I finally got around to reading that Herbert Warren Wind piece, from The New Yorker of August 4, 1951 -- and will post a few of the most interesting passages elsewhere (perhaps even in that thread). But this passage deserves a thread of its own -- because it speaks of an architectural development I've never heard of.
I'm sure it's a mere curiosity -- likely a mere historical curiosity ... but it certainly is curious, and makes me likewise:
"The player congestion on a public course on a pleasant spring Sunday is at its most alarming on the short, par-3 holes, where as many as seven foursomes bunch up on a tee while the foursome ahead of them is trying to get off the green. [Dan interjects: SEVEN FOURSOMES?] For the White Course he [Robert Trent Jones] recently designed, at Westbury, for the Nassau County Department of Public Works, Jones evolved a revolutionary plan for keeping the traffic moving on the course's par 3s. There are two fourth holes, instead of just one, and two eighths, two thirteenths, and two seventeenths, each pair being identical in length, grades, hazards, and greens. The duplicates are adjacent, and Jones is confident that no foursome of Sunday drivers has to wait longer than two minutes before teeing off on one or the other of them."
Does the White Course still exist?
Does it still have duplicate par-3s?
Didn't the traffic jam resume immediately after the par-3s?
Did anyone anyone copy this idea?
Have you ever heard of such a thing?