Small-town standard

Between the Venango Valley Inn & Golf Course 18th green and the tidiest parking lot on the east side of French Creek, on a comfortable, quarter-zip October afternoon, a half dozen women linger, laugh and demonstrate love for their surroundings.

Tones escalate as Jim Cervone and Michael Pero approach their final putts on the 519-yard downhill par 5. Pero’s mid-length eagle putt slides past the low side of hole. Cervone follows the effort by missing a 12-footer for birdie. The women gently tease the duo as they exit the putting surface near the left greenside bunker.

“We should do this more often,” Cervone tells Pero, “now that we own the place.”

Speaking via phone a month later from their home on wooded Crawford County, Pennsylvania, land adjacent to the course, Durbin and Kim Loreno describe their 27-year run owning and operating the blissful facility. “In hindsight,” Kim says, “I wish we had taken more time to enjoy it more. Work less, enjoy the time more.”

Cervone, Pero and Tony Passilla purchased Venango Valley from Durbin and Kim on Jan. 29, 2023. Brothers-in-law in title — Cervone has been married to Pero’s sister, Kelly, for 28 years and Pero says, “You can remove the in-law. We’re brothers.” — Cervone and Pero celebrated the acquisition with Passilla by popping champagne inside the Federal-style, orange-brick, 185-year-old inn.

Reflective moments have been rare since that slushy day.

Selling the property to Cervone, Pero, and Passilla ensured the course remained in the community. The trio hails from Meadville, the Crawford County seat 10 miles south of Venango Valley. Crawford County sits between Pittsburgh and Erie on Route 19, a busy thoroughfare connecting the northwest and southwest parts of Pennsylvania. Meadville, population 12,716, is the county’s largest city.

Fewer than 250 people live in Venango, yet the course attracts around 30,000 rounds and 70 outings per year despite a cold-weather climate and a glut of nearby public courses, including one located just a couple of long par-5s away on the north side of town. The inn — a delectable restaurant, not an overnight resting place as the name suggests — generates four-season activity.

Owning Venango Valley means being too busy to enjoy it. When Cervone and Pero exited the 18th green, neither knew when they would play next their round together, a contrast to the group of women who enjoy the course at the same time, on the same days, every week.

Thousands of small-town golf courses enjoyed by millions seeking close-to-home recreational and gathering spots persist because of dream-seekers who sacrifice what they initially think the dream entails to provide joy for others. It’s a cycle that keeps golf thriving in places such as Venango, Pennsylvania, which a young George Washington passed through while traveling along French Creek in 1753.

Durbin and Kim Loreno’s cycle has ended. Cervone’s, Pero’s and Passilla’s has started.

In addition to staying in the community, Venango Valley remains an industry course. Durbin worked as a superintendent; Cervone also owns a golf course architecture firm.

Paul Erath and Stan Kemp are responsible for constructing a layout admired by denizens of Crawford County and beyond, including Cervone, Durbin and current superintendent AlanZielinski. Erath had deep industry connections, juggling superintendent and golf professional jobs simultaneously and helping build famed Laurel Valley Golf Club in southwest Pennsylvania. Erath and Kemp purchased the inn and surrounding Venango acreage in 1968. They built a practical, enchanting course, routing holes along woods and farmland atop ideal subsurface elements due to the land’s proximity to French Creek.

The 18 holes and inn are the epicenter of a small-town golf and love story. The land and its people demonstrate why facilities like Venango Valley are the soul of the industry.

“I think all golf courses develop their own community,” Durbin says. “People claim it as their own course and they take pride in it, no matter which one it is. This is a gathering place for a lot of people.”

The food matters at Venango Valley. The food led to a relationship that resulted in the course establishing a small-town golf standard.

After purchasing the property in 1976, Joe and Mary Petrucelli incorporated savory and scalable recipes into the menu. The couple refined their offerings over the years and used daily specials to attract business: Wednesdays, Italian Night; Thursdays, Liver Lover’s Night; Fridays, Fish Fry; Saturdays, Pizza Night.

