Submitted by John Dodge
Blessed with a swing and a smile to match, Merry Linda Anderson is remembered as the most accomplished female golf member of the Olympia Country and Golf Club, winning three state championships and a host of other tournaments in her short but spectacular career.
She won the 1958 Olympia city amateur title at the age of 17, less than a year after first taking golf lessons from Lacey golf professional Art Eeckout. “She’s a fine young golfer,” Eeckhout said at the time. She needs experience but she’s got the strokes.” After that first victory, Daily Olympian sports editor Bill Knight proclaimed her ‘the finest female golfer in Olympia history.”
The 1958 Olympia High School graduate was soon shooting in the 70’s. She broke through in the summer of 1960, firing 77-74 to win the Lower Columbia Women’s golf title, followed by a semi-final finish in the Pacific Northwest Women’s Golf Championship in Victoria, British Columbia. In August, she captured her first of three Washington State Amateur titles with a match play victory at Yakima Country Club over Edean Ihlanfeldt of Seattle, winner of more than 20 regional championships and an inductee into the Pacific Northwest Golf Hall of Fame in 1985.
The University of Washington student was gaining notoriety in golf circles. After her successful 1960 campaign, former U.S. Amateur champion Pat Lesser Harbottle of Tacoma said of the rising star. “I feel that Linda is a national championship prospect.” The stage was set for the 1961 golf season when the Washington State Amateur was to be held at OCGC, the first major tournament since the golf course expanded to 18 holes in 1959. Also, the U.S, Women’s Amateur was coming to Tacoma Country and Golf Club, which was like a second home course to Anderson.
“This could be a year of great triumph or deep disappointment,” Knight wrote on the eve of the 1961 summer golf season. As Anderson prepared to defend her state title on her home course, and play in the first U.S. Amateur tournament in the Pacific Northwest since 1903, she spoke with confidence. “I’ve played my best golf there,” she said of the Tacoma layout. “That should be an advantage in the national tournament.”
Also qualifying for the state and national tournaments was Elma native and OCGC member Lee Mouncier, 21, whose parents owned Oakridge Golf Course in Elma. A fine, young golfer in her own right, she was somewhat overshadowed by Anderson.
A fairy tale ending for either golfer was not to be. Mouncier lost her first match and Anderson bowed out in the second round on her home course. Anderson fared a little better in the national championship, reaching the quarterfinals of the match-play tournament before losing. Her top finish in a busy summer of golf was a second- place finish in the Southern Oregon Amateur in September.
A broken ankle from a winter skiing accident derailed her 1962 golf season. She worked as a receptionist at the Olympia Brewery that summer. Her father was also brewery employee. Anderson forged a friendship with brewery president Adolph (Bump) Schmidt in the early 1960’s built on their love of golf. Schimdt, an accomplished golfer, OCGC men’s club champion in 1948 and 1949 and club president in 1939 and 1946, teamed up with Anderson to successfully compete in mixed team tournaments.
Anderson returned to the amateur golf circuit in the summer of 1963, winning the Tacoma Women’s Golf Association title for the second time and reaching the quarter-final round of a national tournament – the Trans-Mississippi Women’s Tournament in Denver, Colo. She returned to the winner’s circle in 1965, with her second state amateur title, playing in 100-degree heat in Wenatchee. By then she had been married for nine months, moving to Puyallup and playing out of Linden Golf and Country Club in Sumner as Linda Challman. In 1969, she won her third and final state amateur title.
She stopped playing competitive golf at age 30 after the birth of her third daughter. She escaped a difficult marriage, raising her children as a single mother and earning a modest income as co-owner and operator of a picture framing business in Bellevue, WA. She died of lung cancer April 24, 2025, just six weeks shy of her 85th birthday.
“She was a tough woman who lost a daughter at a young age,” Kelly Pournoor, her oldest and sole surviving daughter, recalled at her memorial service last summer. “She struggled with money, but she was my mentor and, most of all, she was my mother.”
Ann Swanson, a Grays Harbor native and nine-time state amateur winner, said Challman’s swing reminded her of Hall of Fame golfer Ben Hogan’s. Only half in jest, Swanson said she owed some of her victories to Merry Linda Anderson Challman’s early retirement.
And to this day, the title of finest female golfer in Olympia history still holds true for the athletic young lady with the award-winning golf swing and smile.
