What is up with Philly?

[Mike Sweeney]

http://www.memeticians.com/2008/06/a-chip-on-your-shoulder-growin.php

Stolen from a different website, but growing up in Philly, I do find it unique:

_______________________

Brotherly Love?

Imagine this: It is 1789, and you, Philadelphia, are the United States' favorite son. You are the cultural, social, and economic center of our country's world and worked hard to be this. Other's feel, however, that your greatness is only due to your geographic location, but you have just been granted the status of being our nation's capital, and you hold your head up with pride.

Just one year later, however, disaster strikes. New York City, your older brother, has just graduated and has passed you in population. Along with this newfound title of being the county's largest city, New York is also becoming more cultured, and over the next few years, a shift in our nation's culture and economy would send all of the attention its way up north.

Making matters worse, the U.S. Government, your parents, have also just announced that you will soon have a baby brother, Washington, D.C., a city that has been created specifically to house the U.S. Government. This process would take 10 years, and over time, you are becoming surly with the feeling that you are being left out. You begin to resent the neighbors to your north and south, and make the shift to becoming the industrial center of America. With that, though, there is no glory. Only working class citizens can fill the role of the blue-collar worker as Philadelphia becomes the largest city that everyone forgets to mention.

We are, in every sense of the word, America's city with middle child syndrome. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

_______________________________

Okay in terms of golf, can someone explain the following:

1. Two world class courses;

2. The focal point of GCA.com;

3. Has not seen a significant golf tournament for close to 25 tears;

4. None of the Paul ancestors had any foresight to buy beach property at the Jersey Shore and build their own Maidstone, so they had to go to Rhode Island and Maine for golf in the summer;

5. They post videos, argue history and make fun of outsiders, but very few have actually played Walnut Lane; Ran a guy from Virginia has;

5. MacDonald never built a course there. 

What is up with Philly?

[Mark Bourgeois]

I notice you're ex-Philly.  Weird: almost posted on Walnut Lane today...perhaps the Virginia Colony will pick a day to winter at the course.  Word to the Big Daddy Kane -- "Can't forget the posse down in Philly..." Let it rain propane!

[Joe Bausch]

Dear Mike,

    We've been waiting for youse guys from Philly to get your head out of your #10 at Merion Alps!  Ya' know, a little research work in the libary will do you a world of good.

Sincerely,

MacWood and Moriarity
---------------------------------

[Phil McDade]

You could've grown up in Cleveland....

http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=tortured/cleveland

[David Stamm]

I was born in Philly, but moved away as a child. I still have family there. Am I thought of as a bastard middle child by the Philly Boys? Does it somewhat forgive me for living in Disneyland?

[Chip Gaskins]

I have to admit...I used to think Philly was just a stop on the way north to NYC and Boston and that its better days were behind it....

Then after playing a few great Philly area courses and more importantly tuning in to the Philly crowd on GCA I realized I needed to pay a lot more attention to city of Brotherly Love.

Then I played with Mayday and spent some time with Bausch at the Beechtree closing party and knew Philly was, well different than I thought.

I really wish I could have been at the Tom Paul barn get together!

[Tony_Muldoon]

From the Manhattan screenplay

"Isaac: "Listen, it was a very nice meeting you - it was a
        pleasure and a sincere sensation, but we have to go.
        Because we've got to get some .. we've got to do some
        shopping, I forgot about it"

Mary:  "Listen, I don't even want to have this conversation, I mean,
        really, I'm just from Philadelphia: I mean, we believe
        in God."

Isaac: "What the hell does that mean?  What does she mean?  What
        do you mean by that?  'I'm from Philadelphia, we believe
        in God.'  Does this make any sense to you at all?"



"But he was always a sucker for those kind of women, you know,
the kind who'd involve him in discussions of existential
reality.  They probably sit around on the floor with wine and
cheese and mispronouce 'allegorical' and 'didacticism'."  "

[TEPaul]

MikeS:

The early history of Philadelphia is an interesting one. One of the best books on its ethos compared to other burgeoning metropolitan areas early on is Digby Baltzell's "Quaker Philadelphia, Puritan Boston". It essentially tries to point out how Puritan Boston's ethos was that man should exhibit his God given talents while the Philadelphia ethos was one of a good deal more, how should I say, equanimity. Baltzell's point was essentially that Boston produced more great men than Philadelphia did due to this difference. Of course this was early on and did not contemplate something like the out-of-control raucous Philly sports fan. 

