"I thought Merion was a restricted club...
"
Back in that day it was, Anthony.
That's why the Jewish crew member of Merion that built the "Poconos" hole was fired and his Mah jongg bunkers were removed and the hole was moved to the other side of Ardmore Ave, and the 10th hole of Merion was ridded of any kind of name at all, Alps, Poconos, whatever.
This is also why Merion never refers to its holes by template names, particularly Macdonald's template names and particularly some Jewish crew member's template name from the Poconos.
There is not much question that Macdonald in the ensuing years became a world class curmudgeon, cursing and railing against everyone. David Moriarty is right, Merion and Philadelphia attempted to expunge any trace of Macdonald and his influence from the record of the actual building of Merion. They just didn't do a great expungement job. Basically 96 years later they've been caught red-handed at it.
There was obviously a ton of cool stuff, daring, wacko, mislabeled architecture, whatever, going on at Merion in the early days and certainly during that time when Merion East was under construction between spring 1911 and Sept 1911.
The club had a committee of total novices running all over the property, constantly running intruments they had no idea how to use on a drawing board (Francis), throwing bedsheets all over the site and waving their arms, trading real estate for the 15th green and 16th tee in the dead of night after midnight bicycle rides. The club had a totally soused foreman (Pickering) who was obviously practicing one of the most remarkable feats of "flask architecture" the world of architecture has ever known on the course when the rest were running around maddeningly on the other end of the property.
They had some young Irish kid out of Boston who was trying to learn to draw, a bunch of Italian crew members nobody could communicate with who were building bunkers on their own. Actually, the remarkable "White Faces of Merion" is what happens when you get a young Irish kid (Flynn) speaking some obscure form of Boston Gaelic to an Italian immigrant (Guiseppe Valentino) who doesn't speak a word of either American English or Boston Gaelic.
They had a committee chairman who was constantly sickly anyway who was building some greens in mudholes and tearing them up because he had some outlandish idea they should have decent turf on them. Not to mention the fact that this very committee chairman tried to pass off on everyone, including his brother and business partner that he was in GB two years before he actually went over there---and when he finally did go two years later probably not for the reason they sent him, but only for the purpose of hieing on over to Paree for some extended noocky and to cheat on his long-suffering wife. And to top off the shame of all that the lying young wench artist tries to drum up some sympathy for himself by trying to claim he almost went down on the TITANIC!!
It was just a remarkable time and a remarkable collaboration.
Personally, I think this restoration in the last number of years that Merion refers to as "back to the future" (to restore the course to its glory day of the Grand Slam of 1930) is for the birds.
They should've restored the course to its original glory day of Sept 14, 1912!!
They got rid of about three holes that you could actually take out a car on a drive or approach shot (what better risk penalty could you have on a golf course?), they got rid of a great little par 3 from which you had to go through the clubhouse to get to the next tee and during which you had the opportunity to get completely soused in the interim and they got rid of probably the best Jewish Mah jongg bunkers (a special form of combination Jewish/Chinese/game piece bunkers) the world of golf architecture has ever known and in my mind that's all a crying shame. They should all be restored immediately.
And they almost successfully managed to attribute the course to the wrong person, and one who was nothing more than just a normal run-of-the-mill member, and who was also a bed-wetting novice, mind you in an architectural sense, that is.
The golf course should be attributed to C.B Macdonald who deserves most all the credit for it, with a major assist from his son-in-law Whigam, and I CHALLENGE anybody to PROVE that it should be otherwise.