Peggy Kirk Bell, legend in golf, passed away last Wednesday at the age of 95.

There have been a lot of articles about Mrs. Bell, showing her significant impact on the game. Golf.com, Golf Digest, ESPN, the New York Times, the LPGA, Golf Channel and more, Feel free to read them all.  You’ll find that she was a charter member of the LPGA (not a founding member since she was still an amateur), won many awards and was inducted in multiple halls of fame, was a Golf Digest top-100 teacher, and used to fly her plane from event to event around the country.  These will all be better written, and document her life more fully.  I can share what I knew of Mrs. Bell.

I met Mrs. Bell in the mid-1980s when I was a 13 year-old.  My mother, sister, and I went Pine Needles in North Carolina to participate in Mrs. Bell’s “Family Golfari”, which is a way of saying a week worth of clinics at the resort.

Each morning at 9am, Mrs. Bell and her son-in-law, former PGA Tour pro Pat McGowan, would perform a demonstration of that day’s lessons.  By then Mrs. Bell was in her 60s, but she would just stripe the ball out into the range even with no warmup.  She tried to keep the swing simple: proper grip, comfortable setup bent at the hips, and then “back to target – belt buckle to target” (This is almost exactly how I have explained the golf swing to any of my friends as they have taken up golf and asked me for advice). The rest of the morning was spent on the lesson tee.

I would go back to Pine Needles every year until 1996, some years as a “camper” (if you can call spending time at a prestigious golf resort camping), and some years working as a counsellor at their annual youth camp (my first year as counsellor, one of my kids was future PGA Tour member Kevin Stadler).  Every year, Mrs. Bell and the rest of her family who run Pine Needles, would make me feel like I was a part of the family.

Mrs. Bell, for all of her long list of accomplishments did not brag or live in the past.  She was more interested in helping golfers of all levels to hit the ball just a little bit better.  She made everyone she met feel special, and she never seemed to be in a hurry to leave a conversation. Mrs. Bell was as nice of a person as there is in the world.

I don’t think I’ve played a round of golf or hit a bucket of balls on the range without thinking back to the lessons and times spent a Pine Needles, and I have kept meaning to go back to visit Mrs. Bell and her family.  Unfortunately I have procrastinated too long.