Custom Golf Carts: Super Cars for Superstars on and off the Golf Green

He's the curmudgeonly, irreverent, and iconoclastic Frank Barone on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” a show where he (Peter Boyle) retires to a home in Florida in episode 195, “Not so Fast,” and is so rude and rambunctious in those custom golf carts the elders scuttle about in that the retirement home director is forced to throw him and wife Marie out.

Old man Barone is not alone, though, in his joy of making use of custom golf carts. There's Bradford Cohen, Fort Lauderdale attorney and real estate mogul, who is best known for hearing “You're fired” on the penultimate “episode” of “The Apprentice” for showing what a true leader would do when the whole team is in trouble. Off the set of the show, Cohen tools around in a customized, souped-up gas-powered golf cart equipped with monster truck tires, showing what industrious professionals might do to get around, to commute to the courthouse or to one of his many real estate properties, when they're not driving their ripe banana-colored Hummers.

Then there's superstar rocker Mike Mills of the great R.E.M., who bids on one of the custom golf carts at The Jimmy V Celebrity Junior Golf Classic Live Auction, coming away with a custom cart for the winning bid of $20,000, a cart he wanted for and gave to his father. Likewise, at another auction in and at another land and time, Russell Simmons' “Make a Difference” benefit for Hip-hop Summit Action Network auctions off a customized cart with a built-in Playstation 2, earning for the HSAN $4,000, paid by one unidentified but newly transported car owner in Foster City, California.

Other fans of the custom golf carts, these miniature cars that were first for moving golfers and their caddies from one hole to the next, are the residents of a Sun City, Arizona, retirement community, men and women who use the “Golfsters”—according to one Arizona Republic reporter in 1996—to do errands around town.

And we can't forget to note that custom golf carts, invented in the 50's, nicknamed Golf Cars by the Cushman Corporation, popularized by U. S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower who drove them on the golf courses after aheart attack weakened his ability to walk great distances, were also endorsed by country great Glen Campbell, silver screen and stage sex-kitten/goddess and celebrity golfer Ann Margaret, and super legends and avid golfers Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and Bob Hope.

And while stars of the highest caliber even had especially special custom golf carts made and re-made for them (Gleason had his turned into a miniature Mercedes, for example), stars of all degrees and their chauffeurs, if you will, use custom golf carts on studio lots to get from set to set or studio to studio (such as from stage to stage at Warner Brothers, where a reported 450+ carts exist as the ideal mode of transportation).

No, this isn't intentionally an appeal to authority/celebrity advertisement to lure you subliminally into replacing your family vans with custom golf carts. It's just a collection of observations on the increasing popularity of the miniature cars as off-the-green transporters, too. It's a notification of the synchronicity of the cars' appearances in the most reasonable of places. And it's a nod toward the wisdom of the users who make effective use of satisfying their time and distance needs. Well, all but Frank Barone, that rapscallion.

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