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Today pageants are a hugely popular "sport" worldwide, with an estimated 700,000 contests held in the United States alone each year and 3-4 million entrants competing annually. In addition to the better known competitions, hundreds of thousands of contests are staged around the world each year. Here, then, are is a sampling of the more colorful of the beauty pageant titles...
Susan Akin, Miss America 1986, had grown up with two pet lions and a pet monkey. That is until a neighbor killed the first lion, "Radar," by throwing poisoned meat over the family fence." When Delta Burke competed at the Miss America Pageant as Miss Florida in 1974, she told reporters that she'd been named after her mother's "goofy" cat, Delta, who liked to chase dogs and swim in the ocean. During the 1993 Ms. Senior Palm Beach County Pageant, the pageant director asked one entrant to name her life goals. "Honey," replied the 75-year-old contestant, "I don't even buy green bananas!" |
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Miss Pennsylvania
USA 1978 admitted to host Bob Barker and viewers that her odd
pet menagerie included a dog, a Cuban tree frog, and a water
dragon named Godzilla, whose favorite show was, naturally, The
Price is Right. 
Best Pets...| A freshman girl dropped out of a Vatican-operated
college to enter the Miss Philippines contest. She enjoyed the
limelight so much that she also modeled for a seductive rum advertisement
and made two movies.
But when the sexy student tried to re-enter school, she was refused admission for being a tainted woman. |
Miss Insurance Claims...
.... Miss Florida 1978, whose job required traveling between stores, told the pageant audience that the traveling part was a bit of a problem since she was a bit accident-prone. She'd never hit anything moving, you see, but she'd had plenty of run-ins with fire hydrants and houses. Let's see...there was the time she hit a parked car...the time she knocked out a house's plumbing system...and that time she backed her car onto a porch while the resident was having dinner. Luckily, she said, her dad owned a car business and her sister was a nurse. "That figures," quipped the emcee.
BeBe Shopp, whose crowning as Miss America 1948 in a modest gown, rather than the traditional sexy swimsuit, nearly caused reporters to boycott the pageant, became the first Miss America to travel overseas. When European reporters asked BeBe what she thought of the scandalously skimpy "bikini" becoming all the rage on European beaches, the wholesome farmer's daughter replied, "I don't know what to say, except that American girls wouldn't wear them!"
Delta Burke, Miss Florida 1974, had made a career playing former beauty queens. In her television series, Filthy Rich, she played a former Miss Mississippi and in her smash hit show, Designing Women she played Suzanne Sugarbaker, a former Miss Georgia World.
In real life, Delta was equally adept at collecting crowns: Miss Flame, Miss Optimist, Miss jamboree Queen, and Miss VFW Post 8207, among them. "I was a perfect beauty queen," she told TV Guide. "I was in pig heaven...I'd come traipsing into appearances looking like Snow White in a white chiffon gown, long white gloves, the robe, the scepter, the banner, the big hair, the works."
Sources: Atlantic City Magazine, People, Press of Atlantic City, Union News, Tropic, TV Guide
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