"TE
Thank you for explaining your research methodology. I look forward some day to reading something you've written that involves this methodology. We all look forward to that day. Hopefully that day will come before too long. Afterall we aren't getting any younger. You aren't getting younger, and no one on this site is getting any younger. In fact no one in the world is getting any younger. So hopefully you will write something before we all die or the world comes to an end, whatever may come first."
Mr. MacWood:
The point is really not for me to write about all this (Ex Myopia, Merion, Oakmont, PV, NGLA, Shinnecock, etc, etc. etc. (all though I am doing one on the detailed creation story of Pine Valley)
The point, to me, is to do everything I can to see that it is all properly collected, catalogued, archived and preserved. That is why people like me and Wayne, Crosby, Disher, Wexler, D. White, Ammerman et al are working as we are as volunteers on the USGA Architecture Archive. It's too bad more don't get involved in this but it seems too many just have their own little niggling personal agendas and issues. When that is done to a comprehensive extent which is my wish and hope, I'm pretty confident it can all explain itself remarkably well and remarkably accurately, certainly to people with logical and level-headed minds and a basic understanding of the flux and flow of the history and evolution of golf course architecture.
I'll probably leave the writing to people like you and your protege who seem, in the interest of making names for yourself in this world of architecture, to want to see if you can foist some revisionist accounts on these clubs' histories to people who do not have the interest or the access to the real stuff that emanated out of these clubs and courses.
You guys can write to your hearts content about the "what-ifs". I'm more interested in things like what really was, why, when, how and by whom.