I echo Tom's previous posts.
Charles River was a pleasant surprise for anyone interested in Ross. The topography around Boston is wonderful for golf and Charles River has it all over. Very good time playing golf with Ed Baker and Dave Miller. Dave BBQs the biggest NY Strip steaks and it was fun to have cocktails and watch Boston College football with the boys and their wives.
The Country Club is a magnificent place, everything on a grand scale, except the green sizes (not complicated contours except the original 7th). The rolling hills, rocky outcrops (never heard of pudding stone before), and scenic beauty is a wonder to take in. Nothing beats lunch on the porch except playing the golf course. One of the best courses I have ever seen with the best bunkers anywhere; perfectly placed and maintained. By far the best country club considering all the activities, the topography, and the all buildings' architecture.
I believe, though we will not state without further proof, that as Flynn's 9 hole designs were incorporated into a different routing progression of the original course (not originally a seperate 9 but incorporated into the original 18 with the Clyde 9 as original and the Squirrel 9 including some Flynn holes with some of the original holes played as part of Primrose 9) that either the new 9 holes were designed with the original in mind (bunkers looking similar) or that the original bunkers were redone by Flynn when the new 9 was incorporated in. We need to study any work on the bunkers and the greens to see if Flynn worked on them.
Ground photos before and after Flynn's work should determine if the number, location, and look of the bunkers (perhaps greens) on the original 18 were done by Flynn or not. We also think that given the radical redesigns and reroutings of the original holes, that some work may need to have been done to create a unified look, which it certainly has today. There are great holes all over that course.
We did a bit of golf archaeology to locate old tees and green sites and learned of some constraints (building tennis courts for instance) that mandated that some holes were lost and others needed to take their place. Cornish did some of this work and we will talk to him to straighten out these changes.
The course historians and the entire staff at TCC were very helpful and the research continues with their help. Particularly helpful were Louis Newell and Fred Waterman. Hopefully we helped them learn a bit more about the course evolution as well.
It is taken for granted by many on this site (Mark Fine, Mayday Malone, etc) that Flynn knows how to rout and design on hilly terrain. We are learning with studies of Atlantic City CC, Boca Raton North and South, Indian Creek (radical engineering), and now Kittansett (Flynn's drawings for Opa Locka in south Florida show as well) that Flynn was a master designing and building on flat land. At Kittansett (for the most part as flat as ever seen) he used piles of stone (construction photos showed tons of rocks that needed to be moved) to create mounding and building up bunker forms with the rear edges on cross bunkers many times hiding landing areas between the bunkers and greens.
The head pro, Steve Demmer, and the course super, Lenny Blodgett (40+ years there) were very helpful. While we are sensative to the club's notion of a one hit wonder member designing the course, we think the facts when accumulated will say otherwise.
The greens at Kittansett are all built up to avoid flooding problems, although severe storms have in the past raised flood levels more than 8 feet above ground level, For the most part they are pretty simple, yet on the all-world long par 3 #11, it is as wild a green as you're likely to see with a large upslope from the lower right to the upper left. Awesome! I hope Tom's balky camera worked well enough to see these great holes again. BTW, if anyone wants to donate pictures of various Flynn courses we could use them and will properly attribute them if used.
We think the hole drawings provide irrefutable evidence that Flynn designed the holes in addition to routing the course. Hood was a real big deal there and probably oversaw the construction. Flynn never fought the attribution. Perhaps it benefitted him as Hood was a member, like many others at Kittansett, of The Country Club and this certainly might have helped him get the job there to build Primrose 9 and other work that he may have done a few years later.
Ross proposed an 18 hole addition to TCC in 1921 but all the land needed was not acquired, although some was purchased and was used for the Primrose. Ross also came to Kittansett to consult but his ideas were seemingly not incorporated.