Published: May 10, 2008 07:45 am            

Career a natural for Mike Whittaker

By Rachael Van Horn

Assistant Editor



His career started before he even knew what a career was.

When Mike Whittaker was 10-years-old, he was already sniffing out problems with the golf carts that skittered about on the Woodward Municipal Golf Course.

It was natural to the blue-eyed youth with a nose and an ear for diagnosing the illnesses of the little cars.

His parents, Avis and Steve Whittaker, worked and lived on the golf course on the south end of Crystal Beach Park.

That was nearly 33 years ago, but nothing has really changed, save what Mike Whittaker looks like-a little older, perhaps a little more focused and now he gets paid.

But he still wears the grin of someone who is doing what he is passionate about, an onlooker might say.

However, to understand Mike Whittaker and his golf car dealership known as Northwest Golf Cars, located on U.S. Highway 270 on the east side of the highway, you have to understand how it all started

Including the time before he was born, Whittaker’s parents spent 39 years maintaining and managing the Woodward Golf Course.

With that information, one might think a child would work in a profession as far from a golf course as possible. But not this one. Whittaker enveloped the love of the sport as well as the people and equipment used to support it.

“I often say my parents spent 39 years working for the golf club and I spent 27 working for them,” Mike Whittaker said.

Now, the 40-something year old entrepreneur employs his parents in his dream business on the hill just outside Woodward. “It was always the plan that when I opened my business that my parents would come to work with me in it,” he said.

He credits his parents for much of his success.

Of course, like most children whose parents can include them in their work, the Whittaker’s were key to his first memories of life on a golf course.

Their son bounced along on the green behind his father as early as a two-year-old, his father said in a recent letter in which he recalled the history of the business.

That exposure gave way to an earnest interest in the carts the boy saw golfers use. His interest was so keen, in fact that he got his own golf cart for his 10th birthday.

“I can’t believe I still remember that so well,” Mike Whittaker said. “ It had my name painted on one side and dad’s name on the other and it was blue and silver.”

Soon, that interest emerged as a talent for scouting out problems with carts for the likes of G.O. Williams and others who visited the course.

He still remembers a day when G.O. Williams asked him, just a boy, to look at his cart. “He had a bad cellunoid,” he said as he looked out as if he were seeing the memory on a movie screen.

According to his father, pretty soon everyone just knew that if you had a problem with your cart.

So years passed and Mike grew.

But if you ask his parents, “What’s Mike up to these days?” Why, they’d have to say the same thing they did all those years ago when his friends might have happened by with a fishing pole and plans for a Saturday.

“He was always out working on those carts,” Avis Whittaker said. “Working like that was his play.”

And so it is for the Whittaker’s son, whose work remains his play through his business.

Anyone missing the shop location would not have an excuse other than being badly distracted. A golf cart hoisted about 20 feet in the air should be a clear indication of the business’s existence not to mention what the business is about.

Northwest Golf Cars, an exciting little showroom of electric and motor run golf cars by EZ-GO and Yamaha, is not in its original sight though.

For the first nearly 15 years that Whittaker was in business on his own selling EZ-GO carts, he ran his organization at the golf course.

“In 1990, Mark West approached me about being an EZ-GO dealer for new and used golf cars,” Whittaker said. “I was still working for the golf course and also maintaining their fleet of golf cars as well.”

He was 25-years-old then and it was a signal to how his business would continue to grow through the years.

Two years ago, when Whittaker had already purchased some land and had planned to build a showroom, the property at his present location became available.

“It was like it was meant to be,” Avis Whittaker said. “This just went so smoothly and there were problems with the other location.”

Now, the family focuses on the growing needs of the business that not only maintains and sells new and used golf cars, but also customizes golf cars for their increasingly varied use in other areas besides the golf course.

“I think the exciting this is that these cars are being used in so many other ways,” Whittaker said.

Examples of some of the more interesting conversions of golf cars can be seen in the Woodward High School Boomer Wagon and the sports ambulance at Buffalo High School.

Other uses, Whittaker said, include for driving in lake areas, use in oil field locations as well as farm and ranch driving that does not require a pickup.

These days you will find Whittaker working more than ever at his business since it appears these more tenuous economic times have not put a dent in the popularity of golf and golf cars.

“About the only difference we see now is that more people are asking for electric cars since the price of gas has gone up,” Steve Whittaker said.

        

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