At Oakland Hills

Helen Hicks, a stocky girl from Hewlett, L. I., with fat cheeks and muscular legs, has become one of the best women golf players in the world by imitating her friend Maureen Orcutt. Miss Orcutt, shy and broad-shouldered, with a jaw like a prizefighter's, became good enough to be the idol of Miss Hicks by trying to be as good as Glenna Collett. Thus the three most famed of the competitors who gathered at the Oakland Hills Club in Birmingham, Mich., last week to decide the Women's National Championship composed a sequence with Hicks at one end and Collett at the other. People who understood the respect determining this sequence expected that as usual Orcutt would beat Hicks and Collett would beat Orcutt. If one of these matches had been played in the semi-final and the other in the final the tournament would have achieved a suspense that it lost when Orcutt and Hicks and Collett were knotted in the same eighth of the draw. When the knot came undone, Orcutt and Hicks were out of the tournament and Collett was as good as champion. Or not quite as good. Two ladies clipped through their match and stood in her way. One was a slight, wiry lady in a brown sweater and a brown sports hat-- Mrs. Dorothy Shearer Higbie of Detroit. At the beginning of her match with Collett the latter, though serious, seemed to be thinking of something else. Suddenly news spread over the course that Miss Collett and Mrs. Higbie had left the fourteenth green and that Mrs. Higbie was four up. Galleries and officials who deserted other matches to watch them finish saw something to remember. They saw Miss Collett play reckless, perfect golf to win the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth holes. Needing one more hole to keep the match alive she drove a long, low ball that hit the fairway, kicked sharply to one side, stopped square at the foot of a dead tree. If Collett could have blown the tree away she would have had as good a chance as Higbie of getting her next shot on the green. She chipped out, rolled her third well up and laid her fourth dead. Flustered, Mrs. Higbie flubbed her chip-shot and on the next hole, climbing out of a bunker from which her ball had not climbed, she ran her fingers through her hair, pressed her wrists against her temples and with a sigh said softly, "Oh, dear me." Then she went over and congratulated Miss Collett. Next day Collett beat Mrs. Opel Hill, and the day after that took the finals and her fourth national title by beating plump, blonde Mrs. Harry Pressler, who asked people particularly not to call her Mrs. Harry Pressler but Leona.