Frank's Place: Golf star's life was cut short by killing
After a decade of sports section stories on her golfing triumphs, Marion Miley finally made the front page of her hometown newspaper on Sept. 29, 1941.
After a decade of sports section stories on her golfing triumphs, Marion Miley finally made the front page of her hometown newspaper on Sept. 29, 1941.
It took a bloody murder to get her there. Her own.
According to the Inquirer story, the 27-year-old Philadelphia native was shot twice, once in the head, during a Lexington (Ky.) Country Club robbery the previous night.
Police were alerted at 4 a.m., when Miley's mother, herself suffering from three gunshot wounds, crawled to a neighboring home.
In a 1941 newspaper environment that valued murder, mayhem, and, whenever it could possibly be insinuated, sex, this sordid story had it all. There was a well-known athlete, a particularly brutal crime, a mystery, and, as the paper, reflecting the era's sexist attitudes, noted prominently, "the negligee-clad body of [a] pretty brunette."
Seventy-five years later, few recall Miley, her murder, or her stellar career. But at the dawn of women's golf, when female athletes and their accomplishments were frequently ignored, hers was a familiar name and face.
The Mileys were an old Philadelphia family, based in Germantown and later Chestnut Hill. The golfer's father, Fred, one of 11 children, was born here in 1886. Discovering golf as a youngster, he displayed an instant affinity.
By the time he married Elsie Ego, he was making clubs and giving lessons at the courses then sprouting in this area like Kentucky bluegrass.
Marion, their only child, was born in 1914. She was taught golf early, and her development intensified after the family relocated in 1921 to Fort Pierce, Fla., where Fred took a job as a club pro.
They moved again in 1929, to Lexington Country Club. Fred was the pro there, Elsie the club's manager, and Marion one of its best young players.
Enrolled at Florida State, she won the first of six Kentucky Women's Amateur titles in 1931. She dropped out of college as a sophomore to devote herself to golf.
There was no LPGA yet, but many of the women who would be its pioneers - Patty Berg, Betty Hicks, Babe Didrickson - competed in a series of well-publicized amateur events, most in Florida.
Miley separated herself from this talented pack in 1934, winning the Riviera Championship in a grueling 53-hole final with Jean Bauer. After capturing the Augusta Invitational that year, she was named for the first of three times to the U.S. Curtis Cup teams.
She won five times in 1935, including the Mexican Open, where she met and befriended Bing Crosby. Six years later, the superstar entertainer would offer a $5,000 reward for the capture of Miley's killers.
It didn't hurt that Miley was photogenic, a fact male sportswriters mentioned often, and she quickly became one of her sport's busiest figures.
"Thanks to a stint working in the clothing section of a department store, [she] dressed beautifully," Rhonda Glenn, the late United States Golf Association executive, wrote in a 2010 article, "wearing crisp blouses and skirts hemmed at mid-calf. She played in more than 100 charity exhibitions, gave speeches and was wined and dined by entertainers, baseball players, horsemen and politicians."
Standard Oil hired Miley to inspect service stations as she traveled. She wrote first-person newspaper accounts at big events such as the U.S. Women's Amateur.
Tall and rangy, Miley was a sensational driver. She could, Glenn wrote, outdrive Berg by 15 yards and once defeated the powerful Didrickson in a long-driving contest.
She never won the era's premier tournament, the Women's Amateur, but was a semifinalist twice.
In mid-September 1941, after losing in the Amateur's third round, Miley retreated to Lexington. Her father was then working in nearby Cincinnati and her mother, still the Lexington club's manager, had a clubhouse apartment there.
On Sept. 28, Miley helped set up for a club dance that night. In bed at 2 a.m., she heard her mother scream. Rushing downstairs with a golf club, she tried to battle three masked intruders.
In the chaos, Miley was shot twice, in the back and forehead. She fell dead instantly on the staircase. The men ransacked the apartment, stole $140 in dance receipts, and shot Elsie Miley three times in the abdomen.
Because the clubhouse bore no signs of forced entry, police suspected an inside job. Days later they arrested the greenskeeper, Raymond Baxter; a Louisville nightclub operator, Robert Anderson; and the admitted gunman, Thomas Penney.
In a 1943 interview just days before the three were electrocuted at Eddyville State Penitentiary, Penney, a lifetime criminal, offered a bizarre apology.
"I'm sorry I killed the Mileys," he said. "I was just excited. I didn't even know they were shot until I read in the papers."
"The papers" were also how Fred Miley learned of the crime. Driving home from Cincinnati the following day, he saw the gruesome headlines when he stopped at a diner.
Marion Miley's body - "clad in a tailored suit of gray tweed" - lay in state for two days at a Lexington funeral home, attracting more than 1,000 mourners. Then, just hours after her daughter's Oct. 1 funeral concluded, Elsie Miley died. She was 52.
Days later, alone now, Fred Miley collapsed on a golf course. He would recover and continue to teach the game and play in senior tournaments.
When he died at 71 in 1956, the golfing family was united again, this time in a small plot at Lexington's Calvary Cemetery.
On Wednesday, the anniversary of her slaying, a Kentucky television station will debut a documentary, Forgotten Fame: The Marion Miley Story.
"She is a ghostly presence wafting through the annals of the game," wrote Glenn, who died in 2012. "She is the only fine player in the insular world of golf to be murdered in her prime. Surely she is worth remembering."
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