TomH:
Yes, there is a story about Betty Jameson I did tell on here but I don't know whether you were on here then or where it is now.
First of all, my Dad knew all those people of that era because he worked for Spalding and he also played the states and national circuit for about twenty five years.
Unfortunately, for me, I didn't care anything about architecture before he died so I have no idea what he thought about that and as far as just golf itself he always felt that talking about it with people who he wasn't sure were really interested was both a waste of time and probably boring for them. I hate to think he thought I didn't care much about golf because he didn't talk to me much about it unless I asked him things specifically and I sure didn't do that as much when he was around as I would now if he was still here.
So he kept what he knew to the little fraternity that he knew cared and was actually pretty descrete about that too. My stepmother didn't really care about golf so Dad would do things like get up early on a Sunday morning (almost every Sunday morning it now turns out) and go down to a restaurant and meet Betty Jameson and her friend Mary Lena Faulk (another great touring pro from that era) and sometimes T. Armour (who lived about 1/4 mile down the street from Dad) and they would have breakfast and probably talk over the good old days and stuff.
Anyway the story from Betty that I put on here she told me about four years ago after Dad died and Mary Lena too. It was about the time the LPGA was forming and we got talking about Babe Zaharias and how extraordinary she was although always controversial. And how she factored into the forming of the LPGA.
Babe was the real draw and most of the time since they had little to play in they would do these touring exhibition and sometimes to Europe too. One exhibition match was set up in England and included Babe, Betty, Louise Suggs and I can't remember the fourth (might have been Patty Berg). They were to play the four top ranked men amateurs in England, including the British Am Champ! It was a scratch match but obviously the ladies were on the ladies tees. Babe was a real showwomen and a helluva gambler and she was inclined in personal games to go back to the championship tees against any man because she could hit the ball a mile (Babe, if you don't know, is still today considered one of the great women athletes of all time, Olympic athlete in track and field and all).
So to their horror just prior to tee off of the first match, Babe says she's going back to the championship tees with her opponent and that the other ladies are too! So that's what they all did and Betty was playing last and well into her match she heard that all the other ladies had won their matches! She said, Tommy, I'd played in everything there was to play in but the pressure I felt to win my match was more than I ever felt before or since. And she did win her match and it was a sweep!
After a while I said, Betty how in the hell was something like that possible? With absolutely no pride or self congratulatoriness whatsoever, Betty thought for a while longer about that and said; "I really don't know, except it was windy that day and Babe had a whole lot of shots and never minded trying any of them any time and a couple of the others of us grew up in Texas and were natural born wind players and most of the girls we played with had those shots anyway." Finally she said, "I guess we just showed them some shots they'd never seen before and certainly not from a girl--that's just golf I guess."
That's without doubt one of the coolest and most surprising golf stories I've ever heard!