Longest tenure of any employee

By Joseph Kelly

It’s an old truism that the hardest part of any job is getting hired in the first place. With that in mind, you might think people would hang on to their jobs for long periods, but that’s rarely the case.

Statistics show that after just four years, most people move on. Working more than 10 or 20 years in a job is unusual, while 30 or 40-plus years is almost unheard of.

So, the one thing you can say for sure about someone who has stayed in a job for nearly five decades is that he must have really liked it. And that is certainly the case for Joe Bunk, who is stepping down this year after 48 years as golf pro and course superintendent at the Norfolk Country Club.

It was a cold day in March 1977 when Joe turned onto the country club parking lot on Golf Drive to meet Dorothy “Pinky” Bazzano, the first female president of the club, along with long-time member Savage Frieze. The club house (unheated then and now) was still boarded up for the winter. Joe poked his head into the pro shop and found the floor a sheet of ice. Patches of snow lingered on the fairways and the wind howled off the first tee. Despite the freezing weather, the aptly named Frieze suggested that they play a few holes.

“I said to myself,” recalls Bunk, “this is really going to be something.”

Joe had just turned 30 and was already well along in his golf career. His father, Bruno, had been an outstanding, self-taught amateur golfer in their hometown of Greenwich and his son followed his path, caddying at famed clubs in the area like Tamarack and Round Hill (the home golf course of the Bush family) while entering and winning numerous tournaments.

Upon Bunk’s graduation from high school, Frank Strazza, who won the Connecticut Open in 1947—and later became a designer of blade putters favored by Sam Snead—recruited him to become the assistant pro at Round Hill. Not long after that, he was enlisted to spend winters as a teaching pro at the historic Harder Hall in Sebring, Fla. Between Greenwich and Sebring he was building his career in golf step by step…that’s when Frieze persuaded him to give Norfolk a try.

The Norfolk Country Club golf course is almost 100 years old, has only nine holes and is relatively short in yardage. Given all of that, a non-golfer might be excused for thinking it dated and lacking in the challenges that might be found in more glamorous locales like those in Greenwich or Sebring. Nothing could be further from the truth. The founders of the club recruited the famed golf course architect A.W. Tillinghast to guide the layout, and his thoughtful design remains in evidence on every hole.

Tillinghast carved the course out of a hillside cow pasture. Natural features—steep inclines, deep ravines, a rambling brook—turned into par-frustrating hazards. Fairways ripple and undulate, causing balls to bounce in unpredictable ways. Greens can be steeply pitched, so it’s not unusual for a golfer to face a seemingly easy two-to three-foot putt, only to watch the ball break away inches from the hole, roll off the green and not stop until it’s 5-10 yards into the fairway, one of the most humiliating experiences of any sport.

As the longest serving member of the golf course staff—indeed the entire club—Bunk has been the primary orchestrator of this experience. When he arrived in 1977 he became the club pro, responsible for organizing tournaments, running the pro shop, giving lessons and doing his best to assuage the delicate egos of club members struggling to make par. A short time into his tenure he was asked to be both pro and course superintendent. For years when he wasn’t on the lesson tee or in the pro shop, he could be found assisting his small grounds crew in grooming the greens or fertilizing the fairways. In the years before the club installed a sprinkler system, he would sleep over on hot summer nights in order to water the greens during the prime early morning hours. In 2007, when Ron Pfaefflin came on board as pro, Joe seized the opportunity to go back to wearing only one hat, now just the superintendent.

To be sure, being pro or superintendent left little time for playing. But on a casual outing in 1983, Bunk entered the record books with a six under par 65, tying the course record set by Livingston Carroll in the 1930s. After bogeying the first hole, Bunk notched five birdies and an eagle on the challenging, uphill fifth hole. Besides Carroll and Bunk, only two other players have matched that score: Larry Hannafin and Ron Pfaefflin.

It was once thought fitting to honor a long tenure in a job with a gold watch. Instead, Norfolk golfers who valued Joe’s longtime stewardship decided that a GoFundMe effort to bolster his retirement account might be a better idea. More than 80 club members stepped up, with some contributions ranging into four and five figures.

A brunch was held in Bunk’s honor in August, presided over by George Spencer, a three-time club champion who first learned the game under Bunk’s tutelage. Many others chimed in with memories of how they themselves or their husbands, wives, children or other significant others also learned the game with Bunk’s help.

It was a reminder that golf is as much a social activity as it is a sport. Non-golfers struggle to find the appeal in the hours spent trying to tame the trajectory of a small white ball, not realizing that it’s the relationships and camaraderie developed during that always futile endeavor that matter most.

In the same way it might be hard for some to imagine spending nearly five decades in the world of golf—much less at a small, rural course in northwest Connecticut—not realizing that if you love what you do and also happen to be very, very good at it, 48 years is not nearly long enough.