In the spring of 1958, Phyllis Whitenack climbed aboard an airplane in her hometown of Bluefield, W.Va.
The 17-year-old was on her way with her parents to a town she had barely heard of to compete in a scholarship competition she knew little about.
"I was wondering what I was getting myself into," Whitenack recalled last week from her home in Scottsdale, Ariz.
"My parents were reluctant. It's a risky venture for 17-year-olds to get on an airplane and fly to Mobile having no idea what they're getting themselves into."
The risk ended up being worthwhile. Whitenack won the competition, earning a $5,000 scholarship and becoming the first-ever America's Junior Miss. Now, 50 years after the program was founded and 49 years after the first pageant, Whitenack again boarded a plane for Mobile.
She arrived Friday and will be in attendance tonight when one of this year's 50 contestants is named the 50th America's Junior Miss.
Whitenack is one of dozens of past Junior Miss contestants and winners in town for the golden anniversary. She'll be honored at a banquet at the Battle House Hotel tonight after the competition ends.
"We'll get another 15 minutes of fame," she joked. "Or maybe just 15 seconds."
The seeds for the first Junior Miss competition were sowed more than a decade before Whitenack received her crown and sash.
In the 1940s, after World War II ended, the Mobile Junior Chamber of Commerce began a program to let high school seniors compete to become Azalea Trail Maids.
By the 1950s, the competition was drawing girls from throughout the state, as well as from Florida and Mississippi.
Junior Chamber members, known as Jaycees, decided to restrict the Azalea Trail Maid competition to Mobile residents and create a new competition for women across the country. But they didn't come to the decision easily.
Reggie Copeland, who was the Jaycees' president at the time, said several members voted against creating the new event because they had just started the Greater Gulf State Fair the year before, and they didn't want to put too much on their plate. But a majority of the members went along with the proposal.
"I'm glad we did," he said.
The first Junior Miss event was small by later standards. Only 18 contestants were involved, not the 50 that currently compete.
The contestants only stayed a week, compared to the two weeks they now spend in Mobile. All the girls traveled with their parents. And the audiences for the performances at the Saenger Theatre were relatively small, Whitenack said.
"There were no complicated routines, no multiple practice sessions and rehearsals," she said. "I remember being treated to scrumptious lunches and being taken to Bellingrath Gardens and Point Clear. Mobile paid for all of us to fly down, and it was quite an experience."
Whitenack won the fitness award that year and performed a dramatic monologue on the tragedies of war as her talent.
The Jaycees raised $10,000 in scholarship money for the competition, and Whitenack received $5,000 of it. That's quite a bit less than the $50,000 that tonight's winner will receive, but adjusted for inflation, Whitenack's prize was worth $35,000 in today's dollars.
"Believe it or not, that paid for most of my college," she said.
Whitenack was actually not named America's Junior Miss. Instead she was given the title of Junior Miss America.
About a month after the competition, Copeland said, he received a letter from a law firm in Philadelphia and a lawyer representing the Miss America pageant, which held its first competition in 1921.
The lawyer took issue with the Mobile competition's name.
Copeland immediately called together a meeting of the Jaycees, and Charlie Burch, an attorney for the GM&O Railroad, suggested switching up the words to make it America's Junior Miss. The meeting took about 20 minutes in all, and Copeland said he liked the new name better.
"You can't go wrong with putting America first," he said.
After getting only 18 entrants in the first year, Copeland said, the competition had representatives from all 50 states by its third year.
For several years in the 1980s, that number swelled to 52, as contestants from Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico were added. The number of contestants is now back to down to 50, one from every state.
The finals moved from the Saenger Theatre to Fort Whiting Auditorium and now take place in the Mobile Civic Center.
The show was first broadcast nationally in 1965 by NBC and garnered famous hosts throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, including Ed McMahon, Lorne Greene and Michael Landon.
Several Junior Miss winners and contestants have gone on to high-profile careers after the contest, including journalists Diane Sawyer (1963 winner) and Deborah Norville (Georgia's 1976 Junior Miss) and actresses Mary Frann (1961 winner) and Debra Messing (Rhode Island's 1986 Junior Miss).
"Many become doctors, lawyers," Copeland said. "It is refreshing to think that they got their start in Mobile, Alabama."
The Junior Miss timeline is not without jagged stretches.
The competition has suffered an image of racial inequality. In the 1970s, Mobile civil rights leader John LeFlore was arrested while watching a civil rights protest in front of the Civic Center during a Junior Miss competition.
In the early 1990s, three black members of the Mobile City Council blocked funding to the program because they said it lacked diversity. In 1997, Tyrenda Williams became the first black contestant to win America's Junior Miss.
Two years ago, the program nearly folded after it couldn't get a national television deal, and several national sponsors pulled their support. The 2005 final was billed as the last one ever, and when it was finished, winner Kelli Schutz was not scheduled to make the usual Junior Miss winner appearances.
But in the ensuing months, a group of supporters convinced the organization's board to keep the competition in Mobile without national television.
The city of Mobile and Mobile County increased their subsidies to the program, and Copeland devised an idea to raise an extra $250,000 by having a $5,000 sponsor for each state.
This year's finals will be broadcast live on the Internet through www.nbc15online.com.
Whitenack said she expects the event to live on and, in fact, prosper.
As more risque material continues to seep into mainstream entertainment, she said, the old-fashioned values of Junior Miss will allow it to stand apart and regain its national prominence.
"The girls aren't working to fit some mold, they're not going to cosmetic surgeons and killing themselves to get down to 104 pounds, not trying to portray an image of perfect beauty or any standard except for a standard of integrity and excellence," she said.
"It pretty much operates under the same premise that it had 50 years, and that's what keeps me coming back."
