Keeping Hope Alive: Hope Seignious, Founder of the WPGA and the First U.S. Women's Open
- David Stone
- Jun 6
- 16 min read
Updated: Jun 13
Kingstree, South Carolina is a peaceful town on the Black River known more for its barbecue and quarterhorse racing than it is for golf. Its origins trace back to colonial days, when Captain Roger Gordon and a group of 40 Scotch-Irish immigrants established a settlement there to serve as a buffer between the Indian Territory and the plantations of Charleston, located 70 miles to the south. It takes its name from a giant white pine near the settlement that was branded with King George's stamp to designate its use as the mast of a ship in the British Navy. It was known as the King's Tree.
In 1736 the Rev. John Witherspoon, a Scottish Covenanter from Glasgow, erected the first Presbyterian Meeting House in the region, which eventually became the mother church to over 30 congregations. It was here, in 1780, that Witherspoon's great-grandson, Captain James Witherspoon, joined with scores of local patriots to form the King's Tree Regiment to fight alongside General Francis Marion to rid the area of Tories and British Redcoats during the American Revolution. Over the year's, Kingstree has been the birthplace of Blues singer Maxine Brown, R&B legend Teddy Pendergrass, and Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
Just off South Carolina Highway 261 on the eastern side of town, Williamsburg Presbyterian Cemetery occupies the location of the first meeting house. Among those interred there are Captain Gordon and Rev. Witherspoon, who became the first to be buried there when he died in 1737. Others include William Wilson, a Revolutionary War soldier who served in the South Carolina Militia, and Mary Gordon Ellis, the first woman elected to the South Carolina legislature in 1928. Unbeknownst to most of the golfing world, and likely all but the most historically-inclined locals, the cemetery is also the final resting place of one of the very first pioneers of women's professional golf and founder of the U.S. Women’s Open Championship. Here, lying inconspicuously among the patriots, trailblazers, and saints of Williamsburg County, is the grave of Miss Hope Ann Seignious.
Hope Seignious was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on January 14, 1919 and was introduced to golf at the age of nine by her father, George Marion Seignious, after the family moved to Detroit, Michigan. From an early age, Hope displayed a competitive spirit and athletic prowess. She won numerous swim meets and played shortstop on her middle school baseball team, but golf was the sport in which she really excelled. She quickly made a name for herself, becoming Detroit's youngest golf champion when she claimed the Women's Public Links Championship at just 13 years of age. Over the next two years, she set the women's course record at Sylvan Glen Country Club with an 83 and the low mark at Plum Hollow with a 79. By the time she was 20, she held the record at no fewer than 12 courses in the Detroit area. She could drive it up to 200 yards off the tee, and her distance propelled her to a record five consecutive Detroit District Golf Championships.
Seignious worked in a Detroit airplane plant for two years during World War II, and after relocating with her parents to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1944, she began a new chapter in her in her life. She became the first female golf pro in North Carolina when she accepted a position as assistant pro at Starmount Forest Country Club. Her duties there included giving lessons and helping head pro George Corcoran with the day-to-day operations of the club. Even at this early stage in her career, Hope envisioned a brighter future for women in professional golf. "I feel there will be a grand place for the woman golf professional after the war," said the forward-thinking Seignious. "When the war's over, girl pros will be popular, and I want to get in on the ground floor."
That summer, Hope traveled to Tam O'Shanter Country Club in Chicago to play in George May's All-American Open, which featured a men's open division, a men's amateur division, and a women's open division. Rain on Saturday washed out the third round of the men's division, and play was held over until Sunday. Although the women, who teed off earlier in the morning, had completed their third round on Saturday, May decided to cancel their scores too; a fact that infuriated Seignious. The final straw came when she noticed the stark difference in prize money: Byron Nelson won $27,000 for the men's division, while Betty Hicks received only $500 for her 1-stroke victory over Dot Germain in the women's division. The episode at Tam O'Shanter convinced Seignious that female professionals needed to unite against heavy-handed tournament sponsors like May. "We must form a professional organization so strong," she told Hicks, "that incidents like the Tam disgrace can never happen again!"
Upon returning home to Greensboro, Seignious applied for, and was granted, a charter in November 1944 to establish the Women's Professional Golf Association. Her goal was to create an organization for professional women golfers based on the idea that "every person, man or woman, should have the opportunity to make their living from the thing they do best in life." They would model it after the men's PGA, with plans to stage national tournaments in the future.
