Growing up, you couldn’t miss Miss America. Last night, I did

Every morning I go through the various New Jersey news sites, looking for things worth talking about on the air. This morning on NJ.com, I saw that Miss America happened last night. And honestly, my first thought was: oh, they still have that?

Not that I was ever much of a pageant guy. But there was no escaping Miss America growing up in Atlantic County. My dad had friends in construction, and a lot of them landed summer assignments getting Boardwalk Hall ready for the pageant every single year. Where I grew up, the hype leading into Miss America week felt like Super Bowl week. The local newspaper ran a header every single day that week: "It's Miss America Week." Coverage of the preliminary events went on for days. There was a full parade down the Atlantic City boardwalk, contestants riding in the back of convertibles, and parade watchers shouting "show us your shoes!" as they rolled past. The radio station I worked for covered the parade...on radio.

In our house, my mom and dad turned the whole broadcast into their own private event, just for each other's amusement, like they were running their own news coverage of it. They watched intently. My dad actually took notes on every segment, trying to predict the winner before Bert Parks sang her name. And Bert Parks singing to the newly crowned winner was always, somehow, a little awkward, every single year, and everyone watched anyway. The next morning, without fail, there'd be a photo in the paper of the new Miss America frolicking in the ocean.

Here's what actually happened last night

Regan Hutsell of Houston, Texas, was crowned Miss America 2027 on Sunday, September 6, in West Palm Beach, Florida, becoming the 99th woman to hold the title. She beat out 52 contestants representing every state, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico, and walked away with a $50,000 scholarship. Hutsell is a former Radio City Rockette and a dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet. Outgoing titleholder Cassie Donegan of New York placed the crown on her successor, the same tradition that's closed out this pageant for over a century.

Photo by Donald Kravitz/Getty Images for Dick Clark Productions

How it got from Boardwalk Hall to Florida

The pageant actually started in Atlantic City in 1921, conceived specifically as a way to stretch the summer tourism season a little further past Labor Day. It stayed at Boardwalk Hall for most of the next eight decades. Bert Parks first sang "There She Is, Miss America" at the 1955 pageant, and it became as much a part of the show as the crown itself. The highest-rated Miss America broadcast on record was the 1962 pageant, still ranked among the top 100 television events of all time. Not everyone loved it, though. In 1968, roughly 200 feminist protesters gathered outside Boardwalk Hall for what organizers called "No More Miss America," tossing bras, girdles, and other items into a "freedom trash can" on the boardwalk.

Ratings faded steadily over the following decades, and in 2005, the pageant left Atlantic City altogether, citing the cost of production, landing in Las Vegas instead. New Jersey lured it back in 2013 with state subsidies, and it returned to Boardwalk Hall for a few more years before leaving again. These days, it bounces around Florida, Orlando last year, West Palm Beach this time. Somewhere along the way, the organization also moved away from calling itself a beauty pageant at all, these days it's officially a "scholarship program."

Times change. I get it. But there was a stretch when Miss America week was as close to a hometown holiday as Atlantic County ever had. These days, it's a footnote in the morning paper, happening somewhere in Florida, and I only found out it happened at all because I went looking.