Casualty of war

Pam Barton of England occupies the sliver of golf history in the interval after Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen among men, and Glenna Collett Vare and Joyce Wethered among women, departed or were departing the scene, while Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Patty Berg were in their nascent stages.
From 1936 to 1939, Barton arguably was the best female golfer in the world, a true international at a time when few men or women traveled abroad in search of titles. She won three of what were then the women’s majors (the British Ladies Amateur in 1936 and 1939, and the 1936 U.S. Women’s Amateur). Barton’s death aboard a Royal Air Force Tiger Moth on November 13, 1943, at age 26 deprived her of a probable hall-of-fame career, and deprived golf of a global star in the postwar years, when women’s professional golf was finding its footing.
A week after Barton’s death, The Observer paid homage to the “sturdy, short, trim-balanced figure (a feminine type of the Hagen-Jones stature), the flash of sunlight on the reddish-b...