In the 1950s and 60s in New York, if you wanted your fortune told, you might have made your way to Times Square and found Pandora. She worked there for years, telling people about their futures. But she might not have mentioned her own past. Her real name was Edith Hyde, and she was the first-ever Miss America, in 1919.
The pageant was held in New York in — and I’m not making this up — the Chu Chin Chow ballroom. The theme — and I’m not making this up either — was oriental costumes, and Hyde wore a jeweled, sequined harem outfit that was later insured for $80,000.
Hyde was older than most modern Misses America — she was about 25 — and she wasn’t a “Miss;” she was married with two sons. Nowadays after being crowned Miss America, the routine is nonstop promotional travel for a year, but in 1919, Edith Hyde apparently didn’t have a much (if any) of that to do.
The Miss America pageant she won wasn’t even the one you’re thinking of. The next year Atlantic City held an event called the Fall Frolic that was primarily a parade designed to boost business along the Boardwalk. The parade consisted of 350 decorated chairs on wheels carrying 350 bathing beauties. It was a big success, and the organizers decided to make it annual — and in 1921 they added a beauty pageant. That’s the Miss America pageant that’s been repeated ever since. It kicked off on September 7, 1921.
The first winner was Margaret Gorman, but she wasn’t actually called Miss America at the time. She was the entrant from Washington DC, so she was called Miss Washington DC — but at the end of her year’s reign, Washington DC had already had another pageant so there was another Miss Washington DC. They named Gorman Miss America instead. Gorman, who was only 16 when she won, later said “I really want to forget the whole thing.”
Plenty of people at Equifax want to forget September 7 too. That’s the day in 2017 that their data breach was discovered — or at least that was when they were forced to admit it. They’d allowed all the personal data about 148 million US and Canadian residents and 15 million UK residents to be copied out of their computers. If you’re wondering whether your own financial and personal data was stolen…it probably was.
Equifax reportedly paid some sort of fine to the FTC, although the amount changes depending on where it’s reported. It was just a cost of doing business for them. The only “good” news about the whole incident is that Equifax has never been very careful about the quality of their data; they receive tens of thousands of complaints every year about mistakes in their records. So a fair amount of the personal data that’s certainly now available for sale is probably just wrong. But eventually the data will just be too old to be of any use anyway.
That’s what people told Grandma Moses — maybe they even on her 78th birthday (September 7, 1938). But later that year, not listening to any of them, she started painting anyway. She kept painting for another 23 years, until she was 102, and finished hundreds of paintings. They’re in museums all around the country. But not a single one of them depicts Miss America.
