World Golf Hall of Fame member Marlene Bauer Hagge and her older sister Alice Bauer were there at the beginning of the LPGA. Marlene competed in the U.S. Women’s Open at the age of 13 in 1947, and finished 8th. In a 1991 oral history with the USGA, she recalled:
“There were maybe six or seven tournaments, I don't really remember exactly. This is 1950 - the same year that the LPGA was chartered. My sister and I were among the 13 charter members. We had a lot of publicity because we were young, we were sisters, and we were fairly attractive. You know, we weren't the image of what the public perceived as your basic athlete. We didn't look like stump pullers or football players or whatever. Not that the rest of them did. I mean, it was just that we were oddities in several respects. So we got a lot of publicity, and at that time the exhibition clinic circuit was very lucrative. We had signed a couple of good contracts with Spalding…And we did probably three or four clinics and exhibitions a week, and it was pretty lucrative.”
“Oh, we usually played 18 holes with the local club champion. We played one with Francis Ouimet in Massachusetts…And I remember we played one exhibition in Atlanta and Bobby Jones was there sitting on a bench - I think the 13th tee was near his house. And someone said, ‘There's Bobby Jones.’ And I thought, ‘Oh!’ I got so nervous I blocked my tee shot out of bounds, I was so embarrassed I wanted to just absolutely disappear.”
Alice married Robert Hagge when she was 25. The marriage lasted two or three years, and Alice claimed he didn’t have a job for the entirety of the marriage. Before their daughter Heidi was born, the marriage was falling apart, and her sister Marlene ended up marrying Hagge at the end of 1955, a few months after the divorce was granted. Golf World wrote at the time: “The development comes after months of wonder by other lady pros and followers of their tournaments. Eyebrows were raised at tournaments up to mid-summer when Hagge followed Marlene’s play, not Alice’s and when at tournament social affairs he danced most of the time with Marlene.”
As Alice would say in Liz Kahn’s excellent book on the history of the LPGA, “Having Marlene marry the same man was a strain, only because I was trying for her not to make the same mistake…She was a young girl [21 then] and he talked a lot. I was dumb enough to marry him, but I got something very nice out of it – I got my little Heidi. The only strain was the fact that Marlene didn’t believe me. But in later years I was proven right.” Marlene was married to Hagge for eight years, who ended up becoming a golf course architect. He joined Dick Wilson the year he and Marlene married and later changed his last name to Von Hagge.
Marlene would also support Althea Gibson and Renee Powell, the first African Americans to play on the LPGA Tour. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated integration in public accommodation, municipal parks, golf courses and swimming pools, but this did not change long held prejudices. Leonard Wirtz, tournament director of the LPGA then, remembered going to a restaurant with Gibson once, and the waiter wouldn’t come to the table to serve them. And then there was “a golf club where they said Althea could play the course, but they didn’t want her to use the john or the locker room. We got a new sponsor and venue for that date.”
Marlene Hagge would describe trouble, “especially in the South, and we said we wouldn’t play unless Althea could be treated like everybody else. I’m proud of the LPGA and what we did.” Hagge started rooming with Althea when a hotel said it “lost” Gibson’s reservation and she invited Althea to stay with her. Hagge said Gibson “had a tremendous amount of talent, but she came into golf too late” believing that she would have been a star had she started earlier. “She achieved a lot just by being out there.”
Renee Powell played on the LPGA Tour from 1967 to 1980. In 1971 she went to Vietnam as part of a USO tour and continues work with women veterans by introducing them to the therapeutic value of golf. In 2015 she and six others (including Louise Suggs) became the first female members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. She would say of Marlene Hagge, “if Marlene liked you and she believed in something, she would fight your battle, and she wouldn’t care what kind of cat was out there. She would fight.”
