Live From Atlantic City!

New Orleans, Louisiana. September, 1972

“Every little girl wants to grow up to be Miss America.”  Where did I hear that? Maybe it was in an interview with Bob Barker, host of the Miss America Pageant from 1967-1987. I certainly didn’t hear it from my parents. In fact, the dazzle of Miss America had already begun to dull by 1972. Viewership was down. Women’s liberation was in full swing and in 1972, The Miss America Corporation seemed out of touch and downright corny. At least to some. Like the Newsoms, who were part of a movement that valued womens’ minds over mascara. To the organization’s credit, it has caught up, Miss America 2023 was a classical violinist pursuing a degree in nuclear engineering. Miss America 2024 was an officer in the United States Air Force with  a black belt in Taekwondo, and Miss America 2025 is pursuing a doctorate in nurse anesthesia.

My parents were transitional figures, bridging two radically different generations. Mom cooked three-course dinners, hand-stitched Halloween costumes, and swabbed my chicken pox sores with Calamine lotion. She also lectured on economics at Louisiana State University and had a Joyce Carol Oates novel on her bedside table at all times. She named our new kitten Erica, for feminist writer Erica Jong, after the stupid cat jumped out of a fourth floor window, thus demonstrating she had no Fear of Flying.

Dad listened to Carole King, supported women’s rights and wore amulets. In November of that same year, 1972, Bob and Connie Newsom voted Democrat in the general election, while all the other parents of my classmates voted Republican. And as the families in Miss McIntosh’s second grade classroom went, so went the country. George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide.

Mom and Dad were academics. They held informed, nuanced opinions on global problems. They scoffed as contestants seemed to give only glossy lip service to their platforms of “peace among nations” and “ending world hunger.”  Talking politics and religion was not only encouraged at the Newsom dinner table, it was good manners. Mom often read aloud to dad, short articles of social, political, or theological interest, and Dad listened while dragging on his pipe and sipping on a decent Merlot. In later life these exchanges happened from their Lazy Boy recliners, only without the pipe, and with watered down pomegranate juice instead. It was a thing my parents had, their entire marriage.

So I imagine they were only humoring me when we all sat down together in front of our black and white Zenith that Saturday night in mid-September 1972, to watch fifty girls in swimsuits and heels, with big hair, hot-rolled and teased at the crown, stride straight down the runway and into our family room. Snug in a bean bag chair, I was six wanting to be sixteen, and dazzled by the ultra-feminine spectacle. “Where are the baton twirlers?” Dad joked.  Baton twirling was de rigueur in the West Texas beauty pageants and parades of Bob Newsom’s 1950s youth.

Suddenly, at the first commercial break, Dad stood up, grabbed the keys to our Volkswagen, and announced:  “I’ll be back.” He didn’t say where he was going. Even though Miss Louisiana made it into the top ten finalists that night, that wasn’t enough to hold the interest of my mother or brother. They left the TV room too. It didn’t matter. I was in little girl heaven, watching the princesses of the evening gown competition float onstage in gradations of gray. They sparkled and shimmered, in lace and long gloves and I took it all in, in glorious black and white.

Then, just before the crowning of Miss America, 1973,  during that very last commercial break for Adorn Hairspray, Bob Newsom staggered into the room with a big box.

Spontaneous is not the first adjective that comes to mind when I think about dad. Conscientious, responsible, reliable, over-thinking–these all fit. Impulsive and whimsical do not. Robert Newsom did not have a knack for searing memories into a six-year-old’s brain with spontaneous acts of fancy, not like our neighbor Carole. Carole once tipped a can of blue paint on her front steps the night before Easter, then dipped a brush and painted paw prints leading up to the front door, all to make an Easter bunny believer out of her skeptical son Charles Wayne. No, ruining the front porch to make holiday magic for kids was not dad’s style, except that night, the effect of dad’s action was the same as our neighbor Carole’s–magical. Dad heaved the old Zenith off the bookcase shelf and plugged in a state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line Sony color television. Suddenly, the ten girls in grey lined up at the edge of the stage POPPED in pixels of sherbert colors: lemon chiffon, lime green, and orange cream.

“Well we’ve reached the moment we’ve all been waiting for!” Bob Barker bellowed. “I shall announce the fourth runner up, the third runner up, the second and the first. And then, Miss America. We want you to please remember that the position of first runner up is most important. If for any reason Miss America cannot continue in her role, she will be replaced by the first runner up. The judges’ scores have been tallied, I will now pick them up.” I watched Bob Barker cross the stage to fetch the envelope, passing the line of ten contestants, huddled like pretty parakeets on a perch.

Oh, how seeing it all in color made everything so much better! The camera lingered on each strained smile. Names were called, tears were shed, and the unchosen were escorted offstage. A hush descended. “Ladies and Gentlemen, one of these six lovely ladies is our new Miss America! Which one is she?” I sat up straight in my squishy chair as Bob Barker, in his ruffle-front tuxedo shirt and velvet bow tie, spoke directly to me: “Our new Miss America: Terry Anne Meeuwsen, Miss Wisconsin!” The camera zoomed in on a hysterical Miss Meeuwsen in disbelief. “Terry Anne Meeuswen is the new Miss America, formerly Miss Wisconsin, her talent, as you remember, was singing: He Touched Me. Well somebody really touched her tonight!” The reigning Miss America removed her rhinestone crown and pinned it to her successor’s head. “Miss America, there are the people of America waiting for you and it is my great pleasure to sing you now, your song, welcome her in your hearts!” The music swelled and my heart skipped as Miss America 1973 started down the runway. And then Bob Barker sang that song as familiar as Jingle Bells:  “Oh… There she is… Miss America…There she is… your ideal…”

Of course, everyone who knew Bob Newsom, knew that he loved acquiring the latest technology. Cameras, speakers, turntables. So maybe my father had already been thinking about springing for a color television. Maybe he wanted ours to be the first family to get a color TV on our block. Maybe that was a small part of it. Dad’s desire for the latest innovation could possibly explain such a rare act of spontaneity by an otherwise measured man. But really it was this: a dad seeing the opportunity, then seizing the moment to make his little girl levitate with delight.  That night Miss Maria Cristina Newsom of Panola Street, in Uptown New Orleans, Louisiana, was crowned Daddy’s Little Miss America 1973. And in that father’s mind, until the day he died fifty years later in 2023, there were no successors, that rhinestone crown passed no further.  To him, there she was, and there she is.

—

This Post is republished on Medium.

—

Internal image courtesy of author

—

Photo credit: iStock