1995 was a big year for me. I got married, finished graduate school, and celebrated my tenth year of living in San Francisco. In the midst of it all, I published two issues of Mystery Date. Number 4, which came out in December, was the second of them.

This somewhat ungrammatically titled article about Vonda Kay Van Dyke, Miss America 1965, remains one of my all-time favorites.

Vonda Kay Van Dyke and the Miss American Dream
Lynn Peril © 1995

Vonda Kay and Kurley-Q

Every trip to the post office is an adventure; I simply never know what's going to be waiting in the mailbox for me. Imagine, if you will, my excitement when I tore open an innocent looking manila envelope and an AUTOGRAPHED copy of Vonda Kay Van Dyke's That Girl In Your Mirror (Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1966) fell out. Why, only that very morning my eyes had rested upon my own recently-purchased copy nestled safely in my bedside bookcase. (That's right, some people have the Kama Sutra next to their bed, but I have Vonda Kay Van Dyke.) And now this unexpected bounty!

Accompanying the book was the following letter from Phoenix's Dewey Webb. "Dear Lisa," it began (that's OK, it keeps me from getting a swelled head):

In a recent issue of "Mystery Date," you mentioned that you'd been unable to track down a copy of That Girl In Your Mirror. Obviously, you've never thrifted in Phoenix, Vonda Kay's old stomping grounds. The trick here is finding a thrift store that DOESN'T carry the entire Van Dyke ouevre. And judging from the proliferation of autographed copies (as is this one), she spent most of her reign on the book tour circuit.

Prior to winning the crown, she was something of a local celebrity, performing . . . in the saloon at Legend City, a now-defunct Western-themed amusement park. When she went onto Miss America glory . . . everyone went wild.

Well, maybe not everyone. I have a friend who still bristles at the mention of Vonda's name. At the time, she was a teen mom with an eight-month old baby trapped in some crummy high- school marriage. Anyway, after Vonda Kay won, my friend's mom never tired of rubbing my friend's nose in it -- the message being "Here is someone your same age who has done something with her life." Thirty years later mom and daughter are still at each other's throats and Vonda Key has vanished into near-oblivion. (I saw her hosting some cheesy local pageant on TV a few years ago.)

My theory is that a lot of moms bought into the Vonda Kay myth, hence the flood of thrift-store wisdom in this area. But hey, you're the teenology expert, not I.

Ignoring the gauntlet tossed down in that last sentence, I think Dewey's on to something here. There was -- is -- something about Miss America that has burrowed deeply into our collectively mass-mediated consciousness. His letter got me thinking more about Miss Van Dyke, and then more about the pageant itself. As a child, I rarely missed its annual broadcast from Atlantic City. I was enthralled, along with the rest of my home state, when Miss Wisconsin, Terry Ann Meeuwsen, won the title in 1973. I was transfixed when Miss America 1984, Vanessa Williams, was forced to step down with a mere seven weeks of her reign left after it was revealed that she had, as an innocent 19-year old, posed for some steamy photographs. But as for naming any recent Miss America -- well, let's face it, I wouldn't recognize Miss A in the unlikely event she walked up and smacked me in the face. And, until the day I picked up a 50¢ copy of Dear Vonda Kay (Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1967) in a San Francisco Peninsula thrift store, I had never heard of Vonda Kay Van Dyke.

Pert, pretty, pious and a darned fine ventriloquist, Vonda Kay Van Dyke was the quintessential Miss America. Crowned on September 13, 1964, her reign was balanced between the individualistic queens of the pre-television era and the current crop of blandly interchangeable beauties. While she was neither the first nor the last Miss America to exploit the money-making potential that accompanied the winner's rhinestone tiara, she was perhaps the only Miss America to market herself extensively as a teen expert. Finally, there is something so, well, AMERICAN about the Van Dyke blend of evangelical Christianity and blind ambition, virginal sexuality and dubious talent.

Vonda Kay Van Dyke was born in Muskegon, Michigan in 1943, the only child of Dr. A.B Van Dyke, an osteopath, and his homemaker wife. The deeply religious family later moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where Vonda attended the Phoenix Christian High School. There she exemplified the sort of uber-teen behavior that guidebooks of the era lauded: she was on the staff of the school newspaper, was captain of the cheerleader squad and an active church member, regularly teaching a Sunday school class. She was attractive and well-groomed. No wonder she was later held up as a role model to teens hell-bent on carving out a small slice of independence by smoking, drinking and wrestling with the opposite sex, or even by merely sassing back to Mom and Dad. She was, in short, a girl that even Pat Boone could respect.

