Curt Beusman, Club Industry's Lifetime Achievement Award winner, still works out at Saw Mill Club, which he founded. Photo by Gabe Hopkins.

He saunters into a jam-packed convention hall, gospel music blaring in the background, his robe draped from his shoulders. Brother Beusman is in the house, and he's about to preach from the Bible of Fitness Business. His congregation leans forward en masse, awaiting his next word with bated breath.

It's the early 1980s, and the entire industry is still in its nascent stages. That's why club operators have come to this International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA) convention to hear from the prophet of profits himself, like Moses down from the mountain, offering his Ten Commandments.

The congregation grows quieter. Then, the Rev. Curt Beusman utters his First Commandment:

“Thou shalt know all thy customers and their total spending at thy club, yea, even better than thou knowest thine own wife's charge accounts.”

That's the essence of Curt Beusman. He's a character. A showman. A storyteller. A businessman. A very successful businessman, mind you. And one of the most influential club owners this industry has ever known.

Beusman, founder of the Saw Mill Club in Mount Kisco, NY, is this year's recipient of Club Industry's Lifetime Achievement Award, which he will receive at the Club Industry Conference and Trade Show on Oct. 7 at McCormick Place in Chicago. His feats in this industry are merely a fraction of what he has accomplished in his life. You might even say Beusman is the Renaissance man of the club industry.

“He's one of the brightest people you'll ever meet,” says Rick Caro, president of Management Vision, New York, who received Club Industry's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. “He's one of the funniest people, too.”

SHOOTING FOR THE MOON

“I say to you, worship not solely the ancient god of tennis, nor the flashy idol of racquetball, for there are other fitness activities for the greater multitude that surely will benefit thy overall gross income, and insure thine own retirement plans.”

Born in 1931, Curt Beusman graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School, less than 10 miles from downtown Chicago, at age 16. He had skipped two grades during his elementary school years.

He graduated from Northwestern University soon after turning 20. There, his lifelong love of tennis blossomed. He played on three Big Ten Conference championship teams and captained the 1951 title-winning squad. He also won a singles Big Ten title and went on to play Junior Davis Cup tennis.

While on the Evanston, IL, campus, Beusman's love of the theater blossomed, too. He met his future wife, Jane, in a Northwestern musical review.

“She was a producer, I was a dancing boy, and she seduced me on the producer's couch,” Beusman jokes. “We got married about a year later.”

In his early life, Beusman's calling was chemistry. He studied nuclear engineering at the Oak Ridge (TN) School of Reactor Technology doing graduate research paid for by the government. That led to a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Cincinnati, which allowed his work at Oak Ridge to serve as his thesis project. (Beusman later received a master's in business at Columbia University.) He moved his young family to Mount Kisco in 1957 and worked as a chemical scientist on classified nuclear programs in White Plains, NY.

In 1960, while still in his 20s, Beusman founded Curtis Instruments with Edward Marwell. Beusman had obtained a patent license for a small elapsed time meter called a mercury coulometer, an electrochemical timing device. In 1969, that device was used by NASA on the Apollo Lunar Lander on the moon. The local newspaper's headline blared, “Mount Kisco on the Moon.”

By 1970, Beusman, still not quite 40 and with an invention of his still on the moon, grew weary of the scientific nature of his life. He got a taste of politics by running for and eventually winning election to the local school board. After he and Jane took a few days off, he sat up in bed the next Monday morning, turned to Jane, and said, “I don't want to go back to Curtis Instruments.”

“What do you want to do?” Jane asked him.

“You know,” he replied, “I think I'd like to build a tennis club.”

And with that, the Renaissance man opened a new chapter in his life.

NEXT PAGE: AHEAD OF HIS TIME

Want to use this article? Click here for options!
© 2012 Penton Media Inc.