[Joe Bausch]

As I dig up many Evans articles from the early 1900's I thought sharing them in a distinct thread might be a good idea.  This Oct 8, 1916 article talks about using fairway sod for greens, William Flynn, and even the caddy rates at the newly opened Cobb's Creek!

In this article Evans reveals he belongs to a smaller club in Philly.  Perhaps somebody might be able to figure out which club it was based upon his descriptions of the greens.  Some other detective work I did suggests Evans was a graduate of UPenn and might have lived in the Chestnut Hill area.

[Dan Boerger]

50¢ for a caddie at PV! That alone makes this article fascinating.

[Dave Givnish]

He mentions Whitemarsh several times, but those greens are not square, and definitely not flat.  What did the greens at Philadelphia Cricket St. Martins look like?

[D_Malley]

i think we should all now only refer to william flynn as
"greenkeeper flinn"

[Joe Bausch]

Ok, here is another Evans article (well, I think it is William Evans but no author is listed but he was the golf writer back then for the Philadelphia Public Ledger).

This article may be enjoyed most by GCA.com newbies that would like a short read on the origin of holes at NGLA.  This article is from August 21, 1910, so I guess before the course was formally opened.

[TEPaul]

Joe:

That last article about NGLA is truly interesting to me and may be another significant "piece of the puzzle" in the creation of Merion.

For instance, what in the world is William Evans, the Philadelphia Ledger golf writer, doing at NGLA in the summer of 1910??

Do you think Macdonald asked him to come up and cover the creation of NGLA to date for the Philadelphia market? Or do you think perhaps Merion and Lesley and Perrin and Griscom and perhaps Hugh Wilson and his committee were already well aware of it, had already been there and checked it out and certainly HOW Macdonald was going about it (amateur/sportsman architect and group) and probably told Evan's to go cover its progress for the Philadelphia paper and Philadelphia readership?

But why would they do that at that point? Doesn't it seem obvious----eg they had been talking to Charlie about their new land and their move already.

If you ask me I think this whole thing started with Merion and Macdonald right at the Lesley Cup in 1909! And where was that held with Lesley and Perrin and Griscom and Macdonald and others a part of it? It was held at Huntingdon Valley GC in Philly!

This timeline is continuing to fit together.

Evan's article on NGLA is interesting in how he describes the 8th (now the 17th) and even the present 18th. I do know that Macdonald did move the Leven green but from that description in Evans' article it is pretty hard to figure out where he moved it FROM! That hole definitely does not now play UPHILL.

[Joe Bausch]

Tom, I am confident that the article was written by Evans, but can't be 100% certain.  The material in that article before the NGLA commentary was on Jack McDermott, calling him the 'West Philadelphia wonder'.  That sounds like a local writer to me.  Also being published in the Public Ledger during that era were articles from P.C. Pulver.  But he was a New York guy, I think, and his articles always focused on golf around New York City.

[TEPaul]

Joe:

Seeing HOW the people from Merion knew Macdanold (The Lesley Cup at least as well as likely the USGA board) and considering that those very same people who had apparently been contemplating a move of their golf course from Haverford to Ardmore at least from mid-1909 and considering that in 1910 that move had been actively contemplated for at least a year, it is almost inconceivable to me that they had not been to NGLA and probably analyzed it BEFORE the primary writer for the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper made that journey to NGLA no later than August 1910 to write about it in detail for the Philadelphia readership.

I can't really imagine that Macdonald would've gotten a Philadelphia newspaper to report on his course under construction on his own without the help of Merion's people. It seem completely logical to me that the people from Merion who were contemplating their move sent him up there knowing full well what NGLA was like and how Macdonald was going about it and that they were at that time actively considering emulating the very same process he was using with an "amateur" (membership) committee of their own. Anything other than that sequence of events doesn't make a lot of sense to me if one really thinks about all the circumstances and particularly the people involved, not to mention that Macdonald very likely played in the Lesley Cup in Philadelphia in 1909 after at least one of the Merion members had already bought the land Merion is on.

There is no conclusive proof of this kind of thing in that article but the logic of it seems almost undeniable if one carefully considers together all the circumstances and people involved.

[Joe Bausch]

I don't know if this is a complete list, but here are many if not all of the players in the 1909 Lesley Cup according to a 1909 Philadelphia Inquirer article:

Pennsylvania:  Crump, Tilly, W. P. Smith, E.E. Giles, H.B. McFarland, Fownes, G.A. Ormiston, N. Macbeth, W.G. Pfeil, W.T. West, H.W.Perrin, and Simon Carr.

New York:  T.K. Fuller, H.R. Johnstone,  P. Gilbert, H.H. Wilder, J.G. Anderson, P.W. Whittemore, A.G. Lockwood, T.M. Laflin, W.C. Chick, W. Travis, F. Herreshoff, F.S. Douglas, J.M. Ward, A. Reed, F.R. Upton Jr., G.A. Dunning, J.F. Shanley Jr., H. Gee, and W.R. Thurston.

[TEPaul]

Macdonald only played in two Lesley Cup matches, the first two in 1905 and 1906. By his own admission Macdonald's game was going south in 1906 and would from then on.

Macdonald was certainly very much part of the famous "Foursome Controversy" that surrounded the Lesley Cup Matches and Lesley Cuppers between 1906 and 1908. Macdonald's opinion was one of the strong ones in favor of strictly foursome competition in the matches.

I can't attest to how the Lesley Cup was back then but if it was anything like it became and there's no real reason to think it wasn't back then, one should understand that the Lesley Cup is and probably always has been as much like a club as it was or is like just a golf tournament. As long as I've known about it there have always been a number of Lesley Cuppers who come to Lesley Cups but don't necessarily play in it. It seems like if someone was once part of it they always can be---ex: Tillinghast coming back to it in the 1930s when he hadn't actually played in it for decades. If the Lesley Cup and Lesley Cuppers were anything back then they were and felt they should be disseminators of ideas about things to do with golf, not to mention the fact that a number of them were part of the USGA's board and committees. The world of golf in that particular way back then was a very small and tight-knit circle. In the Lesley Cup back then we are only talking about selected teams from New York, Philadelphia (in 1909 expanded to include Pennsylvania), Massachussets and some years later expanded to include Quebec.

But back in that day Lesley Cuppers were definitely the best players those regions could muster. Today and probably since the 1930s Lesley Cuppers have tended more towards people who have something to do, or have had something to do with golf administration in some way.

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