For #4, the Pauls not investing in shore property----that's true. To get away from Philadelphia in the summer they mostly all ended up in a place called Isleboro, Maine (we've always called it "Dark Harbor"). There may've been a good reason for that which was in those days those kinds of people were virtually terrified by what was referred to as "Dirty Air" (the results of the uncontrolled contamination of the Industrial Revolution). Dark Harbor is an interesting place, started as a corporation that bought an island off the coast of Maine in the latter part of the 19th century. The participants were like-minded friends from particularly Philadelphia but also Boston, New York and St Louis and the island is like a throwback in time with some magnificent old houses (and a most intereting old 12 hole golf course that has virtually never changed--eg Alex Findlay, I think). The island is so secluded it has been somewhat rediscovered in recent decades by the new American aristocracy---eg Hollywood. For instance, in my great uncle, George Drexel's old house now lives John Travolta.

The Pauls all came from Philadelphia but I actually grew up in Long Island, New York, and have only been in Philadelphia for thirty years.

I do have an interesting extended family tree though that includes the Drexels, Biddles, Astors, Munns, Cadwaladers, Fells, Dukes etc.

If you want to read a very interesting book about that extended family pick up one out recently entitled "Uncharted Course", an autobiography by 91 year old Anthony Drexel Duke. I'd heard of Tony Duke, but what a remarkable man and world class humanist! The hilarious stories in it about his famous mother Cordelia Biddle and her father A.J. Drexel Biddle (the man about whom the well known book "My Philadelphia Father" and the Broadway play and Disney movie "The Happiest Millionaire" were done) are worth the price of the book alone. Cordelia's father was one of the most varied, interesting and funniest eccentrics I've ever heard of. Among many other things he actually taught undefeated Heavyweight Champion Gene Tunney how to box.

[JMorgan]

MikeS:

The early history of Philadelphia is an interesting one. One of the best books on its ethos compared to other burgeoning metropolitan areas early on is Digby Baltzell's "Quaker Philadelphia, Puritan Boston". It essentially tries to point out how Puritan Boston's ethos was that man should exhibit his God given talents while the Philadelphia ethos was one of a good deal more, how should I say, equanimity. Baltzell's point was essentially that Boston produced more great men than Philadelphia did due to this difference. Of course this was early on and did not contemplate something like the out-of-control raucous Philly sports fan. 

That book, along with The Protestant Establishment, are two absolutely wonderful E.DigbyB. books, the former particularly if you're interested in a lively look at the Quaker sects in and around Philly and, like Tom said, how the ethos affected the character of government, education, medicine, business, etc. up through the 20th c.  ... and provided a good thesis for why ...

Philadelphia, City of Firsts
Boston, City of Longests
New York, City of Latests

[TEPaul]

"That book, along with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, are two absolutely wonderful E.DigbyB. books, the former particularly if you're interested in a lively look at the Quaker sects in and around Philly and, like Tom said, how the ethos affected the character of government, education, medicine, business, etc. up through the 20th c.  ... and provided a good thesis for why ..."

JMorgan:

Speaking of that Quaker ethos that Baltzell writes about are you aware of the interesting events that took place just preceding the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 and one John Dickinson, Quaker delegate from Pennsylvania?

It was pretty danged neat, in my opinion, and highlights what the nexus of principle combined with the very best of good old fashioned principled "compromise" was all about back then between and amongst those remarkable men of the Second Continental Congress.


PS:
JMorgan, I went to Penn in 1963, and since Digby Baltzell's brother was my married uncle I used to stop in to his cramped book-filed office at U of Penn and just chat with him about just this and that. Little did I know then that he coigned the acronym WASP and that he was considered to be one of the best known and somewhat revolutionary historical sociologists extant, particularly for those string of interesting books he'd written. Some of the stuff the two of us talked about in those months was probably a better education on these kinds of things than I may've ever gotten in any classroom, and perhaps even his. The thing I remember best is getting him to admit that given his thesis on the time and tide and entire world of the WASP and the events of their history over here up to the date we were speaking on that their ethos and their survival as essentially the ruling class they had once been over here put them very much in a basic "no-win" situation!