To fully incorporate, she enlisted Hicks and Ellen Griffin, a physical education instructor from the University of North Carolina's Women's College (now UNC-Greensboro). Needing officers for their fledgling association, they elected a president by playing a game of odds-and-evens, sending telegrams to one another with the result of their coin flip. By virtue of her "heads" to Seignious and Griffin's "tails," Hicks was elected the group's first president. Seignious then expressed her interest in the position of executive secretary and tournament director, a role that Hicks and Griffin were happy to let her take while they focused on promoting the organization in schools and colleges.
With female pros like Betty Hicks serving in the Coast Guard's SPARs and Patty Berg in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve, Seignious became the "Rosie the Riveter" of women's golf in January 1945, when she was hired as the head professional at North Shore Country Club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While she wasn’t the first female head pro in the United States— that distinction belonged to Bessie Fenn of Palm Beach Golf Club— Seignious made history as the first woman to hold this position in the state of Wisconsin. According to Val Byers, chairman of North Shore's golf committee, the bold move of hiring Seignious was both a wartime measure and an experiment. "Granted that having a woman pro is a departure," he admitted, "we felt that qualified women teachers definitely have a place in golf."
Seignious approached the job with enthusiasm, giving lessons to both men and women, while also managing the caddies, running the golf shop, and overseeing the sales and repair of equipment. She also found the time to record the lowest round shot by a woman in the state of Wisconsin in 1945. While Seignious was establishing herself in Milwaukee and trying to cobble together some semblance of a tournament schedule, Betty Hicks was touring colleges and universities in every region of the country, playing exhibitions and demonstrating a curriculum devised by Ellen Griffin aimed at promoting the game among female students nationwide. While Hicks was on her school tour, Seignious convinced the Spokane Athletic Round Table to sponsor the first U.S. Women's National Open. It was originally scheduled for August 1945, but due to transportation shortages in and around Spokane toward the end of World War II, it had to be postponed until the following summer.
After working for one season at North Shore, Seignious returned home to Greensboro to work at Starmount Forest and devote more of her time to the WPGA. Using money from both her father's cotton brokerage and her own savings account, she set up headquarters at the Dixie Building in Greensboro and tried to recruit new members into the organization. By the time summer rolled around, two-time U.S. Women's Amateur champion Betty Jameson had joined the fold, along with 1939 Western Open champ Helen Dettweiler. Meanwhile, Ellen Griffin announced a partnership with Purdue University to present the first WPGA National Golf School for Teachers, which was set for the summer of 1946, and Seignious began publication of The Woman Golfer, a monthly magazine co-edited by Greensboro sportswriter Smith Barrier, which featured player profiles, instructional articles, and fashion tips.
The inaugural U.S. Women's Open took place at Spokane Country Club from August 26-September 1, 1946. The festivities kicked off with an exhibition football game between the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers of the All-American Football Conference, with Betty Hicks, Babe Zaharias, and Patty Berg providing halftime entertainment. Having reaffirmed their comment to the event, the Spokane Athletic Round Table, largely with money they made from slot machines, raised an eye-popping purse of $19,700 in war bonds, $5,600 of which went to the winner. The Athletic Round Table had a track record for staging major golf tournaments. Two years earlier, they hosted the 1944 PGA Championship at nearby Manito Country Club, and they expected the first National Women's Open to be the greatest event in the history of women's golf.
For the first--and only--time, the 1946 U.S. Women's Open was a match play event after two rounds of medal qualifying on Monday and Tuesday. Of the 39 women vying for 32 spots in the match play bracket, only six of them were professionals. One of them was Patty Berg, who shot a fantastic 73 on day one of qualifying to take a one-stroke lead over local favorite and Northwestern Amateur champion Betty Jean Rucker. Berg followed that with a 72 on Tuesday, which gave her medalist honors at 145, seven strokes ahead of Babe Zaharias and eight better than Rucker. Hope Seignious qualified by a comfortable margin, tying for 10th with Helen Dettweiler at 161.
