The August 4, 1951 Issue of The New Yorker

[Tom_Doak]

Prodded by a conversation with a fellow GCAer, I decided to try and find the profile that Herbert Warren Wind wrote about Robert Trent Jones for The New Yorker in 1951.  It was beyond easy ... if you subscribe to the magazine, all back issues are available online, for free.  They didn't have such a thing back in the 1980's, so I have never read the article before.

What a fascinating piece it is!  I wish I could reprint it all here, but hopefully those of you with New Yorker subscriptions will be interested enough to go and look it up.  Though Jones was already starting to be quite successful by 1951, this article must have taken his career to the stratosphere, he comes across as a hero and a genius for doing the same things we all do today.  And Mr. Wind is as thorough as ever ... he mentions everyone else working in Jones' office [of whom the only name I had known was Frank Duane] and most of the great old architects who preceded Jones, as well as many details about his partnership with Stanley Thompson.

[Ian Andrew will also be interested to know that Jones told Wind for the piece that one of the things he had done for Thompson was the routing plan for Capilano, which has been lauded here as a great example of Thompson's routing talent.]

However, the reason I am bringing up the article on GCA is that, in addition to talking a bit about Jones' enthusiasm for his new course in Myrtle Beach, The Dunes G & CC, Wind mentions four new projects that Jones was working on or had just finished, none of which I have ever heard anything about.  These were:

1)  a nine-hole course he built for Doris Duke on her private estate in Somerville, NJ, which included a 110-yard par-3 with an island green in a large lake;

2)  a "dunes-style course" on Sapelo Island near Brunswick, NC, which he was working on for Mr. Robert J. Reynolds of the tobacco fortune;

3)  an 18-hole course at West Point, NY, for the U.S. Military Academy, which was being blasted out of rock, and was the most expensive course he'd ever worked on; and

4)  a 27-hole public course for the city of New York, at Marine Park, near Floyd Bennett Field, being built out of landfill, which sounded almost exactly like the course Jack Nicklaus is building near the Whitestone Bridge today.


Did any of the last three courses ever see completion?

[Brad Fleischer]

Tom

Number 4 on your list is Marine Park golf course in Brooklyn .It's an 18 hole layout and I'm not sure if it was ever 27.  It is part of the NYC
park system.

Brad

[Bill_McBride]

Another HWW article in the New Yorker called "North to Dornoch" was apparently the first time many Americans heard of the place.

My pal Bob Jenkins gave me a beautiful book on Capilano. There's a big photo of Thompson early in the book. I'm on the way home from a South victory in the Kings Putter, will read the book to see how RTJ Is mentioned and report back.

[Brad Klein]

Tom, that article not only launched RTJ's career; it also established HWW's as a magazine writer. He had done a few small pieces for the New Yorker, and just before he published "The Story of American Golf" in 1948 was hired on staff after WWII to write/compile much of the up front section of the magazine. I'm pretty sure it was his first long golf article in the magazine. What's interesting is that it's not about Hogan's win at the U.S. Open It's about RTJ's preparation for the Open. He would set these up with research way in advance, then weave a few sentences about 1/4 into the article about the winner, and they'd run it 6-7 weeks after the event.

It's clear he spent a lot of time visiting RTJ, and as I recall there's even a reference to the boys in the house in Montclair, NJ, Rees and Bobby.

Back in the early-1980s, I spent a lot of time in the library stacks reading every article on golf he wrote for The New Yorker. By the time he went over to SI to be on staff when that magazine was founded in 1954, he'd drive the editors nuts with his slow, deliberate pace of work. He was awful on deadlines, and was more at home with 400-word paragraphs and 100-word sentences that had five descending subordinate clauses.



 

[Jeff_Mingay]

Trent Jones claiming the routing plan for Capilano is very, very interesting. Stanley Thompson was still alive (died in 1953) when this article was published.

[Brad Klein]

Jeff,

RTJ was smart enough to know that by 1951 Stanley Thompson was in no condition to read much of anything, certainly not small print.

Tom, Brad,

Marine Park was only 18-holes. The additional nine-holes was planned for an island of the marsh that would have required a bridge and it was never build. You can still see the golf course on the north side of the Belt Parkway, just west of the Flatbush Avenue exit. If we ever ran a list of courses that could have and should have been great given their setting and budget and expectations and hype, this would be one of them. The probably never had enough top-soil trucked in and the place played rock-hard all summer and boggy all winter.

[Robert Mercer Deruntz]

Soil issues for Marine Park can probably be explained by a five letter word--MAFIA.  This was built in the kingdom of the mib.   The budget for the course probably never included all the payoffs that would have been involved in doing business in this neighborhood.  Ferry Piont is being built in a much less mafia controlled area--any guess on how much money has been siphoned off by the mob?

