Mike,
Your bright colored map may be the most convincing item yet that the road was simply drawn as a nice curve with no real thought to golf by the land planner, pure and simple. BTW, I haven't been to that part of the site (even though I have played and toured Merion) but besides lining up the interesection, there are also topographical concerns in locating it in what turned out to be an inconvenient place for golf.
Basically, if not on top of a hill, or bottom of a valley, intersections need to be far enough from the top of a hill for site distance to prevent accidents. Someone in that area could probably go confirm that as a reason for why that intersection was located there by the engineers, resulting in the odd triangle.
David,
While you are wrong that I just started looking into the historic process, guessing like you do at most other things you call fact, the question is still legitmate as long as you are telling us that your process and analytical abilities are superior to those of others.
It appears to me that you start the process by ignoring the big picture, which is that participants and first hand observers like Wilson, Francis, Alan Wilson, AWT, and others say Wilson designed the course. Of course, you do, because your theory really got started in a two fold basis - TMac found one of the many long existing articles linking CBM to Merion that were news to him in 2003, and you found the manifest records for Hugh Wilson's trip contradicted the time frame you had read in Tollhurst, written in 1988.
IMHO, that started your search to see what else was wrong with MCC's history. All that is fine, but after three years, you still have no first person documentation at all that CBM was involved more than the record shows. NONE.
And most of your theories depend on those participants and all of their observations and records to be wrong, which would be a fantastic coincidence or conspiracy. None of the detail twisting YOU do can really change the big picture, and I think you direct the discussion to little details and inconsistencies (which would be natural in four independent accounts) because you don't have any big picture evidence. Again, NONE that show CBM was more involved than the record shows.
Take for example your argument that Tilly was talking about Flynn. I see your point, but he still says Wilson designed the course! If he wanted to remind people that Flynn was not the designer of Merion, but that CBM designed it, he would have said so! Tilly wrote that Wilson was primarily resonsible for designing that course, not CBM. But, you ignore that and deflect away from the most obvious point.
You argue vociferously around the direct words of Tillie to tell us they means something slightly different that only your historic skills can interpret.
None of your theories has direct documentation, and when asked to show it, you never do. They all derive from your reading of any inconsistency you can find in the record, and are extrapolated from there. You cannot show us a fact or document that says CBM was involved between June 1910 and March 1911 (other than a phone call/letter to set up that meeting)
Its that simple. You can argue all you want but yours is more a docudrama than a historical chase. Maybe its your Hollywood location and all the entertainment industry work your former law firm did, that makes that sort of reasoning come naturally to you! I don't know, of course, nor am I really a qualified historian (just like you, TMac and the rest of us) I do suspect that if we brought some history professor in here to grade your essay like an term paper, the grade would range between D and F, but that is just my opinon.
BTW, if you think new evidence has been brought up here recently, take it up with TMac, as he is the one who stated that recently. I just agreed.
It really is time to end this charade, with you either posting the evidence you say you have, and it should be first person documentary evidence of further CBM involvement or the timing of the triangle, because we have seen none.
I half think you (and maybe TMac) have notes written to be opened after your death that say "We can't believe we were able to turn sane and productive people into insane and unproductive people with our lon running hoax on golf club atlas.com. Ha Ha! It was just a joke."