Dan:
Regarding the Flynn book--I've been told we better get it out fairly soon or we'll be on the pace of Geroge Bahto in producing his wonderful book on Macdonald
(Wayne's doing his part but I'm spending too much fruitless time on Golfclubatlas.com).
My question to you, as I'm somewhat in the breach as to how to portray William Flynn, is do you think more rather than less should be presented about the man himself and particularly the clearly interesting world and time he lived in and around? To do this we'd have to go well beyond just golf course architecture and present the fascinating interconnected social world from that time Flynn plied and very suprisingly for a guy like him---sort of! Flynn's client list reads like a Who's Who in America at that time---perhaps more than any other architect ever!
Also I see Flynn as a real "transition" architect, perhaps even "THE" transition architect and that alone may surprise many who follow architecture, particularly as to the things he was breaking away from and getting into in architecture. Personally he was a daredevil, a hard charging, hard living man who apparently had a total world away from his work in his family. He was apparently a sometimes hot tempered, sometimes soft hearted Irish guy who wouldn't take any crap from a Rockefeller but was pleasantly kind to his lowliest field hand.
The real reason I ask is I keep getting the sense, particularly on Golfclubatlas, that few really understand or appreciate how different things were back then from today. So many seem to look back through the prism of some awareness of things that Flynn never lived to know or understand. I'd sort of like to try to completely strip away in the book the perception on the part of the reader of the awareness of anything that came after him---except maybe to mention it in the context of things Flynn could never know but that we do--if you know what I mean.
Only then, I think, can a reader really appreciate where he started from and where he finally got to in architecture--a span of time that really did see such a remarkable transition in golf architecture! And then just before the most massive transition of all in golf architecture he was dead and gone at 55 in 1945! I guess any of us could speculate what would've happened if so many of those "Golden Age" and transition architects had lived and worked into at least the first 10-20 or so years of the modern age beginning around 1950, but somehow to me that question is just so poignant with William Flynn.
He may have gone on to even greater things but on the other hand who really knows which direction he would've taken with a career that lasted 20 or so more years than it did. I keep thinking that some golf architecture book really should explore intricately that time of about 20 years that some of us call the "hiatus" in architecture--that time between about 1929 and 1949 and what that time in architecture and the world meant to what followed it. Both in golf architecture, in the evolution of our country and even the entire world that time was probably far more significant than we today realize!