Zelda was almost eighteen years old and was “the golden girl” of Montgomery society when Scott Fitzgerald first saw her across the dance floor at the Montgomery Country Club. Zelda had been asked to perform “Dance of the Hours” at one of the regular Saturday night dances the club hosted for WWI officers such as Fitzgerald who were training at nearby Camp Sheridan. Scott was immediately smitten with the Montgomery belle, and Zelda would soon fall deeply in love with the blond Yankee lieutenant. In her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, Zelda described the site of their first meeting romantically:
“The clubhouse sprouted inquisitively under the oaks like a squat clump of bulbs piercing the leaves in spring. … The ground around the place was as worn and used as the plot before a children’s playhouse. The sagging wire about the tennis court, the peeling drab-green paint of the summer house on the first tee, the trickling hydrant, the veranda thick in dust all flavoured of the pleasant atmosphere of a natural growth. … No officer could have visited it three times without falling in love, engaging himself to marry and to populate the countryside with little country clubs exactly like it.”
The original clubhouse was destroyed by fire in 1925, but a new clubhouse was soon built in its place.
You are looking for a small camo colored matchstick holder outside the gates of the Country Club. A bit of walking is required as the nearest convenient parking is the south parking lot by the ball field on E. Fairview Avenue about a block away. Stealth is required as a steady flow of cars is ever present.
Congratulations to OHail for first to find!