Now that we have these ship manifest geniuses working can anyone tell me when George Crump traveled to GB in 1910 perhaps returning in late 1910 or early 1911? I have Ancestary.com but I thought I'd give David Moriarty or Tom MacWood the chance to come up with this information first so they can continue to feel like they're actually accomplishing something here.
RJ:
Yeah, we do have the step by step changes that happened and precisely when at Merion from the beginning on. But it seems to be David Moriarty (using some remark from Travis) who is saying that there was an "initial" stage that was considered to be a "Rough draft" by Merion that got seeded and put into play for a few years including the 1916 US Amateur.
Maybe David Moriarty would like to tell us just how and why the Merion construction from Spring 1911 to the fall seeding in Sept 1911 was considered to be a "rough draft" version of Merion East by Merion, Wilson and his committee. Let Moriarty tell us what the step by step changes were in detail and when. I've never seen anything from Merion that says the initial stage was originally intended by the club to be some "rough draft" version.
What I have seen in that vein, however, is the musings of Piper, Oakley, and Wilson years later explaining that if a club had the luxury of actually creating a course that way over a really extended period of time it was a good way to go. But then they added they realized at that point that most clubs didn't have that luxury for numerous reasons.
This seems to be something that occured to Wilson many years after the beginning. I've never seen anything from him saying this was the way they originally intended that it should be done or was going to be done.
To me this is just another good example of what someone like Wilson meant when he said 4-5 years later; "Looking back on the work, I feel certain that we would never have attempted to carry it out, if we had realized one half the things we did not know."
What he was saying, in my opinion, is back then they just didn't realize much of what they did not know and perhaps that was the very reason they just did it anyway.
I guess he was implying that if they'd known in the very beginning more than one half of what they didn't know back then they may've really begged Macdonald and Whigam to just do it for them, or just gone out and hired some professional golf architect to do it for them rather than assigning Wilson and his Construction Committee to do it.
And who might that have been back then? Young Donald Ross perhaps who had not done a course in Pennsylvania, or perhaps Alex Findlay or Tom Benedelow for a couple of days on their way to their next site of eighteen stakes on a Sunday afternoon for $50?
If you ask me most of us are misreading this time and the ethos of Merion when they decided to get Wilson and a membership construction committee to do the course.
If you read again what Alan Wilson wrote about the beginning he said they got advice in the beginning from two men who were NOT golf architects, they were "sportsmen" only who'd both won US Amateurs. Of course he was referring to Macdonald and Whigam.
They then sent their little member committee up there to talk to those two about how four years previous Macdonald had put together a little group of three without that much architectural experience at the time--eg Travis, Whigam and himself and helped by other amateurs such as Emmet, Stillman, Knapp and Sabin about how they did it on their own without an architect.
I guess Merion (who actually knew Charley pretty well through at least the Lesley Cup) figured if Charley could do this as he did four years ago there was no reason why they couldn't too with Hugh Wilson and his little committee.