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Wednesday, September 16, 1998 By Gene Collier
ATLANTIC CITY - Four days. All that's left in the reign of the current Miss America, whose name is ... um ... anybody?
I thought not.
Because this is a beach town, albeit an oddly fascinating beach town where the outlandish strip of casino hotels separates the blocks o' blight from the dark gray sea, the fashion rule of thumb is not Never Wear White After Labor Day. It is Never Wear White Until Everyone Forgets the Name of the New Miss America.
This can take up to a week.
But shame on you anyway for not knowing the name Kate Shindle. The Illinois beauty is completing a very productive, very serious year of advocacy for AIDS education, visiting hospitals and talking the tough talk on a critical public health issue. It was practically enough to make people take Miss America seriously.
So that's enough of that.
Perhaps Miss Pennsylvania, the stunning Pitt grad Mayra Maria Acosta, will succeed Kate here Saturday night. Miss Pennsylvania's platform issue is "injury prevention and CPR education."
Good. S'good.
Pennsylvania hasn't produced a Miss America since Evelyn Ay of Ephrata in 1954, but as they say in the beauty pageant game, any state can have a bad 44 years.
The reality is that most Americans have not only a short memory for Miss America's name, but for the very history of the whole cultural curiosity that plays out here again this week. Herewith a quick refresher on real important dates in Miss America History.
1921 - The first pageant is held to select a "bathing beauty," a scheme to keep vacationers on the shore a week past Labor Day.
1922 - Mary Campbell of Columbus, Ohio, wins.
1923 - Mary Campbell of Columbus, Ohio, wins again. She is the only two-time winner of the Miss America Pageant. This does not make her, as some historians have cracked, the Archie Griffin of the Miss America Pageant, but rather, when Griffin becomes the only two-time winner of the Heisman Trophy 52 years later in, ironically, Campbell's native Columbus, he is more accurately called the Mary Campbell of the Heisman Trophy.
1935 - At the insistence of Executive Director Lenora Slaughter, the talent competition is added. Lenora, Lenora, Lenora. It wasn't enough? You had to have jugglers?
1945 - The first scholarship is awarded to Bess Myerson, the first Jewish woman and the first college graduate to serve as Miss America. So let's see, the first 24 winners got no scholarship, then they gave a scholarship to a college graduate. Not to be critical.
1947 - Barbara Walker becomes the last Miss America to be crowned in a swimsuit.
1948 - The last crowning in mukluks and a sombrero.
1954 - The first televised Miss America Pageant. It's even better than on the radio.
1955 - Bert Parks becomes Bert Parks and hangs around for a quarter of a century. For most of that time, Bert was merely a beloved master of ceremonies. But from the moment Regis and Kathie Lee took a crack at it, Bert was a god.
1966 - The first Miss America Pageant telecast in color. Curiously, the number of contestants claiming to have blue or green eyes drops from 49 to 19. Some Americans find Bert awfully red.
1970 - The first African-American woman competes in the Miss America Pageant. And only 23 years after Jackie Robinson.
1971 - Phyllis George of Denton, Texas, is crowned, starting the string of successes that will eventually make her part of an NFL studio show. Phyllis wasn't terribly good at it, but Terry Bradshaw still needs 93 cogent comments to tie Phyllis on the all-time list.
1998 - The pageant announces that its master of ceremonies is Boomer Esiason, meaning that someone with NFL studio experience can apparently wind up with the Miss America Pageant as well as vice versa.
2002 - The first pay-per-view Miss America Pageant. Though the show commands $49.95, it's part of the undercard of the Don King-produced Mike Tyson-Larry Holmes fight.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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