Never Heard Of The Miss Amarillo Pageant? Me Either, Until Now.

It's been around for a little over 100 years, and it's personified beauty, goodwill, and other things.

The Miss America pageant is something all beauty queens aspire to become. It is a crowning achievement in their beauty pageant careers. If you land this prestigious title, you will forever go down in history and be able to call yourself Miss America.

It starts at a young age, as the show Toddlers & Tiaras showed us. That show painted it as a cutthroat industry and put a lot of pressure on these young children. Some can stick it out and chase their dreams, while others fall apart and get out of the industry.

Most of these ladies start at a local level, or regional level if there is no competition for them to enter in their local city. Did you know Amarillo actually had a Miss Amarillo contest? I had no idea until I saw something on Facebook.

It started back in 1950 and the first ever Miss Amarillo was GuyDell Ekelund.

If you've never heard of it, you aren't alone. According to this Facebook post, it was something that wasn't heavily promoted even when it was going on.

I did a little more digging into the pageant and found that back in 2013, the pageant was happening here and was an official preliminary contest to Miss Texas and the Miss America competition. They created a Twitter page that didn't have a whole lot of activity but showed it was indeed still around.

I wasn't able to find anything after this 2013 contest, which makes me wonder if that's when it ended.

There does seem to be a lot of history behind it, and with people that others knew. One winner of the pageant back in the day was a teacher who was someone's 3rd grade teacher, then another person who stated she was her French teacher at Caprock in the mid-60s.

I'd love to hear about others who participated in the Miss Amarillo contest. History like this is fun to find out about!