[Mike Policano]

Tom,

 RTJ did build the course at West Point.  I believe it was completed in the late '40's.  It is a short but hilly layout that plays to a par 70.

Cheers, Mike

[Jeff_Mingay]

Jeff,

RTJ was smart enough to know that by 1951 Stanley Thompson was in no condition to read much of anything, certainly not small print.

I don't know about that, Brad. Thompson was working right up until his death in 1953. In fact, his fatal heart attack came the night before he was to make a business trip to South America.

In any event, I find it hard to believe that Trent Jones is solely responsible for the routing plan at Capilano. Mr. Cornish might recall a thing or two about this.

[Peter Pallotta]

Brad - your opinion, please: is there room today anyplace in golf writing for the HWW-type and his 400 word paragraphs and 100 word sentences?  Did writers get worse in the last 50 years, or have readers/editos gotten progressively dumber and/or less patient?  Or alternatively - do you think that old style was in some ways essentially flawed, and that it has been improved upon by today's pithier style?  Or is there nothing left to say except to report on 'facts'?   (You can probabaly sense my bias here -- but despite the rhetoric I am honestly interested in your/a different pov).

Peter

[Phil McDade]

Brad - your opinion, please: is there room today anyplace in golf writing for the HWW-type and his 400 word paragraphs and 100 word sentences?  Did writers get worse in the last 50 years, or have readers/editos gotten progressively dumber and/or less patient?  Or alternatively - do you think that old style was in some ways essentially flawed, and that it has been improved upon by today's pithier style?  Or is there nothing left to say except to report on 'facts'?   (You can probabaly sense my bias here -- but despite the rhetoric I am honestly interested in your/a different pov).

Peter

Peter:

I think alot of what you say is probably true -- less patience (driven by TV and the web and its multiple and instant channels of other information); an emphasis on shorter, pithier pieces and sentences, driven by lots of magazine writers coming out of the newspaper business first; my own sense that editors overstate their importance and try to put more of their own imprint on stories and writings, thus diluting the long-form writing seen by the likes of Wind (and Tom Wolfe, among others).

It applies to not just golf writing, but other kinds of writing as well.

[Brad Klein]

Peter,

Short version of my career. Editors and publishers are more impatient than ever and have long made a living from underestimating readers' tastes and tolerances. The pithy style has come to prevail; you can thank (I would blame) Dan Jenkins and SI for that, though that's like blaming Tom Wolfe and Rolling Stone for the New Journalism.

In fact the causes run deeper, having to do with changing attention spans, time constraints, the dominance of visual formatting -- to the point where ESPN the magazine has done to the SI style what SI did to the New Yorker style, i.e. accelerate it and jazz it up graphically and in terms of fragmented prose. When I started at Golfweek in 1988 I wrote a monthly column of 1,500 words. Now I'm down to 825 words, and I don't get to write a column monthly but maybe 2-3 times a year and instead, parcel out my work into formatted "Raters Notebooks" and shorter course previews. Every magazine in the English-speaking world has adopted successive redesign phases that create more "white space' (i.e. margins) and shorter text blocks.

It's not just magazines that have scrambled. Books, too. Try getting a book published in golf course architecture. 15-20 years ago Sleeping Bear Press took on quite a chunk of manuscripts, then it gradually gave way, first to Clock Tower Press, then Wiley & Sons, and now they have dumped most of their golf architecture line. Luckily I have found a new outlet for my next collection of essays (original, revised and printed texts) in the form of a manuscript I'm working on for the University of Nebraska Press ("Wide Open Spaces: The Landscapes of Golf". Thank have a good sports line of books, but my point is that mainstream publishers are more nervous than ever unless you are a celebrity, as good looking as a model, and spend all of your time on Facebook/Twitter/Celebrity Apprentice.

Sure, there's room for good thoughtful books. But the market is getting smaller in books and is more rapidly shrinking in the magazine world.

[Tom_Doak]

Peter:

I write in those very long sentences, a lot of the time.  My wife has tried to change my style -- her mother was an English teacher, and she is exhausted by all my commas and semicolons.

Bottom line:  I don't know if there are many magazines left that will entertain that sort of writing, apart from The New Yorker.  But there are certainly plenty of blogs and Discussion Groups where "column inches" are not an issue at all.

[Rick Shefchik]

I have every confidence that Snooki could get a book on golf architecture published.

[JMEvensky]

I have every confidence that Snooki could get a book on golf architecture published.

But would she be able to read it without moving her lips?

Sad that each of actually knows who Snooki is.