How appetizing was the pizza Joe Petruccelli cooked in an oven devoted to the dish? Durbin frequently visited Venango Valley, where he worked on the crew in college, for pizza following Saturday maintenance shifts at nearby Riverside Golf Course in 1986. Kim worked at the inn as a waitress. After noticing her a few times, Durbin asked Kim out following a Pizza Night shift.

“It’s funny how one little event in your life can change everything,” Durbin says. “For me, it was going to get a pizza.”

Durbin and Kim possessed land ethics stemming from their rural Pennsylvania backgrounds. Durbin hailed from Greenville, a small town 40 miles south of Venango in Mercer County. He grew up helping his uncles build and expand Pine Hill Golf Course, a modest public facility. Kim was raised on a farm two miles from the course she eventually owned.

They started their lives together in a more densely populated place: New York City. American Express hired Kim and Durbin landed an assistant superintendent job at Hackensack (New Jersey) Golf Club, an ultra-private Seth Raynor design, in the late 1980s. Durbin attended turfgrass management classes at Rutgers University while working at Hackensack. The best training for what awaited arrived came during a superintendent stint at Flanders Valley Golf Course. Leading the crew at the busy 36-hole New Jersey municipal facility taught him how to stay ahead of play and provide solid conditions with modest resources.

The couple’s retreat from big-city life started with Durbin accepting the superintendent position at Binghamton Country Club, a pleasant upstate New York private club with an A.W. Tillinghast-designed course. Wherever Durbin worked, Kim usually held side jobs in the restaurant and clubhouse. She was quietly obtaining golf, restaurant and banquet management experience to pair with her business acumen.

Early in Durbin’s run as a superintendent, the couple casually sought opportunities to purchase golf courses in a geographic region stretching from New York to Michigan. They had less time to think about owning a course once they reached Binghamton and their family expanded to include daughters Tori and Lily.

“I ended up with a nice job in Binghamton,” Durbin says. “Nice house, great membership at the club. We were pretty satisfied and then this came up.”

This was a chance to be involved in a group to purchase Venango Valley from Mary Petrucelli, who kept a promise to give Durbin and Kim first opportunity at acquiring the 150-acre property and inn. Here’s how Durbin and Kim described their connection to the course in a November 2023 phone conversation:

Venango Valley’s condition almost led to Durbin experiencing buyer’s remorse before buying the course.

“Here’s one of my favorite stories,” Kim says. “The night before we were supposed to close on the property, Durbin looked at me at 1 o’clock in the morning and said, ‘This place is going to be a mess. It’s going to be so much work. I don’t think we want to do this.’ Being in the business, he knew what it would take, whereas I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I thought we would be fine.”

The mess included a maintenance fleet with just one unit to mow greens and tees. An adjustable roller allowed the surfaces to be mowed with the same unit. Fairways were maintained using one Toro Spartan gang mower and were constructed without an irrigation system. The surfaces still lack supplemental irrigation. Coincidentally, never adding supplemental fairway irrigation helped the course financially, as Durbin found creative ways to provide solid fairway conditions without the expense of installing and maintaining a fairway irrigation system.

The nearly three acres of greens presented maintenance conundrums. The undulating surfaces offered glimpses of the potential Durbin noticed in the course. But that potential was tough to immediately fulfill because of a 3-inch thatch layer. The greens lacked automatic irrigation, so Durbin started summer days at 2 a.m., dragging hoses in solitude around the sprawling layout bordered by woods and farms. Exchanging lodging and food for labor with a contractor who needed a place to house a crew between projects at prominent private clubs helped Venango Valley receive a new greens irrigation system at a steep discount. A pair of pond expansions increased water-holding capacity.

“The golf course was just a matter of surviving the first few years,” Durbin says. “You couldn’t even mow the greens. They would scalp because there was so much thatch in them. They wouldn’t take any water.”

The inn also suffered from a lack of investment. The dining rooms only accommodated a few dozen guests, the bar barely had space for a half dozen drinkers and employees worked in a crammed kitchen. The main dining room sat atop an outdoor deck, which collapsed following a winter storm in 1996.

Despite thatch slowing greens and constant elbow-to-elbow indoor contact, Venango Valley possessed four critical elements to success: loyal customers, dedicated owners, high-visibility location, and charming golf setting. The warts Durbin and Kim continually noticed didn’t curtail business. “We were surprised by how busy we were,” Kim says.

