About a week ago TEPaul provided us with a glimmer of hope that at least the first chapter of the long running and contentious Merion debates might finally be coming to an end. Specifically, in post 509 on the ". . . a Sore Subject" thread, he wrote that he had just received
“a disk from Drexel U that contains a ton of stuff on Lloyd. All kinds of correspondence including letters between Lloyd and Macdonald which helps explain why CBM wrote Lloyd at Drexel Co instead of the MCC Search Committee. . .” He elaborated on this in that same post and in post 512, and I was hoping to focus the discussion onto these posts here.
Those who have followed the debate or read my IMO have some realization of the important role Horatio Gates Lloyd played in the creation of Merion East, and thus understand that such documents might go a long ways toward clarifying what happened during the planning stage of the golf course. Indeed, according to TEPaul in post 509:
“It looks like . . . they [M&W and Lloyd] were working on something out there with the course in the latter half of 1910. Macdonald and Whigam may've been the actual designers and Wilson and committee may've been brought in later once the land was under Lloyd's control more for developing the agronomics of the course. . . .”Obviously it would be premature to draw any strong conclusions without even seeing these documents, but from the sounds of it TEPaul has received some pretty compelling and interesting information, so
I again commend TEPaul for bringing the documents to our attention. Hopefully, TEPaul’s example will lead to more productive and less contentious discussions from hereon.
Before turning to TEPaul for some clarification, I should probably mention that that quite a few observers have contacted me privately to warn me that they suspect that TEPaul’s posts are part of some cynical game to make me look foolish. In short, they suspect TEPaul just made it all all up to make me look bad. But that would make little sense for many reasons, not the least of which is that such deception and duplicity would reflect poorly on him, not on me. So call me crazy, but I am inclined to believe him, and would like to turn to the actual documents so that we each may begin to analyze for ourselves what we can learn from these documents.
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TEPaul,
Again, thank you for bringing forward this information. I very much appreciate it, and am sure others do as well. I hope you don't mind answering a few questions and getting us started in a productive direction . . .
1. Now that you have had about a week to consider the documents, is there anything more you can tell us about them?
2. Will you be making the documents available for others to review, and if so, how and when? Or would you rather we contact Drexel directly to obtain the digital copies for ourselves?
2. I’ve reached out to a few of the more obvious repositories at Drexel University, but have thus far had no luck locating any collection at Drexel containing substantial material from or about HG Lloyd. In fact, I have been told by a few archivists there that
no such documents exist at Drexel. But oftentimes at Universities one hand is unaware of what the other is up to, and given your statement that you got these documents from Drexel, I assume they must have been mistaken. Can you tell us a bit more about from where within Drexel University these documents came?
Thanks.
David.
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P.S. Here is a link to the page containing the posts in question, for those interested in seeing TEPaul's posts in context.
http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,46025.490/