But she was not entirely the boring, goody-two-shoes that such behavior implied (although she came close). Where some girls may have played the piano, and others twirled batons with panache, Vonda Kay Van Dyke was different. For from the tender age of six, Vonda practiced ventriloquism. Inspired not by the trenchant wit of Senor Wences, but rather by performer Paul Winchell, little Vonda Kay worked diligently on "throwing" her voice, just like she'd seen on TV. By her seventh birthday, she was proficient enough that her parents gave her a small replica of Winchell's dummy, Jerry Mahoney. Before long Vonda was in front of her Sunday school class, singing hymns and reciting Bible verses with her dummy. Already burning with ambition, she lugged her anthropoid prop with her everywhere. To her classmates, nonplussed by the sight of her and Jerry, Vonda was "simply the girl with the dummy." (Of course, had little Vonda Kay and her cronies grown up a decade later, their feelings would have been immutably affected by the Twilight Zone episode featuring Cliff Robertson as an alcoholic ventriloquist, and a very creepy dummy.)

Vonda continued performing for church groups and the like, gaining confidence at each show. The day inevitably came when she needed a new partner, one more suited to her growing talents. Enter Kurley-Q, whom Vonda described (in That Girl In Your Mirror) as "a professional dummy with moveable eyes and thick shock of red hair." Alas, no record has been left of just how Kurley came to bear his singular name, nor of what happened to the unfortunate Jerry. As a matter of fact, in an interview released on the Teenage Diary lp, Vonda recalled that she and Kurley had been together since she was about seven years old. Apparently Jerry's place in the Van Dyke legend was excised when his partner hitched her wagon to a star.

At any rate, Vonda decided to enter the local Junior Miss pageant during her senior year of high school. Junior Miss was (and is) a nationwide competition designed to select "the ideal high-school girl," emphasizing characteristics such as talent, character, school activities, citizenship, poise, etc. Certainly, Vonda possessed these qualities in spades. For the talent portion of the contest, however, she made a fateful decision that set her apart from the usual herd of singers, tap dancers and baton twirlers -- she chose to perform her ventriloquism routine. Evidently the judges liked what they saw, because Vonda was selected Arizona's Junior Miss for 1961, and travelled with Kurley to Mobile, Alabama, to participate in the national finals. She made the top ten finalists in Mobile, but didn't win the title itself. Disappointed, but undaunted, she set her sights on the 1962 Miss Phoenix pageant, the first step on the road to Atlantic City.

She did not win the Miss Phoenix title, she said later, "because I deserved to lose." She had been so nervous that she "raced" through her act with Kurley, dropping some of her best jokes. Unfortunately, Vonda didn't include any examples of these rib ticklers in either That Girl In Your Mirror or Dear Vonda Kay, although if they were anything like those on the Christian kiddie albums I've heard, I'm suprised she was even allowed on stage. This time she took the loss hard, and resolved to have nothing more to do with beauty contests, concentrating instead on her studies at Arizona State University in Tempe. But her friends urged her to enter the Miss Tempe pageant, for which her school residence made her eligible. In a quandary, Vonda Kay did what all good evangelicals do -- she asked God for advice. God, apparently having a slow day, told her to enter the beauty contest.

She realized (or maybe God kind of hinted at it) that she needed "much more practice as a ventriloquist" if she was to win the Miss Tempe title. Luckily, a nearby amusement park, the western-themed Legend City, was auditioning college students to entertain at its "Music Hall." Vonda Kay and Kurley passed their audition and began performing several shows a day, at first on the weekends, then every day during the summer. Frank Deford, in his wonderful history of the pageant There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America (New York: Penguin Books, 1978; I got it at the library -- so should you!), reported that Vonda Kay kept notebooks during her tenure at the Legend City Music Hall wherein she listed the audience's timed response to each bit of her performance. That way she could build the perfect three-minute act. "Every move I had," Vonda Kay told Deford, "every one, was planned." She gave twelve performances a day, six days a week prior to the Miss America contest itself.

