Miami golf course squatter and his wife chased away after 40 years of fairway bliss

It was Christmas Day 1963 and there wasn't a single present waiting for Kenny Bethel. Dejected, the 15-year-old boy ran away from home. He ended up at a newly constructed golf course in south-west Miami with emerald fairways and swaying palm trees. He decided this was a better place to live.

Forty years later, his run of luck living on the grounds at the Palmetto Golf Course has just come to an end. He used to get on perfectly well with all the golfers - collecting stray balls and selling them back at a discount to members - but recently a few among them have been complaining about his presence. So he has to go.

"It's a huge dilemma," said Carlos McKeon, who has been manager of the county's public golf courses for 20 years and considers Mr Bethel a friend. "But when a few golfers complained that he was trespassing and it's against the law, we had to get him off."

Evicting Mr Bethel, 55, and his wife Francis, 43, who joined him in his grassy paradise several years ago, has become a slow process of attrition. Recently the couple was forced to start sleeping off the premises, under a bridge near by. And for the first time, managers have started locking the public toilets and shower rooms at night to keep the Bethels from using them.

Mr Bethel, who has plaits in his greying beard, said: "What have I done to deserve this?" He spoke about the day he left home and how the course saved him. He said: "It made me feel better, and it has ever since. I became this course and it became me."

But a manager at the golf course yesterday, Susan Walker, said that Mr Bethel had brought the problems upon himself.

She said that he "started to lose the golf etiquette that we have been teaching him" a few months ago.

He began walking in front of players when they were taking their swings, talking loudly on the fairways and snatching balls when they were still on the course.

That was when some of the members started complaining to Mr McKeon in Miami's recreation department.

"The letters started coming thick and fast," Ms Walker said. "It's really very sad, because for so long everyone had been so kind to him, giving him and his wife money, blankets and food and so on. We were never cruel to him."

Nowadays, whenever Mr Bethel approaches the edge of the course, staff members come racing up to him on their golf buggies, shouting at him to keep away. "Kenny, you have been warned," was their message to him the other morning. "You and your wife get off the course or we are calling the police" was another.

The affair is getting publicity throughout southern Florida, with sentimental tales of Mr Bethel's four decades of tranquil existence under the palms, watching the foxes at night, not to mention the courting couples who come after dark for a different kind of sport.

The course, meanwhile, plans to fire back with a concerted press campaign telling its side of the story. Among the points it will make will be that it offered Mr Bethel a job clearing balls a few years back but he refused to take it. It will also point out that his family lives only a few streets away, yet that he declines to take shelter there.