A Little History

In the early 1980’s Dan Steward bought a cabin in northern Michigan in the city of Luzerne. In 1984 Dan got together with a group of eight friends to organize a golf outing. The original gang (OG’s) were Dan Steward, Gary "Goose" Petty, Mike Majerczyk, Pete Deane, John Schoff, Bernie Cipa, Joe Wilhelm and Larry Senko. There were two others that played the next year for two that couldn’t make it and will be considered OG’s, they are Larry Walczyk and Ellie Borden. We all stayed at Dan’s two bedroom, one bath cabin during the weekend outing, which became the annual Dan Steward Outing. Originally the outing was over the weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but over the years it has morphed into five days, Saturday through Wednesday and remains that way to this day. It was, and still is, a great time for long-time friends to get together for golf, food, drink, games and, at times, spirited conversation. Who knew that it would become an annual event that has lasted, as of 2025, for 42 years. After the passing of Dan Steward on June 11, 2024, the outing was renamed to the Dan Steward Memorial Open.

It is the intention of those remaining players to continue this annual tradition for as long as possible to honor the tournament’s namesake Dan Steward.

Evolution of Record Keeping

Originally, the recording of scores, greenies and skins was done manually. Not sure how accurate the recording was since it was done after a round of golf and after those figuring out who won the days winnings after they had a "few" drinks. A few years went by and Mike Majerczyk thought that maybe he could put his computer programming skills to good use and automate the recording of scores, greenies and skins, thus relieving the manual effort of record keeping from those individuals that were otherwise not in a good state of mind to do the job effectively.

In 1989, Mike Majerczyk created a Windows-based Microsoft Access application to keep track of the outing’s player scores, greenies and skins.
In 1994 Mike added the tracking of money winnings to the Windows-based Microsoft Access application.
In September of 2013, Mike developed a web-based application (i.e. historical portal) to display the historical data collected since 1989. This gives all current and past players the ability to review historical score cards, winnings etc. online using a web browser. However, the recording of data (i.e. scores, greenies, skins, winnings) remained in the Windows-based Microsoft Access application.
In April of 2024 Mike replaced the Windows-based Microsoft Access data recording function with a web-based application (i.e. outing portal). With the new portal both the historical data review and the data recording functions are now web-based applications resulting in the elimination of the Windows-based Microsoft Access application. The entire tournament is now web-based, from recoding scores to distributing winnings.
In June of 2025 Mike updated the historical portal using a newer .NET technology framework from Microsoft, ASP.Net Core Blazor. Blazor provides a cleaner nicer looking user interface.
Using Microsoft's .NET technology to develop the web applications allows both portals to be accessed via any Internet browser on any device (e.g. phone, table, PC) using the same source code regardless of the device or the device’s operating environment.