Many of them will be on display at the Inverness Club this week – not just the people, but the products they have dedicated their lives to develop. They don’t call Toledo “The Glass City” for nothing.
For well over a century – a generation before the founding members of Inverness built the first nine holes of the new club – glass has been one of the growth industries in Toledo, a manufacturing location that continues to provide good jobs for North Ohioans: the sustainable container. At the height of America’s industrial revolution, its proximity to Lake Erie, along with a natural gas deposit, made Toledo the perfect location for the burgeoning glass industry, as everything from soft drinks to olive oil to perfumes required packaging for mass distribution.
Toledo has been and will remain a hub for this innovation. If you visit downtown during the Solheim Cup, one of the biggest attractions is the 74,000-square-foot Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art. And if you visit one of the hospitality pavilions during the Games, you will likely interact with a city-made glass container .
Just as the Inverness Club pioneered innovation and inclusion and was the first club to let professionals into the clubhouse when the club hosted the US Open in 1920, OI, a leader in the glass industry since the 1880s, continues to set the bar as a sustainability partner of the LPGA and sponsor of the Solheim Cup.
Golf is an outdoor game that is played with the greatest respect for nature. And glass is the best recyclable container product on the market. All OI containers are made from sand, limestone, ash and other recycled glass. Every glass product is 100% recyclable and environmentally friendly. And every OI employee is committed to sustainability. The company aims to increase the recycling rate by 50% and achieve 40% renewable energies by 2030.
It’s a laudable goal not quite a decade into the future, and one of which fits in with the history of the Inverness Club, which the original OI leaders were instrumental in founding.
In 1931, Walter Hagan handed his hat to the great professionals of the day to raise money for a gift to the club that let professionals in for the first time. By the 1930s, professional golfers were welcome in almost every clubhouse in America. The profession was treated with the dignity and respect it deserved, a practice begun a decade earlier by the residents of Toledo at the Inverness Club.
Hagan bought a grandfather clock for the members, which is still in the clubhouse to this day. There is a brass plaque on it with a poem that reads:
God measures people for what they are
Not by what wealth they have
This living message comes from afar
The voice of Inverness
This message remains the same 91 years later. It’s universal. It’s sustainable – like Toledo and the product that made the city what it is today. The glass city.