Business accelerated as Durbin’s and Kim’s vision started formulating. Their accessibility, approachability, and willingness to invest in visible and subtle upgrades transformed Venango Valley. From pre-sunrise to post-sunset, Durbin and Kim — and often both of them — could be spotted at the course. They quickly realized that in a small town customers like to know business owners and employees appreciate bosses who execute the same tasks as everybody else.

“Right away, we worked shoulder-to-shoulder with our people,” Kim says. “Nobody worked for anybody. We worked together. We were in trenches doing the same thing everybody else was doing — sometimes stuff that was even worse than what everybody else was doing.”

The mentality stabilized the outdoor and indoor staffs.

Durbin relied on relationships from his days working at Venango Valley to build a team filled with retirees and students. The staff Zielinski led in 2023 consisted of 25 employees, but just two other full-timers, Todd Yenny and Jeremy Horning. Yenny was one of Durbin’s first hires. As he approached retirement and the sale of the course, Durbin hired Zielinski in June 2020 to lead the golf maintenance team.

Zielinski, who spent 15 years as the City of Erie’s golf course superintendent, realized he joined something unique when he started observing employees arriving at 5 a.m. for 5:30 a.m. shifts. A culture of excellence and commitment established by Durbin and Kim inspired Zielinski and aided his transition to a new job.

“To a lot of the people we employ, it’s not a job. It’s what they do,” Zielinski says. “They want to be a part of the team.”

Zielinski has worked in the municipal, private and family-owned sectors of the industry. He considers Venango Valley the best job of his career.

“I think what keeps golf alive are places like this,” Zielinski says. “People want to be a member of a country club, but many can’t afford it. Our motto is we want to have better conditions than everybody else at the same price.”

Nobody in Venango Valley’s history kept a more frantic pace than Kim, who handled everything from financials to filling kitchen shifts on busy nights. She worked exhaustively until the sale closed last year.

“Every year they did something for the customer experience,” Pero says. “It wasn’t for them. It was for the experience. They were hard workers. Kim never stopped. For most of the years he was superintendent, Durbin was out there from dusk to dawn. Kim opened the kitchen and closed it for years. Their work ethic won’t be matched.”

Durbin’s and Kim’s business philosophy hinged on indefatigability. Increasing volume produced funds for capital improvements, which were plentiful during their ownership tenure. Enhancements ranging from expanding the main dining room and practice facilities to adding a large outdoor pavilion to accommodate outings created more work for the couple. To help manage outings, the kitchen and other aspects of the operation, Durbin and Kim hired Larrie Rose, whom everybody associated with the course praises for her professionalism, affability and organization.

More outings and increased food and beverage sales meant Venango Valley could improve the golf and dining experiences while keeping green fees and menu prices affordable. A weekend round with a cart cost $40 in 2023 and 62-and-older golfers played 18 holes with cart for $25 on weekdays. A large bucket of range balls cost $5.

“It seemed like with all the volume we had, we always had money to spend,” Durbin says. “We could have bagged all that money ourselves. We didn’t take high wages. We just tried to keep the price down. It worked good for us.”

The Lorenos also invested in their employees, offering health and retirement plans and instituting a profit-sharing program. The loyalty of both sides was never more apparent than when Pennsylvania closed golf courses at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “When COVID hit, a lot of these retired fellas came to us and said, ‘We will work for you for nothing. Don’t worry about us. We’ll come and mow,’” Kim says. “That meant a lot to us.”

“But,” Durbin adds, “we still paid them.”

Customers stayed engaged in the course and restaurant during the shutdowns. Lines extended to Route 19 for takeout food orders. The reopening of the course didn’t alter the golf operation. Unlike many courses, Venango Valley functioned at near capacity before the pandemic. “We found ourselves turning away more play after the pandemic because we were so busy,” Durbin says.

Durbin and Kim started exploring selling the property and structures in 2018. The pandemic slowed the process, and they waited until the restaurant approached pre-pandemic customer and staffing levels to aggressively find a buyer.

