Playing Golf, Playing Detective

Each of the 114 postcards that I'm cataloging for the SFPL History Center has something in common with the others: all feature the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes the bridge is prominently displayed, sometimes it's half-hidden in fog, sometimes boats are beneath, sunsets behind, moon-rise above, birds passing through, viewed from above, from below, from a boat, from the Fort, from Marin, from another bridge, from an airplane, etc ... After cataloging 50 cards, I thought I had seen just about every possible view of the bridge, but it seems I was wrong:

My 54th card depicts a view from a golf course!

A golf course?

A quick search through SFPL's digitized photo collection using keywords "Golf" and "Golden Gate Bridge" revealed that there is a golf course in Lincoln Park, and that at least one of the holes has a spectacular view of the Bridge. The SFPL photo with all this helpful information seemed somehow similar to my postcard. And when I compared the two, I realized that it was, in fact, identical -- right down to the golfer's swing and the poses of his seated partners!

Here's a link to the photo:
http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1030607~S0

According to the information provided by the cataloger of this photograph, the image belongs to the Redwood Empire Association. 

Postcard # AAP-0054 -- which I'm currently cataloging -- looks very similar, but is colored in a typically vivid "Linen era" style and copyrighted by "Stanley A. Piltz." It says nothing about the Redwood Empire Association. (Unfortunately, I can't reproduce that photo here, because I'm not certain that I'm authorized to do so, but if you imagine the photograph in the link above with bright primary colors, you'll have a good idea of what my postcard scan looks like).

Did Piltz take this photo? Or did he simply color it?
Did he borrow it from the Redwood Empire Association? Or was he a member of the Association?
The more I pondered it, the more curious I became. So I did a bit of research on the internet.

The Metropolitan Postcard Club's Postcard Publisher Guide [see: http://www.metropostcard.com/publishersp2.html , about halfway down for the Plitz entry] describes Piltz as "a photographer who published many linen view-cards depicting scenes of California, especially of the San Francisco Bay area. Some of these cards are labeled "Pictorial Wonderland, Art Tone Series" on the back. Curt Teich printed most of these cards for Piltz."

So it seems that Plitz is likely to have been the photographer of the original as well as the publisher of the postcard. And Postcard #AAP-0054 is part of the "Pictorial Wonderland" series, as are at least three other postcards that I've already cataloged, so I'll be sure to link them together via an authorized series statement, so that by finding one, you can find them all.

I might also add "Curt Teich" as a possible printer for the Piltz cards in this collection.

So much useful information radiating from a single question about a single postcard!

But I've got to watch my time: I've still got 50 postcards to catalog, and less than a week to do so. When April arrives, I'll need to set this project aside till May. In May -- if time permits -- I'll return to those red question marks and bracketed hypotheses that make a bread-crumb trail on my cataloging worksheet, and I'll follow them wherever they lead me.

This is the joy and the hazard of archival cataloging: the compulsion to dig deeper, to uncover the very fullest, very richest picture of the past that you can.