[Chris_Clouser]

Brad,

Do you think a large part of it is the crutch that Strunk & White's Elements of Style have become?  I have had more than one person reference lately on being essential for editing.  It tends to lead toward a less "wordy" style of writing and seems to value shorter sentences.

As for golf course architecture not having a market, you are so correct.  I was rejected for my Indiana golf book by a local publishing house of good reputation because it didn't fit into their marketing plan, in other words would not sell enough books.  In the last year they have produced a book on barns and corn fields.  I don't know if I should be mad or sad that they feel there is a bigger market for those two things than golf.

[Jordan Caron]

Trent Jones claiming the routing plan for Capilano is very, very interesting. Stanley Thompson was still alive (died in 1953) when this article was published.

Jeff,

I'm intrigued as well by this and surprised that many of us have not been aware of this.  How wouldn't Thompson respond to this comment since he was still alive?  Was it possibly taken out of context?

Tom,

You continue to be a great contributor to this site and CGA, thanks your sharing.  

[Phil McDade]

Well, I'll defend Strunk and White. One of the common misperceptions of Strunk's writing ethos (he taught at Cornell; must've been before Doak's time ) is that he advocated short sentences. Not necessarily so; his most famous dictum was rule #13 -- "Omit Needless Words," and by that he meant not that sentence should be long or short, but that every word should tell.

http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html

Many of his dictums -- use the active voice, frame sentences in a positive manner, avoid loose setence structure -- are worth following. Many probably think of Hemingway as the epitome of a Strunk-driven writer, but Wind to me doesn't seem to violate his major principles.

[Peter Pallotta]

Brad - thanks for the thoughtful response and for sharing the first-hand experience. I keep waiting for a magic wand to come along and make every magazine the New Yorker (but then I guess it would be like hockey after the expansion from the Original Six).  

Kelly - that's a neat way of seeing and putting it: how WWH and Darwin delighted in telling stories (while not hding exactly but perhaps "burying" their own positions/povs) -- a subtle and pleasing kind of writing whereby the narrative itself (and the choices that have created it) is the meaning/message.

Chris - I knew there was a reason I didn't like Strunk and White when I first came across it.  I had a sense that it was a book on writing for those who could not write (and an implicit damning of people like me, who don't know a lick of grammer or any of the rules but who just learned to write from reading people who could).  It's the Game Improvement Iron for hacks....

(not really, I know....but...and Phil -- just saw his post -- is right)

[Brad Klein]

"Elements of Style" is one of those timeless books that deserves to be re-read annually by writers.

By the way, E.B. White's step-son was/is Roger Angell, longtime fiction editor for The New Yorker as well as their baseball essayist. He might well have had some hand all those years editing HWW. Interestingly, when I approached Angell via letter and several messages over several months regarding a proposed biography of HWW, he never responded and was simply hostile and curt the one time I managed to reach him on the phone. HWW thrived under longtime editor William Shawn but was always an outsider to the magazine, and once the new regime came in during the 1980s he struggled and was nudged out. It didn't help that early on HWW showed signs of losing his sharpness with facts and contemporary events. Brendan Gill's wonderfully rambling book about the magazine, "Here at The New Yorker" (1975) has not a single reference to HWW.

[Phil McDade]

Peter:

"I had a sense that it was a book on writing for those who could not write."

That's pretty much who Strunk wrote his book for -- self-published, he used it as his main teaching tool in his introductory writing class for Cornell freshman. My sense is that Strunk didn't so much assume his students couldn't write, but that they were often bombarded with all kinds of writing -- good, bad, indifferent -- and he viewed his "little book" as a roadmap for students who wanted to learn how to write better -- not just for their future college courses, but in life as well.

[Adam Lawrence]

I don't always stick to it, but my own key reference for style is a line of Churchill's, quoted by Henry Longhurst in 'My Life and Soft Times':

"Short words are best; and the old words, when short, are the best of all."

[Tom Dunne]

Yes, my first reaction to reading this was: Holy word count, Batman! The New Yorker is still doing this sort of thing--I'd imagine McPhee's piece of the Open at St. Andrews matched this one for length, and they just ran a Scientology feature that easily cracked the 20,000 word mark.

I am an advocate of long-form, but boy, the writer had better be good. When I was at TLG, a long feature for us was in the 3000 to 4000 word range. One can definitely cover some ground in that space, but only by staying on topic. Wind strays from his subject a couple of times in this piece and I was a little disappointed in myself that my editor mind started to sound the alarm. (I still wonder if the long passage on early Scottish golf really advanced the plot in a profile of RTJ, though...)

