Word: pageants
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Threatened institutions, like endangered species, have often demonstrated remarkable powers of survival. There is the Roman Church, the British House of Lords, the German General Staff and the Miss America Pageant. Criticized as lily-white by civil rights groups, demonstrated against by Women's Lib, condescended to by intellectuals and the New York Times (which has been known to spare two paragraphs deep inside to report the winner), Miss America annually blooms like a crop of late summer corn. The second Saturday night in September always finds more than 60 million televiewers tuning in as, live from Atlantic City...
...worth of war bonds. In the late 1940s she did a little CIA work in Lebanon. The most famous Miss America is undoubtedly New York City's Commissioner of Consumer Affairs, Bess Myerson Grant, who put a little too much truth in packaging at the 1945 pageant by tucking her 36-in. bust into a size 34 swimsuit. The most infamous beauty, alas, came from the pageant's home state. Janice Hansen, Miss New Jersey 1944, became a Mafia moll, a career that came up short in 1959 when she was killed by gangsters along with her companion...
...home town, Mobile, Ala., wanted to honor her, she put a price on her appearance and noted, "Checks preferred." But Yolande was also one of the most liberal and active winners. By the early 1960s she was working for the N.A.A.C.P., CORE and SANE. Much to the dismay of pageant managers, she was on the picket line at the first lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960. She denounced the events in Atlantic City as not only racist but also antifeminist. After her husband, Millionaire Matthew Fox, died in 1964, Yolande moved to Washington, D.C., where she fell in love with...
...entirely seriously. Publisher Bennett Cerf, a judge in 1958, was overheard to inquire, "Do you think they're all certified virgins?" No such assurances are sought, although such extreme measures are taken to separate the contestants from the male sex that at times it seems as if the pageant were run by members of a Sapphic cult. Contestants are not supposed to be seen talking with their fathers. Under the heading "We Love Your Parents-But!" the contestants' guidebook tells why: "They [fathers] are generally too young and too handsome to be considered by the general public...
...fortunately, the BBC and CBS are giving American viewers Henry in a brilliant six-part pageant entitled The Six Wives of Henry VIII, that began Sunday...