Growing up in the small East Texas city of Tyler, there weren’t a lot of entertainment options, but one mainstay was Putt-Putt mini golf. We’d go fairly-often—a nice alternative to renting a VHS movie at Video Joe’s or spending the evening feeding tokens into the games at Mazzio’s pizza. Every year, my Cub Scout pack had a mini golf tournament, which I won one year, but only because one of the den mother’s caught another kid cheating. Hot summer nights from my earliest memories through high school are punctuated by a fun evening out at Putt-Putt.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise that when I recently learned that after 65 years, the Tyler location was closing down, I convinced my wife to make the two-hour journey from our home in the Dallas-area to my hometown for one last night of memory-making. And, perhaps a bit apropos, I thought that the best way to document the Last Night of Putt-Putt would be via instant photography.