Cervone and Pero didn’t meet over pizza. Or golf. Or even after Cervone started dating Kelly, who was one grade behind the pair in school.

They likely met in church or elementary school. They both played sports and considered themselves dreamers. “I don’t know if Mike remembers it,” Cervone says, “but I can recall times being younger, when we were in high school and stuff like that, talking about business and maybe doing something down the line together.”

Growing up in Meadville, a community nicknamed “Tool City USA” because of its tool and die machine shops, satisfied their desires to compete. Meadville High School flourished in basketball and wrestling in the 1980s, a tricky winter double for any Pennsylvania school, especially one isolated from the state’s major cities.

Golf offered summer recreation and competition, and Pero’s mother purchased him a junior membership at Whispering Pines Golf Course in Meadville. Pero and his friends walked the hilly course in the morning, ate a hot dog for lunch and played it again in the afternoon. “I really got the golf bug close to my junior, senior year of high school,” he says.

Pero’s golf passion never waned. He participated in leagues that rotated among area layouts — most of them hilly, a commonality among western Pennsylvania courses — before the demands of raising and supporting three sons decreased his free time. Pero has spent his entire life in Crawford County, which has experienced a decline of 7,000 residents from its peak population of 90,289 in 1983. Surprisingly, the county has 11 golf courses.

“It’s a blue-collar community,” Pero says. “A lot of toolmakers are out here in all the leagues and we have leagues with 140 golfers. It’s a tight-knit community. Everybody knows everybody. Meadville, Venango, Saegertown, Cambridge Springs, … they all blend together.”

Cervone is a golf enthusiast who moved away from home. Unsure of his long-term aspirations, he left nearby Allegheny College after a year and a half and spent a year working construction jobs with his father. He experienced life away from home when he enrolled in a building architecture program at New York Institute of Technology on Long Island. Cervone thought he unearthed a career fit until blunt discussions with the school’s faculty convinced him otherwise.

“I loved it,” he says. “I have never been one to crack books, memorize and study. In architecture, you are drawing and building. I never had trouble spending time doing that. I did really well. But the whole time I was there the professors kept saying, ‘You have no chance of getting jobs. There are too many architects in the world.’”

One of Cervone’s favorite activities in New York sparked a Plan B. “The campus on Long Island was an old hospital,” he says. “There were huge buildings around this campus and inside they had a 9-hole golf course, which you could play as a student for free. It was right outside my dorm window. I played a lot of golf and thought, ‘How cool would it be to be a golf architect?’”

Cervone returned to Meadville for the summer and called the American Society of Golf Course Architects. The society recommended switching majors to prepare for a golf design career. He contacted Penn State and interviewed with officials from the school’s landscape architecture program. With Kelly in the passenger’s seat, Cervone drove from Meadville to State College to answer questions and present his portfolio. He worked construction as he waited for acceptance into the program. Three days before the fall semester commenced, he got into Penn State. He deferred enrollment and worked another year of construction.

As a senior, Cervone met Tom Clark, a Penn State alumnus who partnered with Edmund Ault to form one of the nation’s most prolific golf architecture firms. Clark advised Cervone that earning a job designing golf courses would be as challenging as landing a full-time position designing buildings. “I had no clue at the time how difficult it was to break into golf architecture,” Cervone says.

Clark referred Cervone to an open position at Williamsburg Environmental Group in Virginia. Cervone married Kelly following graduation and he was scheduled to start at the environmental design firm after the couple returned from their European honeymoon. The day before the couple left, Williamsburg Environmental Group co-owner Ron Boyd mentioned that Bill Love had left Ault, Clark & Associates. Cervone chatted with Clark multiple times on his honeymoon and drove to Washington, D.C., for an interview after returning from Europe.

“It was divine intervention,” Cervone says. “I never put out a single résumé or a single cover letter, and I had two awesome opportunities. I was with Ault, Clark & Associates for eight years, and I haven’t really worked a day since.”

Cervone launched his own suburban Pittsburgh-based golf architecture firm in 2002. He has traveled extensively, designing and renovating courses, yet a small-town public facility near his hometown became one of his steadiest clients.

