IT IS AUTUMN in Bergen County, New Jersey, and the women golfers of White Beeches range across the golf course in happy pursuit. Their lightweight spikes crunch into the smooth turf and their space-age club shafts swish and flash to the soft hum of electric carts.

Women's golf at White Beeches has evolved since Maureen Orcutt first swung a wooden-shafted club there nearly 80 years ago. But then, watch women golfers at any driving range and you'll see the same sort of changes. Better clothes and equipment. Easier acceptance.

Since Orcutt's prime, when she rampaged through tournaments in the 1920s and '30s, the White Beeches course has also changed. It has the same character of the early years, and like gentle farmland, the fairways, dotted by a pond here and there, meander through the trees and along a few small brooks. A couple of holes call for a blind shot to the green and, basically, it is the same land on which Maureen Orcutt learned the game so many years ago.

The early design was by architect W. J. Travis, who also worked out the holes of Westchester Country Club at Rye, N.Y., and the Plantation nine at the Sea Island (Ga.) Golf Club. It has been renovated twice. In 1950, Travis's construction superintendent A. H. Tull reworked the course, and a 1953 renovation was done by William F. Mitchell.

Travis took hold of it sometime before 1920, but even the most history-minded members are vague about the date. White Beeches was originally Haworth Country Club -- a crazy patchwork of real estate that must have driven title companies to distraction.

In the first years the members owned a nine-hole layout. Not far away was a nine-hole course on the estate of Hugh Grant, a former New York City mayor. The members bought Grant's nine and combined it with their own, bridging the two properties with a couple of new holes. Even the genius Travis couldn't quite work out the symmetry, and from that day to this, White Beeches Golf and Country Club remains one of those rare American courses with a true 19th hole.

"The 19th was a nice little chip shot from the tee to the green," Orcutt said, "and when we finished playing we'd try to hit one close to the hole."

At the age of 87, Maureen Orcutt still has the snap and humor of the New York Times golf reporter she once was. Her complaints are few. "I only get to play three times a week and I'm losing distance -- that's the big problem," she says.

But in the 40 years in which Orcutt was hitting big tee shots and winning tournaments, the people she knew and the courses she played encompassed the whole sweep of American golf.

On her way to winning spots on four Curtis Cup teams, she befriended Glenna Collett Vare and Virginia Van Wie, starred in exhibitions with Bob Jones and Francis Ouimet, and played all the great courses. Merion, Interlachen, Oakland Hills, The Country Club -- she played them all. Baltusrol and Pinehurst No. 2 are particular favorites. At Pinehurst, she won three straight North & South titles on sand greens, then returned decades later to win the U.S. Women's Senior Amateur on grass. But it is her memories of White Beeches that remain most vivid.

"White Beeches Golf and Country Club is where I got my start and where my brothers helped me get started," she said. "My parents moved to Haworth in about 1917 and joined what was then Haworth Country Club. My father, Benjamin Orcutt, was treasurer of the club. My mother, Elizabeth Kelly Orcutt, was a bigshot around there. I don't think they had too many women in the club at that time, but I remember that she played Mrs. Roy Porter in the finals of the club championship."

Over the next few years, Maureen and her twin brothers William and B. Sinclair Orcutt, literally grew up at the course.

"There was an epidemic of infantile paralysis in 1917, and one of the boys in town got it," Orcutt said. "Mother, to keep us away from the other children, would take us out on what we called 'The Far Links' to play. These were the fifth and sixth holes, on top of a hill. She'd give me golf balls to hit and I wouldn't pay any attention to where they went. I'd hit them and lose them. Boy, was she mad!

"Then we'd play in the bunkers around what was then the seventh green, building sand castles. I don't know how the members would let us, but they did. We had great fun doing that. It was before I began playing golf tournaments."

Maureen had been swinging a golf club since the age of 7. At 13, she was given a White Beeches membership and began playing regularly, if somewhat tentatively. When White Beeches professional George Kerrigan offered to give her lessons, she claimed she was too young. But Kerrigan piqued her interest in competition.

