The Pageant itself now seems like an afterthought to the booming, gambling-addicted Atlantic City of Today, though it was the Biggest Deal In Town not too long ago. In fact, the town fathers first concocted the whole notion of a Miss America Pageant 80 years ago simply as a hook to draw the sweltering Philadelphians back to their resort town for one last summer bash on Labor Day weekend.

Yet while always professing some high ideals in how it made its selection (early judges often included artists such as Norman Rockwell, who was asked to rate the contestants for such attributes as "head construction") , the Pageant still seemed like little more than a jazz-era equivalent of a wet t-shirt contest to many, and was eventually shut down by a kill-joy coalition of feminist and religious groups in 1928 for what everyone at the time assumed was for good.