I found a few passages of the article particularly interesting:
-- "Except for a few topnotch professional golfers, like Ben Hogan, who has earned close to a hundred thousand dollars a year, Jones's annual income exceeds that of anyone else whose livelihood is derived entirely from golf."
======== I wonder how many people whose income is derived entirely from golf exceed the income of today's highest-paid GCA.
-- An advertisement for the "strapping new '51 Buick" promises, among many other features, a "Fireball engine."
======== Was it named after Tom Paul's pal Fireball Roberts?
-- "The Scottish pros might have built better [meadowland] courses if they had taken more time. For most of them, architecture was a means of snagging a few extra dollars -- say, fifty -- on their day off. On a Sunday, in response to a request for 'a sporty nine-hole course,' they would saunter over a specified property, planting a stake to mark the spot where the first tee should be built, another stake to mark the midpoint of the fairway, and a third to mark the center of the first green. They would repeat this procedure for the eight other holes. Then, after giving the members of the embryonic golf club a few tips on where to stick the traps, they would collect their fee and leave. It took only three or four hours to design a course this way, and some of the more energetic Sunday architects could knock off three in a day."
======== I wonder if The New Yorker's legendary fact-checkers seriously examined this paragraph. The Scottish pros *worked* on Sundays? (Is it OK to work -- just not to play?) "Some" of the more energetic pros could stake out three courses in a day? That's a little hard for me to believe. Has anyone ever seen evidence of that? Three courses, plus some inevitable schmoozing before and after, plus travel times? In one day?
** "When Jones is working on a course, he supplements his pencil drawings with a model of each green, scaled twenty feet to the inch and made of ordinary green modelling clay. Water hazards around the green are indicated by blue clay, and the traps are painted in with white enamel. [Aside: When did golf writers drop "trap" for "bunker"?] Jones usually devotes three days a week to inspection trips over courses in the process of construction. If he discovers that a project superintendent, despite the clay model of a green, has somehow missed his intention, Jones goes to work on the green himself. Standing in his shirtsleeves, he directs his bulldozer operator with hand signals and vocal exhortations until the green is buffeted into the shape he had in mind."
========= Showing my ignorance (but what else am I here for?): How much of this description, if any, still applies? How much is standard practice? How much was ever standard practice? How many architects direct their shapers with "hand signals and vocal exhortations -- and how often do they do it?
** Just interesting: " 'When we started building West Point, we got our sand from Army cargo ships anchored in the Hudson,' he says. 'The way it worked, those transports would sail in convoy for Europe loaded down with war supplies. After dumping their cargoes, they'd pull in near any convenient beach and take onsand for ballast. Well, one of those convoys was routed to Scotland, and I like to think that some of the bunkers at the Point are filled with the authentic stuff, scraped right off the dunes of the linksland.' "
** On Page 42: an ad for "A New Musical Play ... The King and I," at the St. James Theater. Who got top billing? Not Yul Brynner. Gertrude Lawrence!
One more passage, later.