At the International Beauty Congress held in Los Angeles in August 1963, when Miss Luxembourg (Catherine Paulus) learned during rehearsals that she was expected to appear in a bathing suit during the contest, she started laughing hysterically and was reported to have said, "I will look like a horse. The people will all laugh at me. And then I will laugh. I can't do it... I can't do it."
The judges had to give her a tranquilizer to calm her down.
Somehow she was nevertheless talked into wearing a bathing suit the next day. And, of course, because of her outburst the picture of her wearing it then ran in papers nationwide.
She received a round of applause during her appearance, but didn't make it through to the finals. However, she was awarded the title of "Miss International Friendship" during the contest.
The undergrads at Tampa University had major complaints about their 1967 yearbook. For a start, all their yearbook photos were destroyed in a warehouse fire. So they didn't appear in it at all. And then, the yearbook they got was dominated by pictures of one person, the yearbook editor Carmen Gonzalez. Her picture appeared 24 times in it, including a six-page spread devoted to her as yearbook queen.
When people complained, Gonzalez explained, "I got into every section because I was in everything." She elaborated that she was not only yearbook queen, but also belonged to at least 10 clubs, was named a member of Who's Who, and had the highest scholastic average at the university. Therefore, it was only natural that she gave most coverage to herself.
The students responded by holding a rally at which they burned 500 of the 2000 yearbooks that had been printed.
Sounds to me like Gonzalez was a woman ahead of her time. She would have thrived in the age of social media.
After the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June, 1968, the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corp. rushed out with a commemmorative, 55-card set of RFK bubble gum cards. It presented "the story of Robert F. Kennedy... with bubble gum."
Kids must have been rushing out to get these.
The cards seem to have appreciated reasonably well in price. Individual cards now range from $3 to $26 in price. You can get an unopened pack for about $65.
Given that just about everything one can possibly eat seems to be bad for you, I'm not sure if Dr. Jackson Blair was a crackpot or ahead of his time with his theory that mustard is the secret cause of heart disease.
But for Blair, mustard was just the tip of the iceberg. It was "part of a wider theory that condiments—pepper, ginger, mustard and mayonnaise, which contains mustard—cause hypertension."
As with everything, I suspect how much of it one eats might play a role.
Elva Ruby Miller (October 5, 1907 – July 5, 1997), who recorded under the name "Mrs. Miller", was an American singer who gained some fame in the 1960s for her series of shrill and off-key renditions of popular songs such as "Moon River", "Monday, Monday", "A Lover's Concerto", and "Downtown". Singing in an untrained, Mermanesque, vibrato-laden style... Miller's voice was compared to the sound of "roaches scurrying across a trash can lid."
But she laughed all the way to the bank. Her rendition of "Downtown" sold 250,000 copies in three weeks, and reached No. 82 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in April 1966.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.