But that's getting ahead of the story. Vonda's rugged determination paid off in 1964 when she first won the Miss Tempe crown, then the Miss Maricopa County title. Finally, she was chosen Miss Arizona, and traveled to Atlantic City for the finals in September of 1964. There she was voted Miss Congeniality by her fellow contestants. Some pageantwatchers viewed this title as a kiss of death, since no recipient in the pageant's forty-three year history had ever gone on to be crowned Miss America. The Miss Congeniality title, it seemed, was pageant's equivalent of being tagged a "good sport" in high school, a one-way step to social oblivion and near nerd status. Miss Congeniality was the pageant's booby prize, given for the nebulous quality of "niceness," in a contest where champion status was bestowed on the winners of the swimsuit and talent competitions, and Miss America herself was adulated as near royalty.

In her autobiography-cum-advice-book-and-religious-screed for teen girls, That Girl In Your Mirror, Vonda Kay glossed over -- OK, never mentioned -- the fact that she did not win either the talent or swimsuit competitions at the national level. Vonda and Kurley, despite their months of practice, did not capture the judges' hearts as they had so many times before. Instead, Miss North Dakota's classical singing won the talent portion.

And even though you'll find lots of mentions of Kurley and ventriloquism in TGIYM, you'll find nary a word about the swimsuit competition. For a girl of Vonda Kay's deeply-held and fundamental religious beliefs, parading about in swimsuit, hose and heels before the mostly male judges had to be a little unsettling. Of course, the pageant required the use of swimsuits made with a special "modesty panel" but that little extra bit of cloth tended paradoxically to focus attention on the crotch area rather than hide it from public view. On the other hand, take a look at the Legend City ad. It appears that, along with lessons in comic timing, Vonda Kay learned something else at the Legend City Music Hall, something suspiciously like . . . sex appeal. Then again, maybe she'd studied Jacque Mercer's book, How to Win A Beauty Contest (Phoenix: Curran Publishing, 1960; I don't have this one, but I want it -- badly). Mercer was Miss America 1949, and like her fellow Arizonan Vonda Kay Van Dyke, she was not one to leave even the smallest detail to chance. Therefore, her book offered written instruction to would-be beauty contestants on such small but consequential details as how to put on a bathing suit:

. . . first, roll it as you would a girdle. Pull the suit over the hips to the waist, then, holding the top away from your body, bend over from the waist. Ease the suit up to the bustline and with one hand, lift one breast up and in and ease the suit bra over it. Repeat on the other side. Stand up and fasten the straps.

I have a hard time imagining Vonda Kay, with Kurley sitting patiently nearby, following these directions. Nor can I picture her bending over to check for any pubic hairs that may have strayed into view, as Ms. Mercer advised contestants do before hitting the runway. Then again, Jacque Mercer was something of a renegade among the ranks, who once told an interviewer that "you could take an orangutan, and, with a year's training, it would be a perfectly adequate Miss America."

While Vonda Kay failed to win the swimsuit competition (the winner was Miss West Virginia, 37-25-37), she nevertheless broke the Miss Congeniality jinx, as she went on to be crowned Miss America 1965. But the pageant had more than its usual share of drama that year. Miss Hawaii, eighteen-year-old Leinaala Teruya of Honolulu, had planned to recite a monologue describing the "bitter feelings of a Negro who has been beaten in a riot." But pageant officials, nervous over civil rights demonstrations taking place that summer and anxious not to besmirch the pageant with anything that might remotely be considered controversial, advised Teruya "for her own safety" not to use the monologue, even though she had won her state contest with it. Miss Hawaii, who the papers reported was "of Hawaiian-Chinese-Caucasian ancestry," instead substituted a monologue poem wherein a blind person spoke about the beauty of the islands. This, however, wasn't the showstopper the other monologue had been. "It's very emotional, very dramatic," Teruya said of her original choice, "I become very wrapped up in it and tears stream down my face, my make-up is smeared, everything."

