Bob,
No TV, as Mike mentioned, but golf was becoming extremely popular and lots of folks were becoming interested. There are pages and pages describing the goings-on at numerous clubs, tons of reporting on the results of matches and tournaments, and new clubs were being introduced to the public through these print sources. What better way to do it than with drawings of holes, routing diagrams, clubhouses, etc..
What's really 'neat' is that many of them had to be drawn by staff artists, not just reproduced from originals.