Guests at the Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines may enjoy an array of options during their stay at this charming resort in the Sandhills of North Carolina. In addition to world-class instruction, a championship golf course, and even grass tennis courts, there is also a swimming pool to cool off in after a long day on the course.
Few would have any reason to suspect that the pool is anything other than a swimming pool, which is to say that it is a nice place to take a dip or get in a few laps. The pool is, however, much more than that.
It is an airplane.
Let’s go back in time to 1952. In the early days of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), which had just formed two years earlier, the women who played the game spent long hours on the road traveling from city to city, often caravanning as a group and sharing expenses along the way. This made for an exhausting way of life, as the season started in the south in the winter and then wound cross-country to California. In a year, one could expect to log somewhere close to 40,000 miles in a pre-interstate America of mostly two-lane roads and highways.
Peggy Kirk Bell, winner of the 1949 Titleholders Championship and a charter member of the LPGA, realized there had to be a better way. Fascinated by aviation since her childhood, Bell served in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II with the hopes of one day learning to fly and join the Women’s Air Force Services. The war ended before she could live out this dream, but her experience traversing the highways of America renewed her interest in flying.
At a New Orleans tournament, Bell told friend and fellow golfer Gloria Armstrong how much she dreaded the upcoming drive to California. Armstrong, who had her own plane, encouraged Bell to learn how to fly and even offered her free instruction.
The catch? She would need to buy her own plane.
The following week in Dallas, Bell wrote a check for $8,000 to buy a four-seat, single-engine Cessna 170. Trying to save some money, she had the radio and extra equipment taken out. She ran into some difficulty in California when attempting to land. Armstrong told her that the control tower — knowing the plan did not have a radio — would flash green or red lights to indicate whether to land or circle the field. Bell, who suffered from red/green colorblindness, could only see the light but not discern its color. The affliction cost her an additional $1,500 to reinstall a radio back into the plane.
Finances aside, the purchase soon turned into a great investment for Bell. Additional flying lessons allowed her to ultimately host passengers on her plane. On occasion, she would be joined by her friend and playing partner Babe Zaharias and her newborn child, Bonnie. She even organized a tournament at Pine Needles in 1955, with the requirement being that entrants had to have a valid pilot’s license.
“You could lose yourself up there in the sky,” Bell said. “The freedom is unlike anything else.”
Things changed dramatically for Bell, however, in 1959. After fueling up in West Virginia en route from her hometown of Findlay, Ohio, back to Southern Pines she heard some Eastern Airlines pilots talk about a bad storm coming from the south. The air control tower, unaware of the severity of the storm in her path, allowed her to take off from the field. Flying east, Bell soon found herself in a snowstorm with almost zero visibility.
Flying low and only able to use a railroad track below her to navigate, Bell made a deal. Faced with one of the most frightening moments of her life, she turned to her faith, which had always been one of the central forces in her life. The granddaughter of a minister, Bell prayed to God to help get her on the ground. If she was able to safely land, she promised to then sell the plane. All she wanted to do was get home to her husband, Warren, and her two daughters, Bonnie and Peggy.
Soon the clouds parted, and Bell was able to locate an open farm pasture. Somehow dodging both the telephone lines and assorted farm animals, Bell successfully landed her plane in the field. After alerting the farmer that he now had a plane on his property, she called her father to let him know she made a deal with God and now had to sell her plane.
“When the weather clears,” he advised, “fly it back to North Carolina one last time and then sell it there.”
True to her word, she did just that; and she spent the rest of her life as a strong woman of faith, showing genuine concern and compassion for others.
“Faith was her foundation,” says her oldest daughter Bonnie McGowan. “She knew that God gave her a platform to carry out His mission and she did it with humility.”
Upon the sale of the plane, Bell immediately invested the proceeds into the construction of a new pool at the Pine Needles Lodge. According to her daughter Bonnie, whenever Bell would pass the pool she would wistfully say, “There’s my plane, and thank you Lord for getting me down safely.”
Travis
Feature Photo: Peggy Kirk Bell purchased her Cessna 170 for $8,000 in 1953, and later sold it after safely landing during a snowstorm in 1959. Photograph courtesy of the World Golf Hall of Fame & Museum.
