Free Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) by Kate Shindle

inevitable that the world would reach a moment when this became difficult to sustain. As Americans recognized that they had more and more choices, the goal of satisfying everyone (or even a significant percentage of everyone) became increasingly impossible. Incidentally, never have the pageant’s identity problems been more significant than in the age of the Internet, which has of course coincided with the biggest and perhaps most irreparable crash in Miss America’s image and marketability.
    But in those early days, well, they didn’t need to sweat the details.
    In 1955, the year after the telecast first aired, the pageant also brought on someone who eventually became more famous than the winner herself: a jack-of-all-trades emcee named Bert Parks. Parks was an established entertainer in his own right, having enjoyed significant success on television. But this gig was to become his most recognizable role. For starters, he was a terrific showman and improviser. He effectively became the wingman to Miss America each year, guiding her toward her crown and then sending her out to greet the world. He possessed a rare gift for effectively holding together a three-hour show year after year. As many have pointed out, he was its star for all but the last five minutes, but he managed to direct the spotlight toward the contestants with delicacy, attention, humor, and grace. And he was, for decades, the pageant’s most enduring constant, with the ability to put the contestants at ease and provide opportunities for their real personalities to permeate the perfect facades.
    Over the years, plenty of men involved with the pageant in some capacity or other have been called (or enjoyed calling themselves) “Mr. Miss America.” Of all of them, though, the most persuasive case can be made for Parks. His stamp on the pageant was indelible; he became synonymous with its identity. He was a true song-and-dance man, but also a witty and charming host. In contrast to later years, when gimmicks and reality TV “twists” frequently left the contestants high and dry—or worse, made them the butt of the joke—Parks treated them with tremendous respect. When they surprised or charmed him and the viewing audience, he enthusiastically laughed
with
them, but was not prone to laughing
at
them. And his most lasting legacy, of course, was his annual performance of the pageant’s signature anthem “There She Is, Miss America” as the brand-new winner glided tearily down the Convention Hall runway. In the years since Parks’s tenure ended in 1980, the song has been performed by everyone from Regis and Kathie Lee to Tony Danza to Gary Collins to Clay Aiken to, one year, the outgoing Miss America herself. No matter how many have tried it, though, the pageant’s most devoted fans always seem to be far more satisfied when a host introduces Parks’s original recording. It’s not just the voice, of course; it’s that he is emblematic of the pageant’s most wildly successful era—an ephemeral moment in which pretty much everyone agreed who Miss America was, and thought that the whole enterprise was pretty cool.
    The nostalgia for those early years, especially among longtime fans and viewers, is probably inevitable. It does not, however, necessarily reflect Parks’s entire term as emcee. The telecasts of the 1970s, especially as the decade went on, tell the last ten years of his story—more on that later. For Miss America, as for most true, traditional American institutions, the harbingers of turmoil started to stir in the early 1960s.
    Today’s global culture is so interconnected through technology and twenty-four-hour news that it often seems as if we face more challenges than ever before in the world’s history. In reality, it’s pretty likely that we just
know about
more of them. Who knows what the sixties would have looked like if its citizens had had access to today’s volume of information? Even without that, though, it’s almost