Theagenes of Thasos was an athlete. Part of his demonstration of strength was to carry a very heavy bronze statue from the marketplace to his house and back again. After Theagenes died a bronze statue of him was put up. An enemy of his took to flogging this statue at night, as a substitute for hitting Theagenes himself. The statue ended this practice by falling on the man and killing him. The statue was then tried for murder in a special court, the Prytaneum, reserved for the trial of what we would see as inanimate objects, although clearly the Greeks did not place the boundaries between living and lifeless where we do. The statue was found guilty and ordered into exile, which, in its case, meant it was thrown into the sea. When a famine hit Thasos, the Oracle of Delphi said all exiles should be allowed to return, which eventually led not just to the return of human exiles but to the statue being fished from the sea. The famine then abated.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer announced on its front page a contest co-sponsored with the Cleveland Health Museum and in association with the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland, the School of Medicine and the Cleveland Board of Education. Winners of the contest would get $100, $50 and $25 war bonds, and 10 additional lucky women would get $10 worth of war stamps. The contest? To submit body dimensions that most closely matched the typical woman, "Norma," as represented by a statue on display at the Cleveland Health Museum. . .

In addition to displaying the sculpture, the Cleveland Health Museum began selling miniature reproductions of Norma, promoting her as the "Ideal Girl," launching a Norma craze. A notable physical anthropologist argued that Norma's physique was "a kind of perfection of bodily form," artists proclaimed her beauty an "excellent standard" and physical education instructors used her as a model for how young women should look, suggesting exercise based on a student's deviation from the ideal. A preacher even gave a sermon on her presumably normal religious beliefs. By the time the craze had peaked, Norma was featured in Time magazine, in newspaper cartoons, and on an episode of a CBS documentary series, This American Look, where her dimensions were read aloud so the audience could find out if they, too, had a normal body.

On Nov. 23, 1945, the Plain Dealer announced its winner, a slim brunette theatre cashier named Martha Skidmore. The newspaper reported that Skidmore liked to dance, swim and bowl — in other words, that her tastes were as pleasingly normal as her figure, which was held up as the paragon of the female form.