A founding member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association which formed in 1950, Bettye Danoff didn’t enjoy the fame or financial rewards of contemporary players, but it sounds like she had fun while paving the way for them. An excerpt from her New York Times obituary by Maraglit Fox:

“Bettye Danoff, one of 13 founding members of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which began as a hardy, poorly paid band of women who traveled the country for the chance to play the game, died on Thursday in McKinney, Tex. She was 88.

Her daughter Debbie Danoff Bell confirmed the death.

Officially founded in 1950, the L.P.G.A. was begun by 13 women, including Danoff, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg and Alice Bauer.

If Danoff was somewhat less well known than they, that owed partly to the fact that she curtailed her touring in the early 1960s, after her husband’s death left her with children to care for at home.

But before that, she joined her comrades in driving from tournament to tournament, convoy style, in their own cars. In each car, the driver kept a set of color-coded paddles — red, green and yellow — that she could wave out the window to signal a stop for gas, food or the bathroom.

Arriving at a course, they might encounter a sea of mud, or greens more brown than green. Before they teed off, they sometimes had to pull weeds. At night they shared motel rooms and sang popular songs together, sweetly off-key. It was A League of Their Own with woods and irons.”

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Some of Danoff’s fellow female golf pioneers, 1950s: