Glenna Collett Vare is a ‘luminous’ figure in women’s golf history. She’s buried in an unmarked grave in Bala Cynwyd.

One of the best female golfers of all time is buried in Laurel Hill West cemetery in Bala Cynwyd.

But if you were looking for her final resting place, you might have some difficulty. Because Glenna Collett Vare, a six-time U.S. champion and member of the World Golf Hall of Fame’s class of 1975, has no headstone of her own — or even her name written near her own grave.

“I think of her as one of the luminous figures in the history of women’s golf,” golf historian Stephen Proctor told The Inquirer.

Proctor has written two books on golf history, Monarch of the Green and The Long Golden Afternoon, and he is working on a third, which is focused on Vare’s rivalry with British golfer Joyce Wethered.

“Glenna Collett and Joyce Wethered became, on their equal sides of the Atlantic, sort of the realization of this notion that women could be as good as men, and some of the scores they put up between the two of them boggle the imagination,” he said.

Vare and her husband, Edwin H. Vare Jr., are interred in the Vare family plot under Edwin Vare Sr.’s headstone. Once known as “the female Bobby Jones” and “the First Lady of Golf,” Glenna Collett Vare is now a little-known legend.

Glenna Collett Vare was born in 1903 in Connecticut and raised in Rhode Island. She was an athlete right from the start; the daughter of George Collett, an Olympic cyclist, she was a swimmer and diver who also played baseball and tennis.

When Glenna was 14, she accompanied George to Metacomet Country Club, and she tried a golf swing for the first time. Glenna hit the ball on her first shot, straight down the fairway. Several men stopped and stared at the distance of her drive, declaring her “the coming champion” right then and there, in a story often repeated later in her lifetime as her legend on the green grew.

Two years later, Vare competed in her first U.S. Women’s Amateur, held at The Shawnee Inn & Golf Resort in Shawnee on Delaware, Pa., and made it to the second round of the tournament. Three years after that, at just 19 years old, she won the whole thing. She won the U.S. Amateur six times over her career, a record that still stands.

It wasn’t just luck or genetics. Vare practiced under Alex Smith, a Scottish golfer and two-time U.S. Open champion, and Ernest Jones, an English golfer. She was known for the distance of her drives; word circulated the country when, at 19, she hit a ball 307 yards off the tee.

In 1931, Glenna married into one of the most powerful political families in Philadelphia. Edwin H. Vare Jr. was an athlete, a Penn graduate, a construction engineer, and the son of a Pennsylvania state senator.

The elder Edwin, along with his brothers William and George, were known as the “Dukes of South Philadelphia,” and together they dominated local politics. Vare Brothers construction business also helped construct trolley tracks, the Broad Street Subway, and Municipal Stadium.

Glenna met the younger Edwin at a golf club in New London, Conn., and played together frequently.

“Edwin Vare, when I caddied for him, won a lot of matches, but there was one person he could never beat — Glenna Collett,” Edwin’s teenaged caddie, Wilmer Stiles, wrote in 1931. “She always defeated him, not bad, but she beat him and made him like it.”

Sometimes, the couple joined forces. Together, Glenna and Edwin won the two-ball Boyle Cup at the Spring Mill Country Club in 1936.

The LPGA Tour wasn’t founded until 1950. In the meantime, Glenna revolutionized the amateur women’s game.

“She just had a great competitive temperament as well,” Proctor said. “She was unruffled in all circumstances. And she was incredibly long from the tee. ... In the finals of the amateur championships she won, she annihilated people: nine and eight, 13 and 12. I mean, just huge winning margins, where the other player, when she was playing her best, had no chance.”

She also took her talents overseas, winning the French Amateur, and was part of the U.S. team that won the first Curtis Cup in England in 1932. The Curtis Cup is a competition contested between teams from the U.S. and Great Britain and Ireland. Vare’s team won the Curtis Cup in 1934, 1936, 1938, and 1948.

Vare won her sixth and final U.S. Amateur in 1935, and she faced off against Patty Berg in the final round. Berg, then a teenager and a prodigy in her own right, would help found the LPGA and served as its first president.

Vare died in 1989. Her athletic career traced through the women’s suffrage movement, World War I, Prohibition, and the Great Depression. She refused to choose between her career and her family and continued to compete after she had children, telling reporters that she got better at golf after she became a mother.

“I’m steadier than I was before,” she said in 1936.

She kept her babies’ shoes on a shelf with her golf medals, and even used her first trophy as a christening bowl for her son. Today, the LPGA awards the Vare Trophy to the woman with the best scoring average in professional golf. And while her name no longer has the recognition it once did, one of the best women’s golfers ever once called Philadelphia home.

“The question of women’s society, where women belonged in society, was a foremost question of their age,” Proctor said. “During the whole time that Joyce Wethered and Cecil Leitch were winning in Britain, the suffragette movement is on full steam, and that’s true in the United States, too. The year that Glenna wins her first championship was the year after women get the right to vote in the United States. So those things are inextricably interwoven with their story.”