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Date Posted: 12:45:48 08/21/23 Mon
Author: .
Subject: .
In reply to: That Miss Milwaukee gal (Camilla) was in a lot of pageants. 's message, "Outstanding report. Never heard of the state Elks queen contest before." on 21:26:08 08/18/23 Fri

CAMBRIDGE — The sight of 50 lovely women from throughout Wisconsin appearing on stage together prompted one spectator to remark, “What a wonderful moment for Cambridge.”

Another attendee gleefully observed that “Cambridge never looked so good; this will put us on the map for sure.”

Both were speaking about the statewide contestants at the outdoor Miss Wisconsin beauty competition that Cambridge hosted eight decades ago. The 1933 Miss Wisconsin pageant was a successful attempt to lure people to Cambridge, just as the Miss America pageant drew vacationers to the famed beach city Atlantic City, N.J. one week after Labor Day each September beginning in 1921. However, no encore ever was enjoyed by Cambridge.

Each year at Community Park, now known as Ripley Park, situated on the west side of the lake of that name near the Dane and Jefferson county border, Cambridge played host to the annual Harvest Festival, a local tradition in area communities dating back to the late 1800s. However, in 1933, the 26th annual Harvest Fest event in Cambridge was none like any other in the past, becoming one of the largest and most memorable events in the history of Cambridge.

Sunday, Aug. 18, marked the 80th year anniversary of one of the biggest attractions ever in Cambridge when the village was in the spotlight — for weeks leading up to the Miss Wisconsin pageant and through the publicity that lingered weeks later throughout the state.

The two-day pageant, organized at Community Park on Aug. 17-18, 1933, was a celebrated gathering of beauties from around the Badger State. Entrants from nearby small towns to larger cities far away participated in the lakeshore competition. It would be the first and last time in state pageant history that the Miss Wisconsin winner would be chosen in Jefferson County.

The primary sponsor of the popular summertime event was the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce, led by chamber President Orlando Hart Perry, a local real estate and insurance agent. He and his wife, Hazel (Bagley) Perry, were champions of the annual Harvest Festival, and as chamber president, he served as the business manager for bringing the Miss Wisconsin pageant to Cambridge that year.

He died on July 8, 1974. They had a son, Orlando Hart Perry Jr., who also worked in the Lake Ripley-area real estate business, and had attended the pageant as a 10-year-old boy.

Major area sponsors were promoted on posters and in articles published weekly in the hometown Cambridge News included Thos. C. Olson & Company, Madison Transit Co. and the Edward Phillips & Sons Company. Baked goods served during the festival were provided by the Cambridge Bakery, while fresh meats at concession stands were furnished by Anderson Brothers of Cambridge.

Documents found at the Cambridge Historical School Foundation, the local archive of historical items of Cambridge, show that Mr. Perry had paid $80 to Jack Miller of Waukesha, a noted aerial stuntman, to perform parachute jumps from an elevation of 3,000 feet during the festival and the evening of the pageant competition at Community Park.

The Harvest Festival was heavily promoted by dazzling eye-catching posters hung at local businesses and newspaper advertisements.

One promotional advertisement in Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal noted that there would be a flower show, a Venetian Night of “beautiful floats and colored light spectacular”; two baseball games, kittenball (now known as softball) “of Southern Wisconsin’s strongest teams”; the WCLO Midway featuring three big radio shows; a Cambridge Merchants Exhibit; several Vaudeville acts; a water carnival, and, of course, the staging of the biggest event of the year: the crowning of Miss Wisconsin 1933.

Prior to the two-day pageant, the community had another important task to complete: the selection of Miss Cambridge, the city’s entry into the state competition.

Weeks leading up the Aug. 14, 1933, city competition held at the Chamber of Commerce Hall, the Cambridge News posted early favorites of area young women who were nominated to appear on ballots on which citizens voted for their favorite finalists. Nearly a dozen women with the highest vote totals advanced to compete for the city honors during a gala event sponsored by the chamber.

Anna Onstad Lee, a red-haired farm-born beauty from rural Cambridge, was chosen as Miss Cambridge after hours of deliberation in a heavily-contested field of local contestants. After nearly three weeks of community voting by the public at various area businesses, Lee emerged the winner at the final city pageant with 862 votes just four days before the state pageant.

Born in the Town of Christiana on Nov. 9, 1915, Anna Lee was the fourth child of area farmers Edwin and Tillie S. (Kingland) Lee. The newly named Miss Cambridge developed a good work ethic while she was employed at her brother’s garage and auto dealership on Main Street at the time of her victory. To this date, historians and local researchers have no clue what became of Anna Lee.

