Nothing could have been further from the truth. Underneath his business-like exterior, Catch Callahan was a loving, gentle, imaginative and humorous man, but in his line of business, he preferred to adopt a certain image… one of strength and power.

He stubbed out the cigarette he had been smoking in the gravel and made his way up the concrete walk to the country club.

The Bayou Country Club was located just outside of Houston on a large tract of land at the edge of a bayou. It was designed along the lines of a southern plantation with tall majestic columns surrounding all four sides of the main building and similar southern colonial architecture in the smaller out-buildings.

It was constructed in 1917 by a wealthy southerner named Colonel Jarvis Jefferson. Jefferson was a notorious drinker. His wife was a bit of a tart and his children immensely unruly. This caused him and his family to be denied entrance to other country clubs in the area. Unperturbed by this slight to his dignity, Jefferson built his own country club and made it grander than all the others combined. People clamored for admission, even those who had kept Jefferson out of their clubs and then it was his turn to do the blackballing.

Colonel Jefferson ran the country club until he died in 1949. His family sold the business to a gentleman named Howard Winthrop, who was a southern snob but definitely not a businessman. He allowed the place to fall into disrepair and eventually it went bankrupt. In 1976 it was to the corporate firm of Dwyer, Keefe, Corson and Kelly. The heads of that corporation hired Catch Callahan to help them turn the country club into a money-making proposition. Catch had just finished working on, respectively, a struggling Las Vegas hotel, a Los Angeles nightclub and a giant amusement park in Salt Lake City. He was tired and needed a vacation and he didn't believe the country club could be turned into a profit-making venture. When he was first approached by Gerald Kelly, one of the heads of the corporation, Catch argued "country clubs are a thing of the past. They are like hoop skirts and cavaliers-nobody gives a damn anymore."