Upsets were the order of the day in the first round of match play with Ellen Keiser defeating Hope Seignious 3 & 2, but the biggest shocker of the day was the ouster of superstar Babe Didrickson Zaharias by 19 year-old Grace Lenczyk, a relatively unknown amateur from Newington, Connecticut. At the time, Didrickson had a streak of 13 consecutive tournament wins, a remarkable feat in its own right, yet despite the loss, Babe kept on counting. To some WPGA members, this tainted Zaharias's eventual claim of 17 consecutive amateur titles, but sportswriters and fans who bought into her bluster were always willing to believe her assertions no matter how exaggerated.
In the round of 16 on Thursday, Keiser eliminated Lenczyk by a 5 & 4 margin, while Betty Jean Rucker squeaked by Helen Dettweiler 2 & 1. Patty Berg, Betty Hicks, and Betty Jameson all survived their matches and advanced to the quarterfinals on Friday. Rucker continued her hot hand on Friday, knocking out Betty Hicks with a 5 & 4 victory before losing to Berg 3 & 2 in their 36-hole semifinal on Saturday. Jameson dominated Ellen Keiser 8 & 6 to make the semifinals, where she won the final hole to defeat California amateur Dot Kielty 1-up to face Berg in the finals.
In their 36-hole final on Sunday, Berg and Jameson finished their morning round all square, but Berg's putter heated up in the afternoon round, and she took a 4-up lead onto the back nine. Berg won the 10th to go 5-up and gave one back with a bogey at the 12th, before closing out the match 5 & 4 when she tapped in for par at the 14th hole. For the win, Berg pocketed $5,600 in war bonds, and Jameson took home $3,100 for finishing second.
Unfortunately, the WPGA could not capitlize on the momentum of that first Women's Open. By and large, the golfing community was never very supportive of the organization, and recruiting new members was more difficult than anticipated. "We had so little to offer them," lamented Betty Hicks. "There was no money and so few tournaments, so parents tried to keep their girls from turning pro." With George Seignious writing most of the checks, Hope returned to Greensboro and with some vigorous lobbying, convinced a couple of amateurs to turn pro. One of them was South Carolinian Kathryn Hemphill, a member of the last pre-war Curtis Cup team. Hemphill had won most of the major tournaments in Florida in the late 1930s and had all but quit tournament golf after an appendectomy in 1940. She was playing mostly weekend golf and working at a Columbia credit union when Seignious persuaded her to join the WPGA in November 1946.
Hemphill worked with Seignious on The Woman Golfer, while Ellen Griffin produced the Golf Manual for Teachers and continued to create innovative ways to teach rules, strategy, and ettiquette to prospective new golfers. One of her favorite inventions was the "Boll Weevil Course," an indoor practice course played with cotton balls, with signs denoting various hazards and obstacles. Griffin also planned a second annual National Golf School for Teachers, which was held in conjunction with the 1947 Women's Open. She and Seignious developed a plan to offer discounted membership to physical education teachers for $1.50 a year, which would include a subscription to The Woman Golfer and teaching materials throughout the school year, but this idea died on the vine when the USGA decided that any teacher accepting this offer would forfeit their amateur status. It was just one more example of the road blocks placed in front of the WPGA by the golfing establishment.
The second Women's Open was underwritten by George Seignious. After discussions during the off-season, the tournament format reverted back to medal play and was set to begin on June 26, 1947, at Starmount Forest Country Club in Greensboro. The tournament was notable for Betty Jameson's winning score of 295, the first sub-300 score for a female in a 72-hole event, which was six strokes better than co-runners-up Polly Reilly and Sally Sessions. It was also notable for the absence of Babe Zaharias, who was overseas playing in the British Amateur and didn't make it home in time for the first round.
Although Zaharias turned pro in August 1947, she never joined the WPGA. While she and Patty Berg played in WPGA tournaments, neither woman ever fully engaged with the organization, a fact that led to a simmering bitterness from Betty Hicks that lasted for years. Zaharias and Berg had been signed by Wilson Sporting Goods to promote women's golf, yet for some reason they were discouraged from joining the WPGA, leaving the organization without much needed star-power and sponsorship money. "We might have made it if they joined," Hicks recalled with some regret. There was no doubt that Wilson had done a lot for women's' golf up to that point, but with Dynamite (a nickname Wilson execs had given Berg) and The Babe on board, Wilson would have invested more of their promotional budget in the association. "If that happened," noted Hicks in 2001, "those girls might be playing the WPGA today!"
