism. It is a special day for our family and we are honored and delighted that you were able to share it with us. It is even more special that we are having the dinner here at the beautiful Pine Lake Country Club, because there is a long tradition in our family of having baptismal dinners at the Kharpert Country Club.” This comment got a few chuckles.
Then my maternal grandmother, well along the path of losing her hearing, blurted out to my mother loud enough for everyone to hear, “Vat he saying? Vee don’ have no country club in Kharpert!” Everyone cracked up.
Thanks to Azniv Merian, who we all called Grannie, the fictitious notion of the Kharpert Country Club became a real thing in our family. At family gatherings we would bring up this story and someone would invariably quote Grannie, “Vee don’ have no country club in Kharpert!” We would all laugh like it just happened. We talked and joked about having golf shirts made with the name of this mythical country club.
The shirt I and other family members will be seen wearing over the weekend is the second iteration of the Kharpert Country Club shirt.
Now, I really do have to go and pack.
I look forward to reporting tomorrow from Detroit!
Latest posts by Mark Gavoor (see all)
- Cool regional columns from the 1950s - December 10, 2024
- Mentors who brought me to the Weekly - November 19, 2024
- A hot day at AYF Olympics tennis - September 26, 2024
Great article! Have fun at the Motown Olympics
I had a maternal grandmother from Kharpert. She lived in the orphanage there. If possible, I would like to get a shirt. Please let me know who to contact. Thank you.
We just had a small batch for family made up.