This could be said of nearby contestant Miss Deerfield 1933, Louise Nelson, whose only known existence to local researchers is that her name was among the list of 1933 Miss Wisconsin contestants, and her senior class picture is in the 1934 Deerfield High School yearbook.

“We could not find any information about Louise at all,” said Deerfield historian Dorothy Loftus, herself a 1940 Deerfield High School graduate.

Placing first runner-up to Lee in the Miss Cambridge event with 535 votes was Isabel Dorothea Wikum, the daughter of farmers Andrew and Julia (Johnson) Wikum of the Town of Rutland; followed by Hazel Adeline Reiner, the daughter of Albert and Josie (Johnson) Reiner of the Town of Christiana. The remaining finalists were Lucille Grubel, Jeannette Olive Rindahl (who was Mrs. George W. Anderson when she died in Nov. 2008), Eleanore Perry, and Alice Ovedia Anderson, who was the daughter of Edward and Amanda (Mery sole) Anderson, of the Town of Christiana.

Some local residents and surviving participants of the Miss Cambridge and Miss Wisconsin competitions recall memories of that special time in the summer of 1933.

Wikum, a Stoughton native now known as Isabel Wikum Countryman of Belvidere, Ill., is one of the very last surviving Miss Cambridge contestants historians could locate. She reminisced about her entering the 1933 Miss Cambridge contest and living with her brother, Stanley, in Cambridge during the time of the competition.

“It was really a popularity contest, totally a community thing in Cambridge. I worked as a clerk at my brother’s grocery store (Wikum’s Royal Blue grocery on Main Street), said Ms. Countryman.

“He and his wife, Esther, ran the grocery, and people would vote for a contestant to win Miss Cambridge as they made their purchases at the store. I was real happy to have been named runner-up and really enjoyed everyone in the community. Grocery stores are so much more different then than those of today; and service was much more personable back then. I am honored that someone remembered me after all these years,” Ms. Countryman said.

Countryman, a 1931 Stoughton High School graduate who will turn 100 on Dec. 2, noted that many of the store customers were visitors from nearby Lake Ripley. The community was best known as the “Umbrella Town” for the colorful parasols lined along the streets of Cambridge and for the Harvest Festival held each summer.

“Lake Ripley was a very popular place to be during the summertime for locals and visitors far away as Rockford. It was the place for fishing, swimming, and boating.” said Countryman, who still drove her car locally in Belvidere at age 95.

Her grandson has the prize she won in the 1933 Miss Cambridge competition, a cherry hinged-top table awarded by an area merchant. As the first runner-up in the Miss Cambridge contest, she was bestowed the honors as serving as the official city hostess as Anna Lee (Miss Cambridge) competed in the state pageant judging.

All throughout the state, newspapers in small and large communities alike received updates and notices about the extravagant plans for the 1933 state pageant in Cambridge in an effort to drum-up publicity and excitement as many of the towns and cities were selecting entrants of their own to send to Cambridge for the state pageant. From as far north as Marinette and Oconto, to the far western reaches of Dodgeville and Fennimore, and large shoreline cities of Milwaukee and Racine to the east, dozens of municipalities began to send their hometown pride to Cambridge.

During research for Miss Dodgeville, Bernice Clara Palzkill, a talented girl from nearby Mineral Point in Iowa County, it was learned that while her name did not appear in any local newspapers about being named Miss Dodgeville, there was a Miss Mineral Point who was selected to compete in Cambridge. However, no records could verify whether Gladys Laverty of Mineral Point arrived in Cambridge for the state competition.

The method in which the 50 contestants received their community titles varied, between actually winning a staged competition, by the local newspaper or chamber of commerce appointing a nominated candidate, or the citizens of the community themselves selected a city winner from a ballot of names of nominated candidates, thus the highest vote winner was given a title, banner and a trip to Cambridge.

As told in the Aug. 19, 1933 issue of the Wisconsin State Journal following the announcement of the pageant winner, longtime news reporter Iver Magnes Kalnes wrote: “The crowd witnessing the selection of Miss Wisconsin Friday night was the largest ever seen at any Harvest Festival here. Automobiles were parked over all the hills and vales surrounding the park, and every inch of space in the park proper was filled with people.”

