Photo courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin
She’s one of the greatest athletes from Oak Cliff you’ve probably never heard of.
Betty Jameson was the first woman to break 300 in a 72-hole tournament, scoring 295 at the U.S. Women’s Open in 1947. The Sunset High School graduate won 10 pro tournaments in her career. Along with fellow Sunset alumna Bettye Mims, she was among the founders of the Ladies Professional Golf Association.
Jameson, who died in 2009, will be among the 2020 Dallas ISD Athletic Hall of Fame inductees this coming May.
From her obituary in the New York Times:
Her career earnings were $91,470, a respectable sum in an era in which the women drove from tournament to tournament in an automobile caravan and often played on courses far less green and manicured than those of the professional men’s tour. But the women drew the attention of news organizations, which placed the blond-haired, photogenic Jameson among the tour’s so-called “glamour girls.”
Jameson started playing golf at 15, when she was a student at Sunset. Her mother gave her 50 cents for green fees and 50 cents to rent clubs “at a golf course just outside of Dallas.” That might’ve been the Mims’ family’s course in Grand Prairie, Sunset Golf Center, which opened in the 1920s and closed this past summer.
Here she is at work, winning a 1955 tournament organized by Babe Didrikson Zaharias (who also lived in Oak Cliff at one time).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=em9srrj25u8]