In January 1948, Helen Dettweiler became the second president of the WPGA, but by that time, the organization was hitting a wall. Though Michigan amateur Sally Sessions had turned professional and joined the group, they were still struggling to convince other amateurs to do the same. Golf wasn't seen as a worthy profession for women, and anyone could see that only a handful were making a living in professional golf. As a result, amateurs had to fill a substantial portion of the field at tournaments like the 1947 Women's Open, where 29 of the 39 entrants were amateurs.
Life on tour was a grind. The women caravanned in modest sedans, communicating with one another with hand signals and signs. They stayed in cheap motels and cooked meatballs in the bottoms of coffee pots; anything to save a nickel. Most moonlit as teaching pros or held non-golf jobs to make ends meet. Despite Seignious's best efforts, an organized slate of tournaments never materialized, due to a lack of marquee talent and a dearth of sponsorship money. Aside from the Tampa Open and the Women's Open, they relied on tournaments like the All-American at Tam O'Shanter, the Women's Western Open, the Texas Open, the Titleholders, and the Hardscrabble. Many were run by state or local golf associations. Some offered purses, but others did not. They initially believed that if each WPGA member contracted for a tournament in her hometown, they could put that together and build a tour, but as Dettweiler later recalled, "none of the girls wanted to do that."
The lack of players, tournaments, and money created internal dissension, and it all came to a head when Dettweiler decided to hire Gene Ellison, an ex-football player from the University of Georgia, as the organization's new tournament director without consulting Seignious. The fact that it was a man only exacerbated things. "Why can't we work together instead of going outside our organization to hire a tournament director?" Hope snarled. Seignious argued that the organization's expenses for 1946 alone had been $28,000, much of which she had paid from her own pocket. The magazine and the teaching manual weren't covering their expenses, and they simply didn't have the revenue to afford it. "With the exception of you and Hicks," she said, "the rest of the contribution has amounted to nothing but hot air and good intentions, which die as they walk out the door."
At the 1948 Women's Open in Atlantic City, third-round leader Babe Zaharias ridiculed the tournament's "puny" $1,200 purse and threatened to withdraw if someone didn't sweeten the pot. She was mollified when a generous club member put up a $1,000 bonus for any player breaking 300 in the tournament and came back for the final round. Needing a six-foot putt on the final hole for a 299 and the extra cash, she missed and had to settle for an eight-stroke win over Betty Hicks.
Zaharias and Patty Berg had little faith that Seignious could salvage the organization, and when they did finally step in with the financial backing of Wilson Sporting Goods, it proved to be the death knell of the WPGA. One thing they had going for them was the backing of Wilson. The other was Fred Corcoran, the brother of Seignious's old boss and former PGA Tournament Director, who was also Zaharias's agent. Staging a coup of sorts, Berg, along with Babe and her wrestler husband George Zaharias, summoned Corcoran to the Venetian Hotel in Miami under the guise of reorganizing the WPGA. They had a plan for a tour supported by Wilson and needed Corcoran's help to make it happen. "You've gotta get all the ladies on board first," Corcoran cautioned. "I've had enough knives in my back. I don't want to find any with lipstick on them." Babe confidently assured him, "You find the money, and we'll get the girls." Beth agreed.
A few months later, Corcoran was contacted by Wilson president L.B. Iceley asking if he had any interest in getting back into golf. "If I can get the other manufacturers to come in, will you set up a women's tour?" he asked. Wilson would cover Corcoran's salary, but he would need to secure the prize money and organize the tournaments himself. Corcoran said he would. He approached Hope Seignious and her father about transferring control of the WPGA, but they declined. It was against Hope's nature to give up on anything, especially having invested so much of her own time and money into the venture. Despite its nominal status, her pride kept her from stepping away. She was sacrrificing her legacy for an organization whose fate was already sealed.
Corcoran went to his attorney, who suggested that he form his own association under a different name, and with Berg and Zaharias's approval, established the Ladies Professional Golf Association. "Ladies!" Seignious huffed when she heard the new name. "Lady is what you take out of the inside of a lobster!" However, her father no longer had the means to support the WPGA. Hope grew weary of the battle, and the floundering league suspended operations in December 1949.
Even though the WPGA no longer existed, its original members refused to consider their efforts a failure. "Maybe we were a little naive in the beginning," said Betty Hicks later. "We thought it would work just because we wanted it to, but there's no mistaking the fact that it was an innovative organization." Despite significant pressure, the WPGA did not have an exclusionary Caucasian Clause like the PGA, which was a bold idea in the pre-Civil Rights era. Additionally, founding member Ellen Griffin pioneered group golf instruction and the training of teachers, establishing the National Golf School for Teachers a full sixteen years before the LPGA formed its Teaching and Club Professionals division. Today, the LPGA's highest teaching award bears Griffin's name. Finally, the WPGA launched the professional careers of four future LPGA Hall of Famers: Patty Berg, Babe Zaharias, Betty Jameson, and Louise Suggs; and eighty years ago in August, it held the first U.S. Women's Open, which formally came under the jurisdiction of the USGA in 1953.
Fred Corcoran's attorneys drew up papers and the LPGA was incorporated in New York in 1950. At the 1950 U.S. Women's Open in Witchita, Kansas, 13 LPGA members designated themselves as founders. They included Berg, the first president of the LPGA; Zaharias; and WPGA members Betty Jameson, Helen Dettweiler, and Sally Sessions; along with Marlene Hagge, Marilyn Smith, Shirley Spork, Betty Danoff, Louise Suggs, Alice Bauer, Opal Hill, and Helen Hicks (no relation to Betty). Together, with Iceley's money and Corcoran's expertise, they successfully grew the LPGA into the resilient and robust organization it is today. Seventy-six years later, the LPGA is going stronger than ever.
"You have to give credit to Hope Seignious and her dad," said Patty Berg years later, "because they helped us a lot. She had a tremendous vision, but I thought we just had to get going. We had to get someone with Fred's background." Although Seignious was awarded honorary LPGA membership in 1953, the same year the USGA took over the U.S. Women's Open, she never competed in its tournaments. Foot problems forced her to step back from competitive golf, though orthotic shoes allowed her to play recreationally and continue teaching the game. Over time, she turned to deep-sea fishing as a way to distract from her inability to compete as she once had. Despite all that had happened, Seignious relished every moment of success achieved by the women professionals, even if it hadn't occurred on her watch. Still unable to use the word "Ladies," she told Jim Foster in 1953, "I predict in 10 years, the women's PGA will take its place alongside the men's PGA in comparison with amateurs."
In the late 1950s, George Seignious closed his cotton brokerage in Greensboro and moved to Kingstree, South Carolina. Hope moved with the family and helped her father run the Princess Ann Motel. Always looking for ways to expand the game of golf, she built the state's first par-3 course adjacent to the motel with the goal of introducing junior golfers--both boys and girls--to the sport. She lived a quiet life in Kingstree, giving golf lessons, managing the motel, and teaching business classes through a small college in the Lowcountry, but she was always proud of what she had started in professional golf. Tragically, on July 11, 1968, just four days after Susie Maxwell Berning won the first of her three U.S. Women's Open titles, Hope Seignious passed away in Kingstree after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. She was only 49.
As we head into the final rounds of this week's 81st U.S. Women's Open, it is fitting to pay tribute to Hope Seignious, the woman who founded the tournament 80 years ago. Her ambition for women's golf was once compared to that of Amelia Earhart's for flying, but like Earhart, she never reached her final destination. Her life's work reflects the mission statement of today's LPGA: "to be the global leader in women's professional golf and to use our unique platform to empower, inspire and advance opportunities for girls and women, on and off the course." She was a revolutionary--Helen Dettweiler called her one of golf's "early feminists." She was simply ahead of her time.
Today, even with all of the media coverage surrounding professional golf, there is very little mention of Hope Seignious or of the Women's Professional Golf Association. The Greensboro News and Record's Todd Graff calls it The Organization that Golf Forgot. "If the LPGA recognizes the WPGA, then the (LPGA's) founders wouldn't be first," joked Betty Hicks in 2001, "and we're pretty competitive women. Everyone likes to be first."
Everyone also likes to be remembered. Don't worry, Hope. We see you.
Thanks for this wonderful article concerning one of Kingstree's own. As director of the local Historical Society,☺️