"TEPaul,
Mel Lucas's recollections would seem to provide a value added, but, one would have to view play of the hole in an entirely different context, given that green speeds in the 60's and earlier are far different from today's."
Pat:
I've never met Mel Lucas, although I hope to soon. He's a friend of Willie Dow. However, I have read a report he did for Merion East a few years ago. That report was most interesting, to say the least. The basic theme of it was how exactly to find the basic architectural "lines" and such of the original greens and bunker surrounds of Merion East by soil probing. I have that report around here somewhere but my recollection is that Mel explained how soil probing could basically determine what he referred to as "Hugh Wilson's fingerprints".
Just think about that a moment and what it means. By probing down through the soil on top of a bunker's top profile, for instance, such as those fronting #8 and #13 it's possible to establish almost exactly the top profile of those old bunkers when they were almost original. Essentially what that could do is determine the exact extent of what the evolutionary build-up was on those bunker top profiles over decades of play and maintenance. In the case of those two bunkers obviously we're talking a build-up of FEET!!
Once you've established what the top of the old profile once was you can begin to estimate how the greens once tied into those top profiles and what basically the entire "lines" of those old greens and their bunker surrounds once looked like--most importantly the vertical dimensions or height lines. Length and width dimensions are quite easy to pick up off old aerials but obviously height or the vertical line dimension isn't and this is a way of actually doing it on the ground to match with what on-ground photos may still exist!!
Interestingly and apropos to what you just said about the differences in green speed today vs yesteyear regarding that old 12th green at GCGC, this is exactly what Mel Lucas was attempting to estimate for Merion if they restored those original old "Hugh Wilson Fingerprints" to the greens of some holes at Merion and used today's green speeds on them!
So I guess you can get a clearer picture of what Mel Lucas does and could do for GCGC if restoring that old green is something the club really wanted to consider.
However, it was clear that "Hugh Wilson's fingerprints" did exist under Merion's bunker and green profiles of today (or certainly before the recent bunker project) but the same may not be true under what is today the 12th green at GCGC. When they did that entire green and green-end redesign on #12 back in the 1960s or whenever it was redone, they may have wiped away the architectural "fingerprints" of Travis or Emmet or whichever one of them did that interesting green, but perhaps not.
The point is Mel Lucas through some soil probing could probably figure that out for the club! What that soil probing turns up from that old green's architectural "lines", particularly the height or vertical dimension lines could then be matched against any old on-ground photos if any exist of that hole.
Once you have all that (if those old architectural "fingerpirnts" still exists out there under the present 12th) you've pretty much done all the historic research on that green that's possible to do.
At that point that research can fairly exactly determine what the grades and degrees of slope and contour once was and from that you can begin to determine what playability of today's greenspeeds would be on that old architecture and begin to adjust the slopes and contour accordingly to get it more in-line with the requirements of today's far higher green speed.
I call Mel Lucas an architectural archaeologist because of what his soil probing expertise can determine and what it can mean to the restoration of old architecture that apparently no longer exists. The point is, in some cases you can very closely recreate it from what lies underneath (those old "fingerprints") some of today's redesigned architecture.
I think GCGC may have to be lucky to find those old architectural fingerprints under what's out there now as Mel could have done at Merion. I have a sort of sad feeling on a green like #12 that when they redesigned that green some 40 years ago they may have wiped away those fingerprints and perhaps used the dirt that used to be that old green and those old architectual "fingerprints" in some other way or maybe even somewhere else around that green!