By Betty Olsen
Tennis Talk 2/2
The first Tennis Club tournament of 2023 is the Prescott Tournament in honor of Phil Prescott, the man responsible for the building of our courts 5 and 6 in 1998. Since only a handful of current club members were here when that happened, I felt it appropriate to enlighten the rest of us who were not here in 1998 to know about Phil Prescott. This article is in answer to the question often heard: “Who and what is Prescott?”
Phil Prescott was born in 1914 in Fresno and entered Stanford in 1932. He graduated in 1936 and married Wilma Knapp, a Stanford classmate in 1937. Phil graduated with an engineering degree and spent most of his working years at North American Aviation in southern California. While at Stanford they became friends with David and Lu Packard, the David Packard responsible for the Monterey Aquarium and refurbishing and remodeling San Jose’s California Theater into an opera house and for symphonic orchestras.
Not sure when Phil and Wilma took up tennis, but in 1966 they did a People-to-People tennis tour of Europe. People-to-People tours were started by Dwight Eisenhower to share cultures for better understanding. They played tennis with local clubs all over Europe.
Phil retired in 1975 at age 61 and then moved to The Villages in 1979 to be close to children, grandchildren and Stanford. Phil was President of the Tennis Club in 1984 and I would like to quote from Phil’s Family History book: “We put on four or five tournaments during the year and had potluck suppers following the tournaments. For the Fourth of July parade, the club took the newly-acquired ball machine, placed it on the back of a truck and added bike wheels to make it look like a cannon. The ball machine spewed tennis balls out to awaiting tennis players. They would in turn hit the balls to other players on each side of the truck who would then catch the balls and feed them back into the ball machine. It was the hit of the parade.”
Next week, look for the conclusion of Phil Prescott’s story.