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We wrap up our retrospective of The Miss America Pageant today with a look at the 1968-1970 period and the massive changes that took place outside the pageant organization, and how it began to effect the pageant itself as the 1970s arrived.
A highlight of this period was the fourth Miss America to become a household name and become a mainstream success on television: Miss America 1971, Phyllis George. Ms George would go on to become a CBS Early Morning Show host throughout much of the next decade and in many ways was the last of the ‘mid-century’ era (1954-1970) Miss Americas. Changes were coming for the Pageant and for America as the 1970s unfolded. These changes would shape the direction The Miss America Pageant found itself in as it entered the 1980s; a decade that would crown (and eventually lead to controversy) the first African American Miss America in September 1983… Vanessa Williams, the fifth Miss America to become a household name and a television and recording industry star.
The Miss America Pageant for years, for decades, was the main event that helped to kick off each fall television season in September. Only until recently (in the past decade or so) did the pageant move to airing on broadcast television (or cable television) early (or earlier) in the calendar year. For decades it aired right after Labor Day, sometime around the second week in September, ‘live, from Atlantic City, New Jersey’, leading to the start of the new fall season in the third week in September.
This year, 2020, marks the one hundredth anniversary of The Miss America Pageant, and although the pageant for 2020 has already taken place earlier this year (pre-COVID-19), and the next pageant may not take place until post-COVID-19, we here at Television Vanguard felt it was important to try to share some sort of tribute to this national institution that at one time was ‘a really big thing’, particularly in that 1954 to 1970 era when television viewership and importance was growing by leaps and bounds.
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Phyllis George passed away earlier this summer… she made an important contribution to television and the Miss America pageant of the early 1970s, as well as to CBS sports as their first female television anchor. She went on to work in the CBS Early Morning Show in the 1980s. She was a lovely, dynamic and charming woman, who also was a successful business woman and one time first lady of Kentucky in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Rest in peace Ms. Phyllis George.
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Coming right up… a final weekend ‘segue’ video clip to help prepare us for the fall 1970 television season review that will arrive this coming weekend, Friday through Sunday, September 11-13.
The Women’s Movement had helped change the times and the Miss America Pageant, but more change was coming as a result of the Women’s Movement, and the broadcast television landscape. beginning in fall 1970, would never be the same again…(read more at source)
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