Peggy Kirk Bell obit

Peggy Kirk Bell, 95, Top Amateur Player and Gifted Teacher in Women’s Golf, Dies

She was not on the list.

Peggy Kirk Bell, a top amateur golfer in the 1940s and ’50s who went on to become a respected instructor and an advocate for women’s golf, died on Wednesday at her home in Southern Pines, N.C. She was 95.

Kelly Miller, her son-in-law and the club president at the Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club and the Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club, both of which Kirk Bell owned, announced the death.

Kirk Bell — who competed as Peggy Kirk before she married Warren Bell, a former professional basketball player, in 1953 — was one of the top amateurs in women’s golf in the years before the Ladies Professional Golf Association was formed. She and Babe Didrikson Zaharias were among the association’s charter members.

She won the Ohio Women’s Amateur Championship three times, the 1949 Titleholders Championship (by two shots over Patty Berg) and the 1949 North and South Women’s Amateur Championship. She also played on the 1950 Curtis Cup team.

Kirk Bell and her husband, who died in 1984, bought the Pine Needles resort and developed it into a top golfing destination. It was the site of the United States Women’s Open in 1996, 2001 and 2007.

Margaret Anne Kirk was born in Findlay, Ohio, on Oct. 28, 1921. A gifted athlete, she first tried golf at age 17.

“I found it more of a challenge than any sport I’d tried,” she said in her autobiography, “The Gift of Golf” (2001), written with Lee Pace. “You simply couldn’t haul off and slam the ball like you would a softball. It took dexterity, but you had to apply it properly. Power was nothing without timing in golf.”

Three national golf magazines named Kirk Bell one of the nation’s best teachers. She helped developed a concept called the ladies golfari, in which women receive golf instruction from other women. She was the first woman inducted to the PGA Golf Instructors Hall of Fame and the recipient, in 1990, of the Bob Jones Award, the U.S.G.A.’s highest honor.

She is survived by a son, Kirk; two daughters, Bonnie McGowan and Peggy Ann Miller; and eight grandchildren.