"As the use of golf carts became universal, par threes lost their major appeal—shorter walking distances."

I'm a little behind in my reading, so I just saw Jeff Neuman's WSJ call for more par-3 courses.

Yet short courses have struggled in the marketplace recently. According to the National Golf Foundation, executive and par-three layouts make up 9% of the nation's courses but accounted for 22% of course closings in 2009.

I learned the game at a nine-hole course surrounding a driving range. I spent many hot afternoons going around and around the place, even playing through a partial solar eclipse one summer. The course is long gone, but some of my lost Top-Flites are surely still there, quietly testing the half-life of Surlyn.

Such courses dotted the landscape in the 1950s and '60s, providing entry-level golf after a period when few 18s were built because of the Depression and two wars. Geoffrey Cornish, the 95-year-old dean of American golf architects, owned a flood-lit pitch-and-putt course in Shrewsbury, Mass., and laid out and built a slew of them for clients up and down the East Coast. Then the boom stopped, Mr. Cornish recalled: "As the use of golf carts became universal, par threes lost their major appeal—shorter walking distances.