David,
You are correct, the Raynor plans were to be superimposed atop the Wilfred Reid Lakeside course. Those familiar with The Evangelist know the only "interview" Raynor ever gave was to The Olympian magazine - the subject of which was his design for a "West Coast Lido."
I'm still not clear on why our club did not simply build the Raynor plans after WW1 ended and then hire another architect to lay out a 2nd golf course if that was the objective. The original Lido was still operating at full rip on the south shore of L.I. and it was considered (I'm pulling this out of my memory banks) one of the top courses in America with PV, NGLA and Timber Point.
I've never been able to orient the Raynor plans in terms of our property, but likely the layout wandered extensively along the water in the same way our original Pacific Links course was routed along the dunes and bluffs below the shelf where the Cliffs Course is today. Perhaps Olympic's Lido would have slid into the ocean just as parts of the original version did. Maybe so, maybe not.
What is still completely unexplainable is when the decision was made to remodel the current Ocean Course, we did not consider using the Raynor plans, sitting there gathering dust in the Historian's closet. And then when we decided to hire Bill Love to rethink the golf course again - those same plans had been framed and were hanging prominently on the wall in our locker room.
How many chances do you get to exhume the spirit of a Golden Age genius from the grave and literally resurrect and build his masterpiece? Our club VP arranged an informal meeting with several members of the Board (and Green Chairman) to give me an opportunity to pitch the idea of building the Raynor plans, but our GC at the time didn't know a Redan from a ball washer and I might as well have been speaking in Swahili.
By contrast, Sequoyah CC was smart enough to let Doug Nickels sympathetically adapt Chandler Egan's wonderful remodeling plans - proposed in the early 1930s, but never completed. Ironically, there is evidence that Raynor also drew up some plans for the club during one of his two trips through the Bay Area, but my research and observations conclude they were drastically modified during construction.
Alas, it is too late and unless I somehow hit the Lotto, purchase some coastal acreage and build it myself, those plans will still be sitting on that damned wall after I take my last divot. The final hope was Old Mac, but Uncle George, Doak and Urbina could not make a strict Lido reprise fit - though I can hardly whine about having an updated NGLA on the West Coast.
In the end, for Olympic, ignoring the Raynor plans was a terrible, once in a millennium lost opportunity; I still believe it was the exact right idea, but at the wrong time - and with the wrong people turning the dials and pulling the levers. If we could somehow reset the clock with the Green Chairs and committees the last few years, I believe the outcome might have been very different.
But then again, if a West Coast Lido already existed at Olympic, Mike Keiser probably would not have moved forward with the idea of Old Macdonald. In the end, a showcase for CB and Raynor's template holes are probably best on a public course to educate the "retail golfers," but it sure would have been nice not to be forced to get on an airplane every time I want to revisit the past.
Off topic, but I just looked on Amazon and cannot believe used copies of the book are going for $375 and up, new ones well north of $1,000. I gave away at least a half dozen of them to friends . . . . . wish I had known The Evangelist would become a collectors item.