Natasha Matson Fife was 14 years old when she watched women’s sports history come through Wichita.
The best women golfers in the country had gathered at Rolling Hills Country Club for the 1950 U.S. Women’s Open and what happened that week was something even larger than a major championship. The LPGA was founded there, inside a clubhouse Fife could still picture more than seven decades later — the iron chairs, the linoleum tables, the room where women’s golf took a historic step forward.
At the time, she did not fully grasp the magnitude of what she had witnessed. She was a young golfer from Wichita still discovering the game, coming of age around legends such as Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Marilynn Smith and Judy Bell…