Remembering When
It wasn’t the best of times for the Miss America Pageant.
By the time the 1970s dawned, American society was significantly different than it had been just a decade earlier. Among the most visible and wide-ranging changes were those in the status and “acceptable” behavior of women.
American women no longer accepted the role that was depicted in such 1950s TV shows as “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best.” Those and other programs portrayed women as adjuncts to their husbands whose only value was as homemakers and mothers. And younger women were pushing back against the notion that their only responsibility was to be as attractive as possible in order to land a husband, regardless of their talents and intellectual capacities.
But those were the philosophies the Miss America Pageant seemed to be upholding even as the ’70s melted into the 1980s and those views likewise dissolved to a large degree. But the Miss America Pageant still appeared to buttress the outmoded ideals of womanhood.
By the late 1980s, the annual contest — still a crucial part of Atlantic City’s identity — had become a joke to a large number of Americans because it had not adjusted to the times. To them, it was still a “beauty pageant” that objectified young women and generally presented them as vacuous trophies.
But all of that changed in 1987 when a local attorney named Leonard Horn assumed the position of president and CEO of the Miss America Organization (MAO), based in Atlantic City at the time.
Horn had been a member of the MAO board. As a matter of fact, he became the entity’s first paid CEO during a phone call with his predecessor, Albert Marks Jr.; he’d called Marks to proffer his resignation from the organization’s directorate but hung up as the new boss.
From the jump, Horn, who served in the position until 1999 when he resigned to move to his wife’s hometown in Tennessee and resume his law career, recognized the beloved, 66-year-old competition was pathetically behind the times.
“We used to have state pageants sending us 21 year olds that looked like 40-year-old Stepford Wives,” he told the Washington Post in 1996. “Society had changed. Women had changed. I didn’t want people turning on the TV and thinking they had stepped into a time warp.”
Horn was especially inspired to drag the pageant into the late-20th century by Miss America 1988 Kaye Lani Rae Rafko, whose traditional post-victory press conference included the 24-year-old contestant from Michigan speaking about her work as an oncology nurse. Among the topics she referenced was the very un-Miss-America subject of death. Prompted by reporters, she also addressed such foreign-to-the-pageant topics as AIDS and assisted suicide.
According to a 2021 article on lithub.com, Horn was galvanized by Rafko’s remarks and thought to himself, “Why can’t we have this every year?” As CEO, he was in a position to make that a reality, and the 1989 Miss America Pageant introduced the “platform issue” portion of the event. Not only were contestants judged in the traditional talent, swimsuit and evening gown categories, now they had to adopt — and give a formal speech about — a cause for which they’d be activists throughout their reign as Miss America.
Creating the platform portion of the competition was one of several radical changes Horn implemented. Among others were banning the wearing of high heels during the swimsuit-judging segment, prohibiting professional hairdressers from being in the contestants’ dressing rooms and rebranding the event as a “scholarship pageant.”
But it was the institution of the platform issue that proved to be Horn’s most controversial move; pageant purists hated the idea of reality intruding on the anachronistic world the contest had existed in for decades. But Horn was adamant, and today, the platform requirement for contestants is as much a part of the Miss America experience as the winner’s crown and scepter.
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