“Having worked with Durbin and Kim as an architect, I’d always known how special this place was,” Cervone says. “I have worked all across the country, and even before owning this ever became a thought in my mind, I felt like Venango Valley is one of the most impressive public golf courses I had ever experienced.”

Courses offering golf with cart for less than $50 hiring qualified architects to redesign tees, rebuild and reposition bunkers, and manage tree removal are anomalies. Cervone’s work trips home epitomized Durbin’s and Kim’s commitment to continually elevating Venango Valley. Cervone and Durbin routinely engaged in conversations about topics more important than bunkers.

“I told Jim, ‘You ought to think about buying this place,’” Durbin says. “And 10 years later …”

Multiple parties expressed interest in the course, with one group looking to add Venango Valley to a portfolio that included businesses in other industries. When the deal collapsed, Durbin says they became “a little more picky about who we wanted to sell it to. Jim was the perfect candidate to come along.”

Cervone knew an ideal candidate for a potential ownership group. “I wouldn’t even consider doing this without Mike,” he says. Passilla, another Meadville native, joined the group later.

The transaction featured some uneasy moments, especially for Pero, who left the tool and die business for a job as an estimator that he quickly detested. “I realized it wasn’t my cup of tea,” he says. “I had a family and I had to pay bills. I was sort of stuck. Jim buzzed me, and said, ‘Hey, do you want to buy Venango?’ ‘OK, let’s try.’”

Pero quit the estimator job and spent the final two months of 2022 observing the happenings at Venango Valley, learning as much as he could about the people and the business from Rose, fellow clubhouse manager Kristina Krizon, hourly employees, customers, and Durbin and Kim. The business represented a solid opportunity, but the personal stress amplified as 2022 ended without a deal.

“There was a point where I said to Jim, ‘I have to move on. I have been holding myself back from doing something else, hanging onto this dream. I’m not getting any younger, I have to figure something our,’” Pero says.

Durbin and Kim were also ready for their next phase. “We have been married for 35 years,” Durbin says. “In the golf business, I was gone in the morning when she got up and I would be sleeping when she got home at night. In 35 years, we didn’t really spend that much time together.”

In 2023, Pero experienced the sensation of spending more time at the course than at home as Cervone split his time between improving other people’s courses and operating his own. The duo relished the exhausting year.

Abundant thatch, inadequate equipment, and unsafe structures didn’t greet Cervone’s, Pero’s and Passilla’s arrival as owners. They purchased a turnkey business consisting of 150 beloved acres anchored by a practical and playable golf course, 13,000 square feet of cozy indoor space, an outdoor pavilion with capacity for 150 people, reliable maintenance equipment and carts, and gas wells for free heating. A case can be made they purchased perfection in the form of a vision motivated by giving others something to enjoy.

“One thing I loved immediately about it was the 1830s Federal brick building, the historic feel, the classy casual atmosphere, a nice well-maintained golf course, the beautiful vistas,” Kim says. “I think that’s what we saw, and I think we did OK getting it there.”

For the first time in his career, Cervone doesn’t need approval from an owner, board, HOA or committee to fulfill his vision for a golf course. He collaborated with Zielinski last year to increase the number of tee markers from four to six, reduce fairway acreage, add contouring and bailout area around select greens, eliminate the intermediate cut between fairways and rough, and replace 100-, 150- and 200-yard markers on the sides of fairways with black-and-white 150-yard poles in the middle of each fairway.

Sitting in a cart by the 15th tee on that fall day, Cervone admires his surroundings. He can see most of the back nine, the inn, French Creek and farmland beyond a waterway George Washington traversed. His eyes drift to the 14th green repeatedly during a conversation. The 8,194-square-foot surface features a severe front-to-back slope. It might be the trickiest green between Pittsburgh and Erie. It’s near the top of the to-improve list.

None of the women who jokingly jeered Cervone and Pero a few hours earlier mentioned the green. They enjoyed another charming fall day at a meaningful place. Cervone knows thoughtful actions must be implemented to keep them returning. Their predecessors established a small-town golf standard difficult to duplicate.

“We’re blessed, we’re really blessed,” Cervone says. “There are a lot of facilities out there that don’t come close to this one. All we had to do was come in and not mess it up.”

Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry's editor-in-chief.