Lou:
Thank you but I do live in the general neighborhood and have been around here a while. If somebody's going to write a book on Crump a la Geoff Shackelford's "Cypress Point" or what you suggested it should definitely be Geoff Shackelford himself. I might write a lot on here but he's a much better writer than I am and a much better researcher too!
There already are a couple of books on Pine Valley and most of its history with some mention of its architectural creation and evolution--Warner Shelly's "Pine Valley Golf Club-A Chronicle" and Jim Finegan's recent "Pine Valley Golf Club--A Unique Haven of the Game".
But I think I learned from my "Gulph Mills Design Evolution-1919-1999" booklet that when it comes to analyzing how things happen in golf architecture and how it evolves, you have to leave no stone unturned. Things happen in strange ways sometimes and for odd reasons--reasons most people don't realize and many times for reasons far simpler or more mundane than we think now.
It helps to understand routing too and sort of how it works from scratch and how it progresses, connects, disconnects and how balance and variety is always factoring, what the obstacles and sticking points can be and are, how to think about overcoming them or working with them etc, etc and what goes through the mind of a man in Crump's situation.
I think of the way Crump went about doing Pine Valley as doing a bit of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, as I said before, particularly as he went into the conception of it with quite a defined balance and variety, apparently, maybe even too much of one. In this way he didn't make it real easy on himself, in other words! That seemed to be quite a mentality back then to produce something that really tested or examined a golfer's entire game and when you try to specifically space and balance that test conceptually going in, things can get complicated!
And of course he wasn't long into it when the idea of a true championship course was conceived (in the very beginning preconstruction and prepurchase Pine Valley was conceived of as simply a winter course!). Doing his routing seemed quite quick in places, for a while, but then the next parts of adjusting and refining his routing and holes and how the features and playabilities were going to work is to me like fitting rails into long lengths of "in the ground" posts--you have to keep adjusting and fiddling and sometimes you have to take a ton of them out (and Maybe some posts too) and go back and sort of start again. At this point or just before it may have been the time Colt helped him a lot! But I think in the end he went way past Colt's ideas and used, at the least, his own ideas or refinements of them! And frankly, other than the week or two in May of 1913 I'm not sure Colt ever saw Pine Valley again, although his partner Hugh Alison certainly did.
That's the way I think he did it mostly because that's the way you had to do it back then if you were trying to do something where he was the way he was. But the unique thing about Pine Valley, that all should realize, is the amount of time he spent there from beginning to near completion of the course and also the end of his life. He was also apparently an inveterate shot tester and sometimes apparently on his own by his own demand! That too, says a lot.
But Crump was apparently a very generous and accomodating man with his friends and collaborators. I've never seen anything to indicate that he would take the ideas of others in some proprietary way and not give them credit for it--actually quite the opposite! He seemed to have given a number of people credit for things, even conceptual credit for things that he never accepted or things that he changed later. I believe he was very clever that way and that he fully understood the power of public relations and basic advertising!
So it's undeniably evident to me that whereever he got his ideas and from whomever he got them that Crump was indeed the final editor of everything that happened until his sudden death.
And also Crump (and Wilson) were the best examples of what actually is the "Philadelphia School of Architecture" (Crump, Wilson, Flynn, Thomas and Tillinghast). The "Philadephia School" was not actually a style of architecture at all--it was more a time and process of collaboration! And it was that because all these men knew each other well and they did collaborate, of course Pine Valley being the finest and best example of all time. Crump managed to bring almost everyone into the process, from Philly, New York, Boston, Chicago, LA and Europe too!
Time on site and collaboration fascinates me! It never happened before like that and it never happened again like that! I would like to see it happen again, somehow, obviously the collaboration in smaller ways because the process Crump had going would be impossible today. But the time on site is the key too and that can happen again, anywhere, anytime!