Pageant Magazine

Articles from Pageant Magazine

The Predator
(Pageant Magazine, 1955)

The attached article, A Mother’s Ordeal with Homosexuality first appeared in 1955, a time when the term gay was not known, and the word homosexual was used in its place – and as you will learn, homosexual was essentially synonymous with the designations sex offender, Paraphilia and Child molester.

The charge of homosexuality against someone, anyone, is not a light one. It requires proof, the strictest proof there is; getting it is not an easy matter.



Jane Fonda
(Pageant Magazine, 1960)

When this article went to press in 1960, Jane Fonda (b. 1937) was all of 22.
She had recently dropped out of Vassar to pursue modeling in Manhattan (unlike most college drop-out who quit campus to pursue modeling, Fonda’s smiling mug was placed on two VOGUE covers that year) and to study method acting with Lee Strasberg (1901 – 1982). She had her first taste of Broadway in a short-lived production titled There was a Little Girl and had not, as yet, taken up her interest in totalitarian communism.


Click here to read about Henry Fonda.

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Explaining Abstract Art
(Pageant Magazine, 1950)

WHY DO THEY DISTORT THINGS? CAN’T THEY DRAW? WHY DO THEY
PAINT SQUARES AND CUBES?


In an effort to help answer these and many other similar questions that are overheard in the modern art museums around the world, authors Mary Rathbun and Bartlett Hayes put their noodles together and dreamed up the book (that is available at Amazon) Layman’s Guide to Modern Artstyle=border:none, and we have posted some of the more helpful portions here, as well as 17 assorted illustrations to help illustrate their explanations.


The authors point out that abstract images are not simply confined to museums and galleries but surround us every day and we willingly recognize their meanings without hesitation:

Lines picturing the force and direction of motion are a familiar device in cartoons… The cartoonist frequently draws a head in several positions to represent motion. Everybody understands it. The painter multiplies the features in the same way… Everybody abstracts. The snapshot you take with your [camera] is an abstraction – it leaves out color, depth, motion and presents only black-and-white shapes. Yet its simple enough to recognize this arrangement of shapes as your baby or your mother-in-law or whatever…

The Unknown Jackie Kennedy
(Pageant Magazine, 1970)

Seven years must have seemed an appropriate amount of time to withhold information concerning the generally unpleasant character traits that were apparent in First Lady Jackie Kennedy – and so in 1970 Washington writers Lucianne Goldberg and Fred Sparks put pen to paper and recalled all the minutiae they could piece together regarding Her Elegance:

Jackie was master of deception. In the White House, she never wore her double-breasted mink coat when she could be photographed. But after her husband died, and she moved to New York, she wore the mink, as one fashion writer put it, ‘to do errands around Manhattan’.


This article appears on this site with the permission of Lucianne Goldberg

The Great Civil War Battles
(Pageant Magazine, 1958)

The second portion of Bruce Catton’s article (see above) concerning the necessary knowledge required in order to justifiably call your self a Civil War Buff was this short piece listing the greatest battles of the war. Accompanying the five brief thumb-nail summaries is a map of the South Eastern U.S., highlighted with red stars, which serve to identify where the blood poured.

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Father and Son Over Pearl Harbor
(Pageant Magazine, 1970)

One morning a 17 year-old boy exclaimed to his amateur aviator father: Let’s fly around the island, Dad! – this article wouldn’t seem worthy of appearing on the internet if they lived on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, but the island in question was Honolulu and the morning was December 7, 1941…

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Anita Colby
(Pageant Magazine, 1946)

For a time, Jinx Falknenburg shared the high ground as the best-paid fashion model with a lass named Anita Colby (1914 – 1992). She was restless and highly ambitious beauty who recognized that her exulted position in the fashion world was only a temporary one – and by the time that the clock ran out on her, Colby’s resume would boast of numerous high-profile positions such as publicist, syndicated columnist, movie studio executive and T.V. talk show hostess.


This article pertains to her brief stint at the Selznick Studios as some sort of perfumed Über-Stylist who lorded over all the other glam-squad proletarians on the lot.


Her book, Anita Colby’s Beauty Bookstyle=border:none, has become a classic on 1950s style.

‘Celebrity Services”
(Pageant Magazine, 1945)

Earl Blackwell and Ted Strongstyle=border:none founded a curious institution that they called Celebrity Services, Inc. in 1938 – figuring, as they did, that

Today America has more celebrities than it can keep track of and Celebrity Services aims, simply, to keep track of them.

Celebrity Services’ office is a busy hodge-podge of files, cross-files, indices, cards folders, stuffed pigeonholes, telephones, confidential memos address books, private dossiers and fat envelopes – all pertaining to the lives of 50,000 celeb-utopians.

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That 1960 Look for Men
(Pageant Magazine, 1960)

Some call it the Mad Men Look, others may simply label it that late 50s/early 60s look – but either way high praise should be dolled out to costume designer Katherine Jane Bryant who so skillfully brought these fashions to the attention of millions of men through her work on the T.V. show Mad Men (AMC).


For those lads pursuing an advanced degree in pulling-off that look in their daily attire, we recommend this handy list of fashion’s Do’s & Don’ts from 1960.

E-Learning in the Fifties
(Pageant Magazine, 1958)

This article from the late Fifties refers to the educational benefits that existed in the form of tape recordings, television, films and slide shows and what a glorious discovery it was that they came along when they did to aid in the teacher shortages of the time. Today we have decades of studies that show what among these tools has been useful and what has failed.


In the 1940s Color TV was Anticipated as a Tool with Which Art Students Could Learn…

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The Dial Diet of 1955

Within the cozy confines of the attached PDF file rest in honored glory the digital reproduction of seven (7) tried-and-true diets from 1955:


• The Liquid Diet


• The Spring Cleaning Diet


• The du Pont Diet

• The Basic Seven Diet


• The Famous Clinic Diet


• The Hard and Fast Diet


• The Daily Dozen Diet


They were all the necessary diet choices required for the (so-called) Pageant Diet Selector Dial, which is a part of the download. Seeing that there is not a single diet that is right for everyone, there is attached herein a paper dial that can be referred to daily – one for women and the other for men:

Looka at the outside band of the wheel for your age and activity group (whether you lead an active or a sedentary life). Then, select the number of pounds you want to loose.


– finally select the diet or combination of diets, indicated by the number on the inner wheel and follow the directions.


From Amazon:


The Doctor’s Diet: Dr. Travis Stork’s STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Healthstyle=border:none

The Shelley Winters ‘Get Thin Quick’ Diet

We all know that successful film actresses all seem able to drop weight quickly when the rolls call for it. Attached herein is the 1958 diet plan put to use by the Hollywood actress Shelley Winters.

Living the Life
(Pageant Magazine, 1957)

This is the new suburban America… It has developed since the Second World War. It is within hollering distance of a big city but has a definite will of its own. Its people are youngish and their numbers growing. To find out what goes on in such a community, PAGEANT MAGAZINE made a study of one typical postwar suburb: Levittown, Long Island. It has 82,000 people, fairly young; the town is 12 years old and still growing fast. What happens there [each year] is typical of the new American ‘normal’:


• Average Income: $6,100.00


• Deaths: 304


• Births: 2,760


• Divorces: 101


• HS Graduates: 285


• College-Bound Graduates: 60


• Auto Accidents: 355

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