But Vonda Kay wouldn't dream of smearing her makeup during competition (although reports indicate she couldn't stop crying after her victory), and she and Kurley never discussed politics onstage. (She had, however, caused a minor flap after being chosen Miss Congeniality when she exclaimed, "Goldwater, here we go," in reference to the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater of Arizona. She backpedaled after being crowned Miss America, of course, coyly telling reporters she was "very proud" of fellow Airzonan Goldwater, and refusing to be more specific about her political affiliation.) Thus it was Vonda, dressed in a beaded, white strapless gown, who bent her head to receive the winner's tiara that night. The first thought to enter her mind after her name was called, she told reporters, was "the awful big responsibilities I now had to my friends, my family, my country and to my God." No wonder Dewey's friend's mom held VKV over her juvie daughter's head. What a despicably wholesome thing to say! Your teeth probably still hurt from reading it. I know I feel unclean merely having typed it.

Becoming Miss America was "God's will," Vonda Kay went on to tell the media. I guess that means God wants some people to be doctors, others to be teachers, and still others to act as corporate shills for a year. For that, you see, is what Miss America does. In 1963, for example, an Oldsmobile executive told Business Week magazine that sponsoring the Miss America pageant gave Olds "a beauty and style story to reinforce [their] image of prestige and performance." Whenever Miss A needed to travel that year, she travelled in an Oldsmobile. Indeed, the pageant winner spent most of her reign at the beck and call of Olds and other corporate sponsors. If Pepsi wanted Miss America at supermarket promotion in East Paducah, then she showed up, selected the contest winner's name out of barrel, and offered her congratulations and prize-winning smile before she was spirited off to another mindnumbing occasion. She was compensated for these appearances, of course, but on the other hand she really had little choice in the matter of where she would speak or to which products she would lend her name and likeness.

This is not to say that Miss America provided slave labor for the pageant's sponsors. Indeed, Frank Deford estimated that Vonda Kay Van Dyke took home approximately $65,000 over the year of her reign. ("She did so many Youth for Christ appearances," admitted Miss America's schedule coordinator, Doris Kelly.) What is more surprising is that, given the rapid rate at which last year's Miss A tends to slide into oblivion, Vonda Kay continued to make money after she turned in her tiara. Capitalizing no doubt on her parent-appeal and image as an irreproachable goody-goody, the Fleming H. Revell Company, a Christian publishing house, approached Vonda about writing an advice book for teens. The result, as you know by now, was That Girl in Your Mirror. Vonda Kay's beauty and advice philosophy is pretty much limited to variations on the suggestion that girls turn to religion for "that inner sparkle that only Christ can give."

As several Phoenix-based MD readers have pointed out, virtually every thrift store in the city carries autographed copies of TGIYM. In fact, at the end of February 1966, Vonda Kay Van Dyke made a one-day tour of six bookstores in the Phoenix area. Over a thousand books were sold in conjunction with this mini-tour, and Publisher's Weekly reported that another 2000 copies were sold in Phoenix alone during the first week of March. By March 15, Revell reported that they had sold 60,000 copies nationwide out of the first printing of 100,000. On the other hand, Revell required stores to puchase a minimum 100 books in order to participate in a special promotion, and these books were not returnable, so draw your own conclusions. But in Phoenix, at least, TGYIM was a hit, and the overall sales figures respectable enought that Revell had Vonda do another book for teens, Dear Vonda Kay, which came out in 1967. Personal experience alone would have me believe that DVK was not the seller that TGYIM was. It's simply not as easy to find -- in the Bay Area, at least. DVK is a compilation of letters received by Vonda Kay, and "her" replies to them. (I don't for a minute think that VKV had anything to do with the actual writing of the books that bear her name. Input, yes, writing, no.) Of course, none of the questions are of the "My boyfriend likes to suck toes, what should I do?" type that make the Ask Beth teen advice column such enjoyable reading. Rather, Vonda Kay answers run of the mill teen questions concerning smoking, drinking, cheating at school, makeup, and so on. (Of course, she's against all these things. Oh, except light makeup is OK.) Because she and her publishing company were interested in proselytizing, she also answered questions like "What do you think of girl who joined a certain church just because a boy she wants to impress goes there?" (Not much, but she might sincerely become interested in the church in time.)

By the time DVK was published, its author was a married woman, and her credibility as a teen authority waning. Apparently Vonda Kay had little interest in maintaining her place in the national limelight, although she did make an appearance at the fiftieth anniversary of the Miss America pageant in 1970. She also recorded several albums of "devotional" songs for Word Records. But as her fifteen minutes of fame faded, Vonda Kay Van Dyke's books and records lost their audience and found their way to thrift store shelves. Where they wait for you dear readers, for you.