I do agree with Brad that, "Editors and publishers are more impatient than ever and have long made a living from underestimating readers' tastes and tolerances." That is very well put. But it's not just a unilateral dumbing down on the part of publications, denying a meal to a reading public hungry for the long form. These days it also has to do with the fact that consumers have grown increasingly used to free content, and features like this one require a great deal of time and money to produce.

Peter, it's fine to want more magazines to be like the New Yorker. But then you need to pay a lot of people--not just writers. Fact-checkers, copy editors, and yes, even editors themselves--who do occasionally improve a story, even one submitted by a great writer. The Internet may seem liberating and all, but it does not allow you to cut corners with the process--professional content is produced by many hands, period.

[Peter Pallotta]

Tom - thanks. You and others on this thread really know your stuff and know the craft and are published regularly.  I'm just pining for the days when someone could digress into an aside on early Scottish golf not in spite of the fact but precisely BECAUSE it strayed off point and didn't advance the plot or main through-line. I won't argue the point or try to rationalize it, but I really do believe that we have lost something important and vital in our pre-occupation -- as both writers and readers -- with 'staying on point' and 'conveying the message' and 'getting right to the point'.  It's like the photo-shopped golf courses that praise themselves for having '18 great holes', and like our endless interest in rankings -- as if the 'perfect' and the 'facts' give us or tell us something of real value. How about the natural and the human and the rambling and the imperfect?  When we have gotten to a time and 'place' -- as readers and writers and golfers and friends and neighbours -- when we disparage honest and spontaneous 'communcation' and interactions of all kinds, personalized and unique and fraught with failings and quirks and misunderstandings....well, it will be a sad day it seems to me.  It will be a GOOD day, mind you, for Business and Commerce and Synergies and Efficiency and the Bottom Line and the IPAD and Career Paths, but we will be getting mighty close to the end of nuance and depth and...well...MEANING (at least any kind of meaning that can't be conveyed in a hundred words or less).

Tom D - apologies...I have helped jack this thread into a non-gca direction.  

[Dan Kelly]

I'm just pining for the days when someone could digress into an aside on early Scottish golf not in spite of the fact but precisely BECAUSE it strayed off point and didn't advance the plot or main through-line. I won't argue the point or try to rationalize it, but I really do believe that we have lost something important and vital in our pre-occupation -- as both writers and readers -- with 'staying on point' and 'conveying the message' and 'getting right to the point'.  It's like the photo-shopped golf courses that praise themselves for having '18 great holes', and like our endless interest in rankings -- as if the 'perfect' and the 'facts' give us or tell us something of real value. How about the natural and the human and the rambling and the imperfect?  When we have gotten to a time and 'place' -- as readers and writers and golfers and friends and neighbours -- when we disparage honest and spontaneous 'communcation' and interactions of all kinds, personalized and unique and fraught with failings and quirks and misunderstandings....well, it will be a sad day it seems to me.  It will be a GOOD day, mind you, for Business and Commerce and Synergies and Efficiency and the Bottom Line and the IPAD and Career Paths, but we will be getting mighty close to the end of nuance and depth and...well...MEANING (at least any kind of meaning that can't be conveyed in a hundred words or less).

Peter --

Right on, brother!

I believe that Mr. White would join me in applauding this. Then we'd be a party of three! ("I am a member of a party of one" is my favorite quotation by E.B. White -- or anyone else!)

Don't know about Prof. Strunk -- though I think he'd join the chorus, too, after a wee bit of editing.

Hmmmm. I wonder how many of our fellow GCAers -- even those who've been reading this thread -- gave up on your paragraph about halfway through it ... because it was too dense, too wordy, too much effort!

Alas, as clueless as they usually are, publishers do know what modern readers are like. Twitter was no accident.

As far as having every magazine be like The New Yorker: You'd have a lot more writers in the loony bin. A very good friend of mine -- the best magazine writer I've ever worked with -- had a piece accepted by The New Yorker a few years ago. A lifetime's ambition realized! Then they copy-edited and fact-checked the hell out of it, and held it for months, and trimmed it, and then it got out of date, and he had to revise it, and they accepted the revisions, and then they copy-edited and fact-checked the revisions, and then they held it for months, and finally it was set to go, and then the editor decided (because there was too much science in it, my friend was told) that it was twice as long as he wanted it to be ... and they asked my friend to cut it in half, and he told them to go to hell, and then he sold it, as it was, to ... I think it was Harper's.

Tom Doak is quite correct in noting that, with the arrival of the Blog, anyone is able, nowadays, to write however he wants to write -- whether it's any good or not! And with the advent of e-books, a grandiloquent author willing to self-publish might even be, as they say, commercially viable.

Dan