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Gloria Armstrong, LPGA: Living Legend Continues to Give Back

By Shelia Young

Few people intrigue me more than women who go the extra mile to give back to the game that helped them through the early days of golf. Here in the Bay Area we have such a woman, and her name is Gloria Armstrong. She was born in Alameda, went to Frick Junior High and graduated from Fremont High in Oakland. She will turn 81 in October and is as active today as ever.

I met Gloria several years ago, along with LPGA member Pat Hurst (San Leandro) and Patty Lopez, a former teaching pro at Monarch Bay, when I played in a pro-am tournament at Lake Chabot Golf Course. Gloria was Pat's teacher from the time Pat was 13 till she went out on tour. Armstrong mused when she spoke of today's women golfers.

"The girls today just don't realize [how different it is today]. When Pat played in her first pro tournament, she won more money than my best year on tour. I won $7,600 in 1960. Pat won $7,800, I think, for 15th place. Of course, when I went on tour it costs $22 a week. It was $5 to enter, gas was only 22 cents a gallon and the caddy was $5."

Armstrong and Pat have always stayed in touch. When contacted, Pat was quick to comment: "Gloria has set the foundation not only with my golf swing but life in general. She has always been there for me and that is something I will never forget."

I recently spent a warm, sunny afternoon at Chabot Golf Course in the Oakland Hills where Gloria Armstrong still teaches today at the Lake Chabot Junior Golf Academy, a free academy for youngsters. Gloria has been with the academy since it opened in 1991.

She has devoted her entire life to teaching others to love the game of golf, from the time she was a teenager and taught students at Fremont High School until today, some 60-plus years later. She started teaching professionally around 1966 and was named teacher of the year by the LPGA in 1970.

When we talked about the years she played the game as a professional and the years she has been teaching, her eyes sparkle with her love of learning from and teaching others. She mentions names like Sam Snead, Davis Love Jr., Babe Didrikson, Marlene Hagge, Walter Hagen, Earl Fry, Dick Fry, Tommy Armour, Tony Lema, Byron Nelson, Karsten Solheim and so many others. It is interesting to note she played mostly with men early on, including seven youngsters at Alameda who all turned pro at the same time. Of course I have to mention that one of those seven was our own Tony Lema in San Leandro.

Her dad, Philip Armstrong, was a driving force in her life, and she speaks lovingly of him, although she had her moments with him through the years. She credits him with pushing her to learn many different sports to see which ones she liked. She spent so much time learning sports, including ice skating, bowling, tennis, trout fishing and flying planes that she never had much time for dating. Once she turned to golf, marriage and children were never part of her life's goals, probably, she says, because of her mother and father's divorce and of her not wanting to settle down.

After her dad and mom divorced, she lived with her father. Both parents played golf and both were also pilots. Consequently, she learned to fly at an early age and received her pilot's license at 17. It came in handy years later when one of her fellow golfers, Peggy Kirk Bell, had a plane but no license, so they were able to get to tournaments with Gloria doing the flying.

Gloria hit the golf tour at the age of 21 and played for 12 years during the 1950s and 1960s and participated in some interesting tournaments that were billed as mixed foursomes, one in particular that was featured in an article by Tim Murphy in Golf World magazine that hangs in the pro shop at Chabot. One of the vignettes of that article was about Gloria and her partner, Jim Turnesa, winning a tournament in a playoff, where Gloria scored the winning birdie shot with a putter new to the tour called a Ping.

The putter had been given to her by the founder of Ping golf clubs, Karsten Solheim, of Solheim Cup fame. No one had heard of those clubs at the time; Karsten was selling them out of the back of his car. I was intrigued and asked more questions. She told me that years later, while her father was still living, they found the original putter at his house. Gloria decided to send it off to Karsten since it was one of the first seven made and she had no more use for it. Of course, she also wanted to thank him again for allowing her to have it for the Haig & Haig Mixed Foursomes all those years ago.

When she didn't hear from him or his office, she wondered if it may have gotten lost in the mail. She called Karsten's office and the staff said that indeed the putter had arrived and that she shouldn't be concerned about its safety. A few days later she received an envelope in the mail from Karsten and assumed it was the thank-you note she anticipated. Inside, however, was a check. She glanced at it and thought how nice of him to send her a check for $2,500, especially since all those years ago he had said if she won with the putter he'd pay her. Well, imagine her surprise when she went to her apartment and looked again and discovered there was an extra zero: $25,000! She chuckles when she tells the story. When asked if she kept a copy of the check she said no, she just took it to the bank.

"I was lucky because I had a father who was open-minded and I got to do an awful lot of things at a young age that women didn't get to do back at that time. But I also learned golf from and with the boys, so I hit the ball like a man, and developed some bad habits."

She remarked about maybe staying longer and playing better on tour if she had had a better teacher. "Davis Love was a great teacher. I worked for him for 10 years when I left the tour, and coincidentally, babysat both Mark and Davis Love III while I worked for him. I ran his pro shop."

She ended our afternoon talking about the old days and never getting paid for her first tournament because the sponsors ran out of money; it had rained and there was no money from the gallery because there was no gallery! The sponsors never followed up and never paid, either. "Ahh," she says, "the good ole' days."

And a parting bit of prose from Gloria's father on the occasion of her first golf scrapbook.

    Trials, Tribulations and Trivia of
    Gloria Carol Armstrong
    Born October 10, 1929

She did her utmost, she won a modicum of fame.
Her record speaks for her — it honors her name.
Each day that passes may add to her glory
But how she played the game — therein lies the story.

— Philip Armstrong