"Laying out, plan, arrange and other terms were used to describe the act of routing golf holes, but laying out was by far the most common term used."
Tom MacWood:
Thank you. I would completely agree with that. Therefore, it is very interesting that the Wilson Committee report to the Merion Board meeting of April 19, 1911 which is actually the first committee report to the board since the committee was formed and includes a chronicle of what they had been doing over perhaps 2-3 months, also includes all three words and terms (laid out, plan and arrange) in one single sentence of that committee report to the Board!
And of course the timeline is notable since everything they reported in that committee report occured BEFORE their final plan out of five different plans in the preceding month was submitted to the Board on April 19, 1911 and approved by the Board and before they began construction.
Therefore, although the Merion records also report that Macdonald/Whigam assisted and aided Merion on three separate occasions over a period of ten months, this looks like pretty clear proof to confirm the many decades old interpretation of MCC and Merion G.C. that Hugh Wilson and his committee created multiple plans (routings) for Merion East during that period, including the one plan (routing) out of five Wilson Committee plans selected by Macdonald and Whigam on April 6, 1911 that was submitted to the Board for approval. The committee report also records the events of April 6, 1911 in more detail----ie that after going over the ground itself and going over the five plans shown to them by the committee on April 6, 1911, Macdonald/Whigam selected one of the plans and said they would approve of it as they felt it included the best last seven holes of any inland golf course in the world. Again, that was the plan submitted to the Board on April 19, 1911 (on paper, by the way) and it was approved by Merion's Board and became the Merion East golf course.
Of course this all occured before the course went into construction which would mean they were not speaking of or writing about "laying out" meaning actual construction of golf holes on the ground which is what the IMO piece "Missing Faces of Merion" contends and concludes that that was the Wilson Committee's sole responsibility (to construct the course to someone else's plan).
This also means that the architectural history of Merion East as always told by Merion GC with Hugh Wilson and his committee being completely involved in all phases of the creation of Merion East with the aid and assistance of Macdonald and Whigam on three separate occasions over a ten month period is true, as Merion originally recorded it and always told it.
Therefore, there is no myth or mythology there!
The Desmond Tolhurst history book of 1988 appears to have made only two real historical mistakes, which did turn out to be a myths. The first was when the Tolhurst Merion history book assumed and reported in 1988 (77 years after the facts of 1911) that Wilson went abroad in 1910 rather than 1912.
The 1988 Tolhurst history book's second mistake was a story that is even more ironic-------it also reported that there had long been a romantic rumor around Merion that Wilson almost went down on the Titanic but that that could not have been true as his trip abroad (1910) was almost a year and a half BEFORE the Titanic sunk. That reported romantic rumor of course turned out to be the truth, as Wayne Morrison reported a number of years ago and David Moriarty later confirmed when he produced the ship manifest of Wilson sailing from abroad a week or two after the Titanic sunk.
The Titanic story and Wilson actually gets even odder. The father (Clement Griscom) of Wilson Committee member, Rodman Griscom, was the chairman of the board of International Mercantile Marine (IMM) that essentially owned the White Star Line that owned the Titanic. And added to that, Merion Board member John Thayer went down on the Titanic and Hugh Wilson assumed his position on the Board of Directors of MCC.
Tom MacW, thank you very much for helping me finally clear all this up. As a result of what you just said above, I now find you to be a better analyst of golf architecture history than I have previous thought.
Why don't you pass all this on to David Moriarty, as it appears in the last few days he is now refusing to discuss anything about Merion with me.
Actually, somewhat counter to something else you said above---eg nothing new has been produced here-----in my experience it is generally not just when something new is produced that the truth comes out but when various previous interpretations that are flawed are reinterpreted and corrected. One that note, I invite you to have a one on one discussion with me (and please invite David Moriarty if you would) so we can go over the numerous mistaken interpretations and mistakes in the times of various events in that IMO piece and perhaps encourage the author of that essay to correct them once and for all (actually the IMO piece ("The Missing Faces of Merion") is an awful mess and has been for some time for some reason----its footnotes and such became completely messed up and unnumbered for some reason, some time ago. I read it again the other day and it has become very hard to follow even if its mistakes were corrected).