Beverly Hanson

Born: 1925 in Fargo, North Dakota

Tour Victories:
17

Major Championships:
Professional - 3
• LPGA Championship: 1955
• Western Open: 1956
• Titleholders: 1958

Amateur - 1
• U.S. Women's Open: 1950

Awards and Honors:
• Vare Trophy (low scoring average), 1958
• LPGA Tour money leader, 1958
• Member, U.S. Curtis Cup team, 1950

Trivia:
• Beverly Hanson won her professional debut on the LPGA Tour (the 1951 Eastern Open), a feat no golfer has accomplished since.

• Hanson was the winner of the inaugural LPGA Championship, which debuted in 1955.

Beverly Hanson Biography:
Beverly Hanson never intended to have a career as a golfer. She wanted to be a journalist, and that's what she studied at the University of North Dakota.

After graduation, she went to work at the Fargo, N.D., newspaper. But in the winter, she headed down to Florida to get in some golfing.

"I was staying with this lovely couple, and they had a yard man who could neither read nor write, he signed checks with an X, and he was making 60 cents an hour, and I had been getting 50 cents an hour from the biggest paper in the state," Hanson told the Baltimore Sun newspaper in a 2006 article. "That's how I decided to be a golfer."

Good decision.

Hanson headed back home and started taking lessons from Patty Berg's coach at the University of Minnesota. And her amateur career got rolling. By 1949, just five years after that fateful decision made in Florida, Hanson won the Texas Open as an amateur, plus a couple big amateur tournaments in California.

The following year Hanson's amateur career culminated in winning the U.S. Women's Amateur and representing the U.S. in the Curtis Cup.

Hanson turned pro in 1951 and joined the LPGA Tour, winning her very first event. She didn't win again until 1954, but from 1954-58 she won twice each year.

Although she won three times in 1959, the year 1958 was her best. That year Hanson led the Tour in scoring average and money, won twice and finished second five times.

Hanson wound up with 17 Tour victories, including three majors. One of those was the 1955 LPGA Championship, which Hanson won in the event's first year of existence. She also claimed the 1956 Western Open and 1958 Titleholders, both majors at the time.

Hanson became a golf instructor after her playing career ended, and was still teaching into her 80s.