Oldstress Golf

Scottish-born Dorothy lona Campbell Hurd Howe, 57-year-old wife of a Princeton, N. J. banker, is the only woman who ever won the world's four major female golf championships: Scottish, British, Canadian, U. S. Two years ago, when twice-married Mrs. Howe joined the U. S. Women's Senior Golf Association, she ran away with the national Senior championship too. Last year Mrs. Howe successfully staved off all challengers.

Last week, when 60 U. S. matrons and spinsters gathered at New York's Westchester Country Club for their 17th annual tournament, it looked as if Mrs. Howe would make it three in a row. But in spite of her 800 golf prizes, Mrs. Howe failed to keep her head down, flubbed three successive shots on the seventh hole, wound up with a first-round 87, two strokes behind Beatrice Stevens Hammer Stevens of Greenwich, Conn.

Next day, while Mrs. Howe scored a matronly 88, young Mrs. Stevens, twice-married and a 51-year-old grandmother, chalked up 83 to win the tournament by seven strokes. Champion Stevens had won the Senior championship once before, but the name that appears most often on the big silver cup Mrs. Stevens took home is that of Mrs. Leila Du Bois, four times champion and five times runner-up since 1927.

Last week onetime Champion Du Bois, now Mrs. Richard V. Pell, finished seventh, with a score of 184 (95-89). "She did marvelously well," chirped her cronies, explaining that 200-lb., thrice-married Leila Cruikshank Stockton Du Bois Pell, now 58, and more interested in showing dachshunds than playing golf, had not touched a club in two months.

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