AMHERST — Golfers who spend time on the links naturally focus on their drives, chips and putts. Few, however, give much thought to the ground they walk on.
That’s where Patricia Vittum comes in. The associate dean of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has made a four-decades long career in the field of turfgrass entomology, where her research has been influential in the field of golf course maintenance.
Vittum, 65, will retire in March after 37 years at UMass, and she’s going out on a high note. Before she leaves her post, Vittum will accept what she sees as the most prestigious award in her field: the Golf Course Superintendent Association of America Col. John Morley Distinguished Service Award.
To top it off, she will be the first woman to do so.
“It feels like the hall of fame of golf course management,” Vittum said. “It is a heck of a way to go out. In my mind, things couldn’t be better.”
Vittum will accept the award along with two other honorees at the organization’s annual conference in Orlando in February.
The award “recognizes an individual who has made an outstanding and significant contribution in both substance and duration to the advancement of the golf course superintendent’s profession,” according to a press release from the UMass Office of News and Media Relations.
Vittum has won a number of awards, including the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Entomological Society of America Eastern Branch in 2014, the USGA Green Section Award for work with turfgrass in 2015 and the 2016 GCSA of New England’s Distinguished Service Award, according to the press release.
In an interview Wednesday, Vittum said she was surprised when she came back from traveling and saw she had a voicemail from the president of the Golf Course Superintendent Association of America.
“I thought I had done something wrong,” Vittum said with a chuckle. “I had no idea … it is just astounding.”
Vittum was shocked and humbled to receive the award, but as she looked back on her career, it seemed it was meant to be. Vittum’s connection to UMass and Stockbridge actually began before she was born.
Vittum’s mother, who grew up in Cummington, attended UMass in the 1930s. To reduce expenses, she signed on to do housework for Professor Lawrence Dickinson in exchange for a place to live.
Dickinson was the founder of the UMass turfgrass program Vittum would dedicate her life to half a century later. In 1958, Dickinson won the Golf Superintendent Association of America Award that Vittum will accept in February.
“I think it was meant to happen,” Vittum said.
Her father was a UMass student as well. Her parents married and moved to New York, and her father became a professor at Cornell University. After taking a gap year after high school, Vittum attended a small, private liberal arts college in Ohio.
On the hunt for a summer job, she applied to every department on Cornell’s Geneva campus, save for her father’s department. She got an offer from the turfgrass program.
Vittum spent three summers working with Haruo Tashiro in his lab. Years later, Vittum would co-author “Turfgrass Insects of the United States and Canada,” with Tashiro and Michael G. Villani, a textbook she calls “the bible of turfgrass entomology.”
That first summer, Vittum was assigned to indoor work in Tashiro’s lab. It wasn’t typical for a woman to do the outdoor work at that time, Vittum said.
“Then I told him, ‘You know, I’d really like to get outside,’” Vittum said.
From then on, Vittum spent hours driving to different sites to collect grape leaves full of Japanese beetles that Tashiro would study in the lab.
In 1975, things continued to fall into place for Vittum. Tashiro was out of the lab on sabbatical, and Vittum was helping to manage the lab in his absence. She was offered an assistantship at Cornell to do her doctorate work. She graduated from Cornell in 1980 with a degree in turfgrass entomology.
“I did not even know at the time that Cornell had the second best entomology program in the country,” Vittum said. “It was an opportunity not to be turned away.”
After graduation, Vittum applied for only one job, which was at UMass, and got it. She started working in Waltham taking phone calls from homeowners, but had an urge to go back to doing research. Vittum asked Joseph Troll, the face of the turfgrass department at Stockbridge at that point, for help.
“He asked me what I needed, and I said ‘Some shovels, garden stakes, buckets…’” Vittum said. “He sent me to Rocky’s Hardware Sotre with an open purchase order and said ‘Get what you need’…. He saw I lived and breathed turfgrass just like he did, and I think he saw me as a kindred spirit. I was just younger.”
Her career blossomed from there.
Vittum is best-known for her work with the bluegrass weevil, a tiny insect that kills grass plants. In one bluegrass weevil’s lifetime, it can kill 10 to 12 grass plants.
“They look so innocent,” Vittum said, peering into a vial with several weevils inside.
Vittum researched the life cycle of the insect to advise golf courses on when they should spray chemicals to best control the critters in the least invasive way.
Beyond her research, Vittum says she hopes she has opened a door by being the first woman to receive the award. She has not run into gender issues herself, and said the men in the golf industry felt like “brothers” to her more than anything else.
“I’ve not run into any gender-related issues in the golf industry,” Vittum said, noting that having her doctorate gave her more authority in the field. “They didn’t care if I was brown, blue, purple or polka-dotted.”
“It feels really special to be the first woman. There were others who went before me who were just as creative and made contributions every bit as great as mine,” Vittum said.