Latest Podcast: Can Miss America Save a Perfectly Good Baby Name…

…That nobody happens to use anymore?

Discussing the pop-culture impact of Betty Cantrell‘s Miss America win on Betty, the namesake of Betty White, Betty Crocker and my Aunt Betty, and the No. 2 most-popular baby name for American girls.

In the 1930s.

Listen to The Joal Ryan Thing on Podbean: goo.gl/BeN5Pb

Listen and subscribe on iTunes: http://tinyurl.com/qj36p2d

Catch it on Stitcher:http://tinyurl.com/qjptvq5

Follow me on Twitter: @joalryan

And when you’re done catching that episode, you are then allowed to go back, and listen to the previous week’s episode that I forgot to plug here. It’s about Justin Bieber, One Direction and Chad Everett‘s Medical Center. You know, same old, same old.

Listen on Podbean: goo.gl/b99VY9

 

Whatever Happened to Miss America?

The answer was and wasn’t as succinct as I expected. No, Miss America is not the celebrity that it was. But, yes, it’s survived reports of its demise for nearly as long as it’s been around—and it’s been around for nearly a century.

The 95th anniversary edition of the pageant is tonight. The story I wrote for Yahoo! posted today. (Yay, synergy!)

By the by, when I was young and (more) full of snark, I once covered the pageant for E! I remember being struck by the crowd outside the convention, its faces full of young hopefuls and their mothers. Men might have run the operation, but women and girls powered it. It was and is the way of the world, not just Miss America.