In 1944, a newspaper in Gary, Indiana held a beauty contest to select a "Miss Gary Cigaret." The public were encouraged to vote, with each vote costing five cents. All the funds raised would be used to send cigarettes to American soldiers.
Over $15,000 was eventually raised, which was able to buy six million cigarettes (or 300,000 packs).
The contest winner, Irene Kuchta, got to model a bathing suit made of cigarettes.
Vidette-Messenger of Porter County - Sep 22, 1944
Windsor Star - Sep 9, 1944
The entire patent, figure and text, is given below. How I wish the inventor had gone on at length about his design.
On a mission to wreck marriages and destroy romance by promoting the consumption of coffee.
Personally, I need my morning coffee before I'm at all sociable.
(click images to enlarge)
Spokesman Review - Jan 16, 1949
Boston Globe - Sep 11, 1949
The title was supposed to be bestowed on an employee of British Reinforced Concrete, but it was given to non-employee Nanette Keay by mistake:
"Just as the contest was starting some of the men pushed me into the line for a joke.
"They wouldn't let me leave and so I had to walk past the judges. I was absolutely astonished at winning."
Despite not being an official contestant, they let her keep the title.
Glasgow Daily Record - Apr 6, 1953
"the newest way to make lastex yarn work for you"
Radio and Television Mirror - July 1948
In the summer of 1945, the Cleveland Health Museum put a statue of "Norma" on display. Norma was said to be the "norm or average American woman of 18 to 20 years of age." Accompanying her was a statue of Normman, her equally average brother. The two statues had been sculpted by Abram Belskie, based on data gathered by Dr. Robert L. Dickinson.
The statues were celebrated at the time but seem like oddities now because a) their idea of 'average' didn't include any minorities, and b) they seem to represent a mid-20th-century obsession with being average or normal.
As the saying goes, the real weirdos are those who think they're normal.
Natural History magazine - June 1945
More details from
The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World that Values Sameness by Todd Rose:
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.
Martha Skidmore, "Norma" Contest Winner. Cleveland Plain Dealer - Sep 23, 1945
Unfortunately, Seagram's got this prediction totally wrong. Forest fires are now a far bigger problem than they were in the 1940s.
Newsweek - Aug 14, 1944