Earning the 1933 Miss Wisconsin crown after a very competitive contest was brunette beauty Miss Portage, Marie Marguerite Huebner, who was attired in royal purple. The petite former high school yearbook editor went on 20th birthday. Judges in Atlantic City, N.J. selected her among the pageant’s 16 semifinalists, the best showing for a Wisconsin contestant since Clara Wilma Koehler of Milwaukee in 1924.

Winning the 1933 Miss America crown was Miss Connecticut, Marion Bergeron, a 16-year-old from West Haven, Conn., who died in October 2002. She often attended the Miss America pageants through the late 1990s.

Prior to competing in Cambridge, Huebner was chosen as first runner-up in the state Elks’ Queen pageant in Milwaukee. The contest, held July 8, 1933, prior to the Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks national convention, was won by Eau Claire’s Elks queen, Marjorie Crowley, 23, a college graduate and trained nurse.

After competing in the Miss America contest (held for the first time in the then-newly built Atlantic City Convention Hall), and meeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Huebner gladly returned to Wisconsin under much statewide press attention and citizen appreciation.

Standing at 5 feet, 4 inches, Huebner remains today as one of the shortest women to have held the Miss Wisconsin title. But her small stature didn’t hold Huebner back from accepting modeling assignments, especially from her employer, Carroll and Klug’s Apparel Shop in Portage, where she worked as a clerk and seamstress.

At the time of her death at age 93 on Feb. 15, 2007, of a brief illness in Des Moines, Wash., Huebner was the oldest and earliest living Miss Wisconsin titleholder. She and her husband, Elmer William Raimer, who died in 2001, had moved to Washington in the early 1970s to be near their four children.

The state pageant contestants arrived in Cambridge from near and far and by an assortment of transportation. Some of the Milwaukee-area entrants arrived by train, while Miss Lancaster, Leona Dorothy Vesperman, 19, a country farm girl, came by car with her mother, Mattie Bertha Vesperman. Leona, who passed away in September 2004, was featured in the 2007 Lake Ripley Edition of the Cambridge News weekly newspaper.

On a postcard sent from Cambridge on the eve of the pageant competition to her future husband, Dale McFall, then of Platteville, which included a one-cent postage stamp, had this brief message: “Some beauties I’ll say. Wish I had stayed at home. Will not know (the name of the winner) until 10:30 Fri nite.” On the other side of the postcard was a picture of Hotel at Shore Place, Lake Ripley, her host lodge during the Miss Wisconsin pageant.

Meanwhile, big-city beauty entrant Miss Madison, Gladys Seldal, 18, was featured in a Wisconsin State Journal newspaper advertisement and article which told of Seldal selecting a DeSoto car sponsored by Quality Motors, Inc. of Madison for a ride to Cambridge.

“Two winners go together,” headlined the ad. “It is only natural that Madison’s beauty winner should select a DeSoto, the car that has won the approval of car buyers all over.”

While some contestants, including Miss Madison, got wide recognition as a state contestant featured in newspaper advertisements, other contestants barely were making any news—even in their hometowns. And some apparently never told their children years later that they were local pageant titleholders and contestant in the 1933 Miss Wisconsin pageant.

The family of Miss Platteville, Bernadette Dolores Marr, had no clue that their mother was Miss Platteville, said son John (Jack) McCormick of Tijeras, N.M.

However, Jean Binkert Schroedl and her sister, Bonnie Binkert, knew all their lives that their talented mother, Mabel Viola Staude, was Miss Johnson Creek 1933, and also the fact that Mabel was also a member of the Staude Orchestra with Mabel’s two brothers.

Once in Cambridge, the state pageant delegates arrived at Lake Ripley for boat rides, shoreline sunning, meeting the public, and posing for press photographers who spent hours taking pictures of the contestants from sitting in trees to walking the stage during the official parade and competition. There was no talent competition, as the official judging consisted of meeting with the judges and appearing on stage in full-piece swimsuits and formal gowns, some of which were homemade, including that of Miss Waterloo, Geraldine Bossa, who was known for making clothes in her youth.

A panel of seven judges hailing from Madison and Milwaukee selected five women to be named runners-up to Miss Huebner, the newly crowned Miss Wisconsin. The first- through fifth runners-up were, respectively: Miss Waupun, Ethel Berdine Krueger; Miss Beaver Dam, Jeanne Ruth Neugerbauer; Miss Burlington, Evelyn McGarey; Miss Oconto, Marion Burbey; and Miss Green Bay, Lorraine Hansen, who placed as the fifth runner-up. Honorable mention went to Miss Marinette, Dorothy Louise Wescher; Miss Wauwatosa, Myra Nelson; and Miss Kenosha, Dolores Dorothy Moriarty.

