MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
A woman who was a golf legend in her time but who died in obscurity will get her due in a memorial service this week. Miriam Burns shared headlines with baseball slugger Babe Ruth, also with heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey, but she was buried years later in an unmarked grave in Kansas City. Reporter Greg Echlin has more details about her life.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AIN'T SHE SWEET?")
BEN BERNIE: (Singing) Ain't she sweet? See her coming down the street.
GREG ECHLIN, BYLINE: In 1927, "Ain't She Sweet?" was all the rage. And the song fit Miriam Burns. The snappy 23-year-old Kansas City golfer dazzled the Long Island, New York, crowd. It was there where she won the U.S. Women's Amateur Golf Championship. To some, she was Mrs. Horn, a recently divorced mother of an infant son at the time. But most of the attention centered around her game, colorful outfits and no-holds-barred personality.
JOHN GARRITY: It was noted that she smoked like a chimney during her rounds. She chewed gum. She was not above an occasional profanity.
ECHLIN: That's former Sports Illustrated magazine golf writer, John Garrity. He says it was O.B. Keeler, 1920s influential golf writer, who labeled Burns the It Girl of women's golf.
GARRITY: She was the Roaring Twenties, and I think that's what the It Girl comment stands out - is that nobody in sports represented this new age more than Miriam Burns.
ECHLIN: That bygone notoriety is one of the reasons Ashley Tyson (ph) of Miami, Florida, the great granddaughter of Miriam Burns, is in Kansas City for the graveside memorial service. Tyson is no golfer but says she has a visceral sense of Miriam Burns.
ASHLEY TYSON: Hearing about her chain-smoking and, like, cracking jokes on the golf course, I'm just like, that sounds like somebody I am related to, for sure.
ECHLIN: Just 24 years after her national title, Burns died without fanfare. She had married a second time and retired from golf in 1930, following the 1929 stock market crash and when no women's professional tour existed. Her son, Kenneth, born from her first marriage, was alive when Burns died of pneumonia in 1951. And Tyson wonders why her grandfather couldn't have helped with a more dignified burial for his mother.
TYSON: I'm so curious, and I don't know if I really want to know the answer to this. But it's about my great-grandmother but also about her relationship with my grandfather and why we don't have those ties.
ECHLIN: Tyson says very little is known about the emotional connections, or the lack of them, between Burns and the rest of her family.
TYSON: It gives me a little bit of pain and sadness 'cause I just feel like there's probably a lot of hurt and suffering there, and I don't know why.
ECHLIN: Kansas City historian, Bruce Mathews, discovered that a local funeral home had actually placed Miriam Burns' remains next to the marked grave of her father. Standing near the grave sites, he explains.
BRUCE MATHEWS: The family never knew about it after that, and she was kind of lost. Nobody had any records of her until we started looking for her and found out that she was buried here.
ECHLIN: Now the family and others who've become fans of the golfer, once a celebrity and until now, long forgotten, will pay tribute. Among them will be Kansas City's most recognizable golfer, Tom Watson. And now, in her final resting place, Miriam Burns will have a headstone graced with her name. For NPR News, I'm Greg Echlin in Kansas City.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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