The Miss America pageant has been conducted since 1921, but it's only been televised since 1954. Before then, it briefly had competition when the Miss U.S. Television contest, conducted by the DuMont Television Network, aired in 1950. Watch the full pageant at the internet archive, or a version edited for length below. It has a strange opening segment in which the contestants introduce themselves, framed by a fake TV set. Then they go on to their talent performances, some of which were truly awful. The winner was a young Edie Adams.
According to wikipedia, the Miss U.S. Television contest only took place once, but there must have been subsequent pageants that used the same title, since once can find women being crowned Miss U.S. Television in later years, such as Phyllis Maygers (below), who won the title in 1952.
This picture and caption ran in papers back in October 1951. It's not clear why it was considered newsworthy. It also left unanswered the question of who the shortest man in the Air Force was, if Sgt. Perkins was the second shortest.
Prehistoric Women is a 1950 science fiction adventure film, written and directed by Gregg C. Tallas and starring Laurette Luez and Allan Nixon... Tigri (Luez) and her stone age friends, all of which are women, hate all men. However, she and her Amazon tribe see men as a "necessary evil" and capture them for potential husbands. Engor (Nixon), who is smarter than the rest of the men, is able to escape them. He discovers fire and battles enormous beasts. After he is recaptured by the women, he discovers fire and drives off a dragon-like creature. The women are impressed with him, including their prehistoric queen. Engor marries Tigri and they begin a new, more civilized, tribe.
It seems like the kind of movie that might be so bad it's good. But PopMatters warns that, though you might hope it would have some cheeseball value, it's "actually not very good." If you watch the clip below of the catfight scene, you'll probably have seen the highlight of the movie.
With school budgets constantly declining, maybe this is a money-saving solution that should be reconsidered. Stop building new schools and conduct classes in store windows instead.
Of all the towns in America, why did they choose to feature Cumback in their ad? Or was 1958 a more innocent, pre-internet era when the term 'cumback' didn't have the same connotations (see Urban Dictionary) that it does today ?
1952 was the year that the panty raid craze hit campuses across America. One of the primary goals of the raids was to cause chaos and commotion (and grab panties, of course), but a few students at the University of Idaho decided to use the raids to achieve a greater social good. They conducted a "reverse" panty-raid. This involved showing up, "whoopin' and hollerin," in the middle of the night at a female dormitory, and then they auctioned off panties to the girls, instead of stealing panties from them. They donated all the proceeds of the auction to the Crippled Children's Fund. It was a nice gesture, but the slogan they chose for the event, "I'd Give My Panties for a Crippled Kid," probably wouldn't pass muster with the guardians of political correctness on campuses today.
This picture ran in the January 1953 issue of Newsweek with the following caption:
Five young women at a West German fashion show wear these enveloping hoods both to direct spectators' attention to their legs and to spell out the brand name — Elbeo — of their stockings.
Elbeo is still in business, and still selling stockings. Could it seriously never have occurred to anyone there that their fashion show, with "enveloping hoods," was going to look an awful lot like a Klan rally?
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.