"Yes, Bill, and I know now why Tom Paul never became a lawyer--nobody could ever afford to hire him!"
Richard the Magnificent:
You're fairly right about that. To get me to practice as a lawyer it would take more money than almost anyone could afford.
One thing I'm beginning to seriously wonder about is if Macdonald and Whigam were asked by the "Special Search Committee" (Lesley, Felton, Bodine Baily, Griscom and Lloyd) to come to Merion in June of 1910 to talk about ANYTHING OTHER (such as a real routing and hole plan) than the general suitablility of a SITE for a golf course and golf CLUB why are we assuming they were the ONLY ONES talking to Macdonald and Whigam at that time? Other than Lloyd not a single one of those men on the "Special Search Committee" would have anything to do with creating the actual course.
Why would the members of the "Special Search Committee", who we are told by both Wilsons and the Merion history book were only looking for possible sites for a move, be talking to Macdonald about the real specifics of a course at that point? If Merion's search committee had considered the Ardmore site as their choice seriously enough, at that point, to be talking about the specifics of a course on that site one would think Macdonald and Whigam must have also been talking to some of the men who would built it, certainly including Hugh Wilson.
To think the "Special Search Committee" could have been talking in specific detail about the design of their future course with Macdonald and then just wait six months to tap the people who would ACTUALLY DO IT seems pretty ass-backwards to me.
I don't know, to consider that the search committee were the only ones who got involved in discussing specifics of the routing and design of a course in June 1910 and then just dropped out and turned it all over to five guys who'd had nothing to say about it at all who would actually do it seems pretty odd.
If any specifics of a routing or holes were discussed or generated in June 1910 I bet Wilson was very much out there to discuss it too. Failing that, it would seem that nothing specific about a routing or design was discussed as seems very likely from the actual words of Macdonald's letter of June 1910.
It seem to me if Macdonald/Whigam had anything remotely to do with an actual specfc routing and design, that too MUST have happened beginning in 1911 when Wilson's committee was appointed. Maybe January 1911 and that visit of the "Construction Committee" to NGLA is the key here but in Hugh Wilson's report he did speak pretty specifically about what they did there for two days and getting a real routing and design for the course from Macdonald and Whigam was definitely not one of the things he mentioned.
I think it's more likely than ever that a lot more of what they were all discussing with Macdonald throughout was how to grow grass. I've thought that for years now---hence those massive files of agronomy letters from both Wilsons and precious little about architecture.
It would make sense from Macdonald's perspective too as in 1910 he was in the middle of experiencing one massive agronomic grow-in failure at NGLA causing him to delay the formal opening of NGLA for a year.
This suspicion would seem to be confirmed by Macdonald's prescient remark when he first visited Crump's Pine Valley: "This could be one of the great courses if they could grow grass on it."
Interestingly Crump site's soil was almost identical to Macdonald's and both were about as opposite of Merion's as they could get soil-wise.