Harry Watkey Easterly (31 August 1922–16 June 2005), president of the United States Golf Association, was born in Richmond and was the son of Catherine Tighe Hart Simms Easterly and her second husband, Harry Watkey Easterly. Educated at Saint Christopher's School, he entered the Virginia Military Institute in 1940. He suspended his studies in May 1943 to join the United States Marine Corps, in which he served as a radar officer in the Pacific theater during World War II. While undergoing military training in Boston, Easterly returned to Richmond and on 28 August 1943 married Mary Friend Blanton, the daughter of the writer Natalie Friend McFaden Blanton and of the physician and historian Wyndham Bolling Blanton. They had two sons and two daughters. After his discharge, he returned to VMI and graduated in February 1947 with a B.S. in civil engineering. Easterly worked as a manager at Concrete Pipe and Products Company, Incorporated, where his father was an executive. In 1962 he became president of Southern Industries, Incorporated, and several years later he took a position as an executive vice president for the investment firm Wheat and Company, Incorporated (after 1971 Wheat, First Securities, Incorporated).

Easterly's main passion was the game of golf. An avid golfer from his school days, he proved victorious in the Country Club of Virginia's spring 1940 tournament on his first attempt. Easterly won the Richmond amateur championship in 1949 and 1958. He also won the Kenridge Invitational Tournament, in Charlottesville, and was runner-up in the state amateur championship, both in 1956. During this period he competed in the United States Amateur Golf Championship and in the Middle Atlantic Amateur Golf Tournament. His love of the game spurred his involvement in its administration, and in 1965 and 1966 he served as president of the Virginia State Golf Association.

Beginning late in the 1950s Easterly volunteered for the United States Golf Association. Eventually he chaired its standing committees on championship, finance, junior golf, public information, and rules. In 1968 he became a member of the USGA's executive committee and later served as treasurer. As chair of the championship committee in 1972, Easterly led efforts to return the United States Amateur Championship from stroke play to match play, where golf teams compete on every hole rather than individual golfers aiming for the lowest score over eighteen holes. Match play, he believed, better suited amateur competition. Elected vice president of the USGA in January 1974, he was also appointed chair of the rules committee. In May 1975 he helped bring together the USGA and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of Saint Andrews to establish a uniform set of rules for the game worldwide.

Easterly was elected to a one-year term as president of the USGA in January 1976 and reelected the following year. Described as a stickler for the rules, even in friendly games, he rigidly enforced USGA rules and regulations. He was credited for deftly handling difficult situations, including Vietnam War protestors at the 1972 United States Open held at California's Pebble Beach course, and a death threat made against eventual winner Hubert Green at the 1977 United States Open at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 1980 Easterly was selected as the nonplaying captain for the title-winning United States squad at the World Amateur Team Championship. In December of that year he left his job as a senior vice president at Wheat, First Securities, to become the USGA's chief administrative officer. This new position, for which Easterly moved to Somerset County, New Jersey, marked the first time a former USGA president had become a paid staff member.

During his tenure as senior executive director, as the position became known, Easterly managed USGA administrative operations, expanded its headquarters, and overhauled business procedures. In 1980 his unique idea that the USGA could lease a golf course and organize a tournament enabled the United States Open to be played at New York's Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in 1986. He also wrote the preface for a 1982 USGA reprint edition of The Art of Golf (1887), by famed Scottish golfer Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson. Easterly stepped down from the USGA in July 1983 and formally retired effective 31 January 1984. Having returned to Richmond and once again become eligible to play competitive golf, he won the Richmond Golf Association's Senior Championship in May 1984. Three years later he was runner-up at the state's senior amateur tournament.

As chair of the VSGA's golf-course development committee, Easterly oversaw construction of Independence Golf Club, a public course in Chesterfield and Powhatan Counties that opened in October 2001. Established as the home of the VSGA, the club dedicated the Harry W. Easterly Museum of Virginia Golf History in June 2002. Easterly received many honors, including the USGA's Ike Grainger Award in 1995 and the VSGA's President's Award in 1996 for his years of volunteer service.

Easterly received the Richmond Junior Chamber of Commerce Award for Distinguished Civic Service in 1955, and late in the 1970s he served as vice president of the Virginia State Chamber of Commerce. Easterly was president of the VMI Alumni Association from 1979 to 1981. An amateur historian, he wrote a 2003 booklet on George Minefee, a seventeenth-century Virginia merchant and planter. Harry Watkey Easterly died of cancer on 16 June 2005 and was buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery. The VSGA trophy awarded to the winner of the Senior Open of Virginia is named for Easterly, whom Sports Illustrated regarded as "one of the game's great traditionalists."

Sources Consulted:
Interview in Virginia Golfer 21 (Sept./Oct. 2003): 32–35; Mary Blanton Easterly Papers (1877–2006), Acc. 43509, Personal Papers Collection, Library of Virginia (LVA), Richmond; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 29 Aug. 1943; Harold Pearson, "Thomas Jefferson's Man at the USGA," Golf Journal 29 (Jan./Feb. 1976): 18–19, 43; Easterly, George Minefee, Early Virginia Merchant and Landowner (2003), Acc. 40722, LVA; Bruce H. Matson, Golf in the Commonwealth: A History of the VSGA and the Royal & Ancient Game in Virginia (2004); obituaries and memorials in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 18, 26 June 2005, Virginia Golfer 23 (July/Aug. 2005): 5–11, Virginia Military Institute Alumni Review 81 (summer 2005): 160 (portraits), Sports Illustrated (online ed.), 12 Dec. 2005 (quotation), and Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 2006 sess., 2034–2035.

Image from scrapbook in Mary Blanton Easterly Papers, Library of Virginia.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by John G. Deal.

How to cite this page:
John G. Deal, "Harry Watkey Easterly (1922–2005)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021, (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Easterly_Harry_Watkey, accessed [today's date]).

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