Among the 50 entrants who visited Lake Ripley and participated in the 1933 Miss Wisconsin pageant was an outgoing Rebecca Josephine Lillian Stokstad, who competed as Miss Stoughton, a title she won weeks earlier while at the Stoughton fairgrounds.

Stokstad Lunde, who will turn 97 on Dec. 23, recalled last year of being in the 1933 state pageant with Huebner. However, what she remembered most was a comment from Huebner’s father, Oswald Huebner, a Portage dry cleaning store owner.

“He (Mr. Huebner) came up to me after the pageant and said that had I been three years older, I would have won the contest hands down,” laughed Lunde, who retired from working at the Stoughton Hospital’s gift shop at 92. “I really never expected to be a Miss Wisconsin contestant”.”

In September 1974, she married her third husband, high school classmate Olaf J. Lunde, who died in April 2012.

“Olaf and I enjoyed life together,” Ms. Lunde said recently.

She also enjoyed living an independent life in a Stoughton senior care independent living facility.

At 96, Lunde is believed to be one of the last few surviving contestants of the 1933 Miss Wisconsin pageant. Less than a month before Huebner’s death in 2007, Miss Middleton 1933, Susan Jane Ziegler Ripp of Black Earth passed away. The Ashton native was a popular drugstore clerk in Middleton at the time of her victory. She died on Jan. 19, 2007, after a brief illness at 93.

Other recent deaths were those of Miss Two Rivers, Carolyn C. Keune Kronzer, in April 2007; Miss Hartford, Frances Geraldine Van Hara Beatz, in March 2008; Miss Whitewater, Bernice Dorthea Keeley McAuliffe, in August 2009; Miss Waupun, Erna Marie Kannenberg Last-Pargand, in Dec. 2009; and Miss Marinette, Dorothy Louise Wescher Hodgins, who died in Crosby, Texas, in August 2011.

Just before her death, Hodgins recalled traveling down to Cambridge for the state pageant.

“I loved being at the pageant. We took a train down and the lake was beautiful. The weather was nice for the outdoor competition”, said Hodgins, who worked as a substitute teacher at Humble (Texas) High School when she was in her 70s and 80s.

She said of her latter years, “I could not retire; I had to stay active.”

Hodgins was one of several Miss Wisconsin contestants who previously competed in the Elks queen contest on July 8, 1933, for the Elks convention in Milwaukee. Other Elks queen contestants who would later join Hodgins in Cambridge were Miss Appleton, Miss Beaver Dam, Miss Milwaukee, Miss Oshkosh, Miss Racine and Miss Portage, Marie Marguerite Huebner, the eventual 1933 Miss Wisconsin winner.

The Cambridge representative at the state pageant, Anna Lee, didn’t place in the 1933 Miss Wisconsin pageant, but as the hometown girl, she had the honor of placing the crown on Huebner’s head.

However, the biggest crowning achievement was the community of Cambridge for hosting one of the most memorable Miss Wisconsin competitions in the long-fabled history of the pageant. The beauty competition brought much acclaim, media recognition and statewide interest, to say nothing of the hundreds of visitors and family members of the statewide contestants from a round Wisconsin.

The state pageant never returned to Cambridge, and even now after 80 years since that two-day eventful program was staged there, it remains as one of the biggest events to ever come to Cambridge and be staged at Lake Ripley.

“I can’t believe its now been nearly 80 years,” Isabel Countryman said recently.

She recalled having purchased a beautiful black two-piece jacket and dress ensemble for the local Miss Cambridge pageant coronation at the Chamber of Commerce Hall, which was attended by more than 400 people.

Longtime Cambridge historian Eileen Scott, who was a five-term village president, recalled during her last interview just prior to her death at age 88 on Aug. 21, 2009, having attended the state pageant at age 12 and watching the pageant contestants in person.

The former teacher remembered how proud the Cambridge community was of having such a major event with statewide recognition take place in conjunction with the annual Harvest Fest, which was always an anticipated event.

“We were excited to have the Miss Wisconsin pageant and popular light shows be at Lake Ripley for this festive occasion,” Scott said. “It was a great day for the Cambridge community, (one) which will hopefully be long remembered in the history of this town.”

While there were no official celebrations in Cambridge this past weekend to mark the 80th year anniversary, Scott would be pleased to know that the community still recalls the Miss Wisconsin pageant when it took place on the shores of Lake Ripley, giving it something to remember for a lifetime — and longer. Cambridge was back in the spotlight again, 80 years later.

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