HISTORY REVISITED: Two revered Sandhills resorts take a different swing at a new generation.

• Author: Purkey, Mike

Tucked among the towering longleaf pines along Midland Road just north of downtown Southern Pines sits a golf resort steeped in the game's centuries-old tradition, complete with a wood-paneled lodge where generations of visitors have swapped stories about missed putts and sensational shots. To stay relevant in the age of millisecond attention spans and information overload, however, Kelly Miller knows that his sport and business need to keep a keen eye toward the future. While there is a place for golf history, yesterday won't allow you to grow into tomorrow, the president of Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club says.

"It's a challenge," says Miller, 59. "There are things that younger people want that older people might not be interested in. Music is a big thing on the golf course now, and for the longest time, it was taboo. My son, Blair, is a millennial and he's actually got me kind of hooked. Now, I've got an [Ultimate Ears Boom speaker] in my golf bag." A growing number of golfers now carry similar Bluetooth equipment to accompany their rounds, signaling a shift in golf culture led by younger players but increasingly accepted by older golfers.

"We're still pretty much old-school at our facility," Miller says. "But I can say we're really looking for new ways to do things." Thinking ahead helped prompt the family-owned business to take on a wealthy investor last year to help finance improvements.

For the last 60 years, the resort has been synonymous with its owner, Peggy Kirk Bell, who died in 2016 at age 95. In 1953, she married Warren "Bullet" Bell, a former professional basketball player with the Fort Wayne Pistons. Later that year, they purchased Pine Needles, which consisted of the golf course and one lodge, for the princely sum of $50,000. It felt like all the money in the world at that time, she often said.

Peggy Kirk Bell was a charter member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association. In the early days of the LPGA, Bell flew her own single-engine airplane to and from tournaments and on barnstorming trips around the country conducting clinics and playing exhibition matches to promote Wilson Sporting Goods.

One day in the early 1950s, Bell was flying in the Midwest when an electrical storm came up. Looking for a place to land, she flew over a cornfield and said a foxhole prayer: "God, if you get this plane on the ground, I'll never fly again." She landed successfully and trekked to a nearby farmhouse, where she offered the owner an...