"Since Mike Cirba put that article up first, should he get the credit for discovering a heretofore unknown historical fact, should I get the credit because I read the article closely, or is this something where I was the only clueless one?"
Chipperino:
I say, sure; why the hell not give Mikey and Joey and you credit for discovering a heretofore unknown historical fact!
I mean I don't see what difference it should make if thousands of people once read these articles when they came out about a century ago and were aware of these things. I think Merion's history book reflects this but perhaps not. I know our book has for about 5-6 years now but obviously it's unpublished even if some people who have looked at parts of it don't seem to understand that.
I hope you realize that this kind of thing----eg finding a newspaper article or two today that mentions something that someone reading it was not aware of before, and then just considering it in a vacuum unsupported by what the actual history of Merion has said for years can lead to numerous threads that last for years!
What I'm particularly referring to is Tom MacWood's 2003 thread on here entitled "Re: Macdonald and Merion?"
In that thread he apparently found a couple of articles that mentioned that Macdonald/Whigam had advised MCC and Wilson and his committee back in 1910 and 1911. Since he'd never been to Merion and was apparently unaware of what its history had always said, I guess he figured he'd just discovered something theretofore unknown.
So he put a thread on here back in 2003 asking if anyone knew what it meant specifically or in architectural detail. As you can see if you look at that thread that's way back in the back pages now some of us here who were a whole lot more familiar with Merion's history than he was told him the details have always been somewhat unknown because other than a few instances (such as Francis's story) that kind of hole by hole detail and who did what and where and when was just never recorded, but that in an over-all sense everyone connected with that project tended to give Hugh Wilson the lion's share of the design attribution while always recognizing the advice and help from Macdonald contained in the early records and in the club history book.
You can even see if you read that thread that first me and then eventually Wayne Morrison who arguably knows more about the details of Merion's architectural history than anyone alive, came on and basically told Tom MacWood the details were relatively unknown and that it would probably be best if someone like him did not try to make too much in a virtual vacuum of those two articles he'd found.
In my book, that was a very reasonable and accurate response from both me and Wayne but if you look at Tom MacWood's response to it, it's pretty hard to miss that he took a certain amount of umbrage at Wayne's response apparently assuming Wayne was accusing him of being something less than the self proclaimed expert researcher/writer he had been telling us all on here that he was.
Merion's original sequencing was the way it is now, it was changed in the mid teens and then changed back to what it was originally and I think you and Mikey and Joey should get credit for discovering it and pointing it out to the new world.