Tom,
If you would be so kind, I would appreciate you posting the following;
David Moriarty,
Thank you for your words of support and encouragement in post #1425. It is greatly appreciated and hopefully we can move forward in any of our dealings with each other in that spirit of discussion and not confrontation.
Frankly, it gets difficult to participate in productive discussion when one is accused of lying and deception, or more euphemistically, disengenousness, as has happened too often in the past. In that regard, I hope to answer a few of your open questions, and show an example of how those inflammatory words and accusations (by parties on any side of a disagreement) can lead to erroneous conclusions.
First, in answer to your question about my contention that by 1940 Cobb's Creek still had the highest number of rounds in the country. To be honest, I have no idea at present what my source was for that information. The "book", as it is, never started out to be anything but a collection of the articles and other information that some of us (mostly Joe) had found over time, and the writing of it happened in stages over the past four or more years. At some point I tried to take this wealth of raw information and put it into some type of chronological order that told some of the story(ies) in chronological order.
We wanted to present this information (in hard copy) to various parties we thought would be interested, such as the Fairmount Park Commission, the Golf Association of Philadelphia, the Billy Casper Golf Management Company, the USGA, etc., with the goal of 1) disseminating this information for posterity, and 2) hopefully igniting interest in our restoration efforts.
Because we never intended this to be a book for widescale distribution, or something available online, and certainly not for profit, I frankly didn't do a very good job of footnoting and sourcing the various entries as they were collected over time. Frankly, the book is a bit of a trainwreck in that regards, but we deemed the information it contained as so competlling and valuable for historical and restoration purposes that we don't care too much at this point and I'm certainly not going to go back and try to pull all that together retrospectively.
So, as far as the 1940 claim, if I don't recall or find the original source for it I'll delete that statement from future editions.
In a similar vein, you asked;
As for your post above, as you said all that information is in your work. I don't think repeating it here addresses Tom's questions or mine. For example, I don't understand how you guys distinguish between someone like Carr, who was also on the committee but gets little credit, and someone like Crump, who is on the same committee but is hailed as if he was one of the designers. My post of yesterday where I chronicled all of the information we had on George Crump's role in one place chronologically was meant to address Tom MacWood's contention that there is no evidence that Crump was involved in the design. Similarly, I pointed to the evidence from the book to address our mentions of Walter Travis, George Thomas, and Ben Sayers, and indicated specifically what was written about each.
This was in recognition of the fact that not everyone here is inclined to wade through 344 pages of details looking for the information. Essentially, I felt that Tom's statements were calling my integrity into question, and needed addressing, so I was happy to provide that first-hand evidence which I think points out that 1) Crump was on the Committee charged with locating a site for a golf course in 1913, and subsequently he was put on the design and construction Committee which created a routing of the course in 1914, and journalists mentioning who all were involved in the creation of the course mentioned that Crump (along with others) volunteered to do this "for the love of the game". I think that's pretty compelling, frankly.
To your point, about Father Carr, however, I would agree that we've given him short shrift. I'm hoping to address that and provide more information about him in a future edition. Joe had found the articles citing Crump's involvement back some time ago, and when I first found mention of Carr in the GAP Minutes I thought perhaps he had been named to the committee but never participated, as I had no other contemporaneous evidence to include him. Then, last fall, I looked again at an old, very faded article that I only had a poor hard copy of and noted that the very last paragraph included the members of the committee, which I had never noticed before. That's the article I subsequently scanned and posted that credits Hugh WIlson with drawing the tentative first plans for the course, but which also includes the members of the Committee including Father Carr. Then, over the winter, Joe's find from Philadelphia Golfer (the Joe Dey article) cinched it, and as I said, Carr has not been given enough credit in comparison to the profiles we've done of some of the other men involved.
Finally, perhaps a little lesson to all of us when we question each other's honest and integrity...
Some months back all of us were involved in the silly and pointless imbroglio about whether AW Tillinghast's account of George Crump being able to see that the rolling land which later became Pine Valley was markedly different than the usual flatness of south Jersey. Patrick in particular stated that this would have been impossible because of the thickness of the trees as well as the speed of the train and the limited view of a passenger on that train.
This past winter, without knowledge of the other, both Bryan Izatt and I went to Pine Valley to take photographic evidence of what was visible from those railroad tracks. Both of us arrived at similar conclusions that 1) The amount of deciduous tree growth was roughly half the forest, and in some areas was the predemoninant growth. What this meant with the falling leaves and dying away of undergrowth is that it would have been hard to miss the difference of the underlying hilly, sandy terrain compared to the rest of their trip across low-lying plains, and that 2) there is no way that it would have been impossible for someone to make that observation.
Patrick's other point was that the train was moving too quickly, and that a passenger sitting facing in the direction of travel would have a very oblique, at best 90-degree view out the side of the train at the passing terrain, hardly enough concentrated time to see the forest for the trees, so to speak.
However, this assumption is where the problem lies. First, let's look at some of the surrounding terrain just off the tracks;
I've purposefully tried not to show the pictures I have where you can see long views into the property because to be fair, those areas had trees removed for golf. And, I guess it's plausible to argue that someone sitting facing the conductor on a coach seat in a passenger train travelling at 70mph might have to be pretty quick and astute to notice differences in topography out their side window.
However, I've had this picture of George Crump getting off the train in Atlantic City for some time now and it wasn't until this past winter that I realized something that shows George Crump not only had a side view out his window, as well as out the other side, but also long, dedicated views of the terrain BEHIND him in the distance.
Here's the photo, and notice the car that Crump is disembarking from. Notice it's position at the end of the line;
I did some research on passenger trains of this era, and this is what I learned.
[bAn observation car/carriage/coach (in US English, often abbreviated to simply observation or obs) is a type of railroad passenger car, generally operated in a passenger train as the last carriage, with windows on the rear of the car for passengers' viewing pleasure. The cars were nearly universally removed from service on American railroads beginning in the 1950s as a cost-cutting measure in order to eliminate the need to "turn" the trains when operating out of stub-end terminals.[/b]
Here is the type of car that George Crump was travelling in, as well as a good indication of the type of view he would have had along those tracks just after Clementon Station. Although Patrick will likely never admit it, I think everyone else can make their own determinations as to whether Tillinghast's story about Crump's discovery was "impossible";
Thanks, again,
Mike