Maureen was walking home from school when she was stopped by Kerrigan, who told her she should play in the junior girls' tournament at Englewood Golf Club.

"I played and didn't do too well. Martha Parker won, but in 1922 I won my first juniors with a score of 94, so I had improved," Orcutt recalled.

Soon she began to rack up an impressive record in a bigger arena.

"I had won the state championship in 1924, and my brother Bill said I was ready to play in the Eastern. I was taking final exams in high school, but the teachers were very nice to me. They let me go, and I won."

It was the first of her eight Eastern titles. Orcutt went on to win the Canadian Women's Amateur twice, the Doherty, and three consecutive North & South titles. Her winning career, spanning 41 years, is one of the longest in American amateur golf. That first Eastern title came in 1925, and her last national championship, the U.S. Senior Women's Amateur, was in 1966.

White Beeches professionals had a hand in the honing of Orcutt's skills. George Kerrigan helped her with her swing, then Pat O'Hara, who the members called "P. O'Hara," helped Orcutt to become a very strong player. In her book Ladies in the Rough, Glenna Collett Vare noted that Orcutt, who could hit a drive a measured 250 yards with a wooden-shafted club, was one of the five longest hitters in the game and could hit "screaming brassies."

From 1923 through 1959, playing out of White Beeches, Orcutt competed in all but eight U.S. Women's Amateur Championships, twice reaching the final. Always she returned to her home course to practice and play.

"The course wasn't too long, but it was a good test and helped me to become a very good iron player," she said. "There were little brooks and several hidden greens which demanded sharp iron play. I was allowed to practice there, and I did a lot of it, hitting shots of different kinds. I'm sure that playing such a course helped my career."

Many of Orcutt's memories of White Beeches revolve around her family. Most of her rounds at the course were with her two brothers. One of her eight victories in the Met Golf Association brother-and-sister tournament came at the course. Often, she played with her mother, nearly encountering a tragedy one memorable day.

"Mother and I were playing the 10th hole one day, and we had hit to the green. All of a sudden I felt something fly by my hand and thought it had been a bug. It was a bullet! Two boys who lived in town were target shooting in a wooded area, not realizing there was a golf course nearby."

Other holes have particular significance. After rating the course with another crack amateur, Carolyn Cudone, the two adjourned to the clubhouse, congratulating each other on a very fine rating job, then discovered they'd left out the ninth hole. And Orcutt won the 1959 New Jersey State stroke-play championship at White Beeches, edging Cudone by a stroke with a birdie on the 18th.

"The whole gang was around the green, so it was really quite something," she recalled.

Over the years, White Beeches members have reciprocated Orcutt's fondness for the old course. Early in her competitive career, the club held several dinners in her honor, and the members gave her a diamond bracelet, adding a diamond for each of her victories until the bracelet was full.

Orcutt today lives in Durham, N.C. She last visited her home course in 1992.

"My niece was having an engagement party and named several New Jersey clubs as possible sites. I said, 'Oh, White Beeches! That's my home course, and there's a Maureen Orcutt Junior Girls Tournament there in July.'

"Darned if she didn't fix it so that her engagement party was there at the time of the junior tournament," Orcutt said. "It was great. I had a wonderful time. I presented the trophies and then we played the course, but boy, was I awful. I don't think I hit a shot all day, and I'm glad the juniors didn't watch me."

Today Orcutt plays at Croasdaile Country Club in Durham, where she's been club champion seven times. In 1990, still fascinated by amateur competition, she attended the Curtis Cup matches with her brother Bill. She sat on a hillside at Somerset Hills Country Club, serveying the new players and recalling the first Curtis Cup match for the television cameras. She remains a thoughtful historian with vivid memories, our connection to the past. But it is the time at White Beeches, the course where she grew and played and learned, that she seems to hold most fondly in her heart.

-- Rhonda Glenn