Hand in hand for 40 years

The Miss Nebraska contest was.

Four decades and one victorious Miss America later, North Platte and “Miss Neb” are virtually synonymous.

The Miss Nebraska Scholarship Program opens its three-day, 40th anniversary North Platte edition at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Performing Arts Center at North Platte High School.

It’ll be held concurrently with the Miss Nebraska’s Teen competition, marking its own 20th anniversary since it was founded in North Platte in 2005, left for Omaha for three years (2017-19) and then came back west.

Like most years since 1985, Miss Nebraska kicks off North Platte’s annual “festival month.” The Miss Rodeo Nebraska contest will be June 15 to 18, with the 60th statewide Nebraskaland Days celebration — a North Platte fixture since 1968 — set June 18 to 28.

Nebraskaland Days was long settled near the Platte River forks in the fall of 1984, when the chance to land a second summer showcase presented itself.

Young women first competed for the Miss Nebraska crown at Lincoln’s 1936 Nebraska State Fair. Mytris Roach, the state’s first Miss America contestant in 1925, had won the Miss Omaha pageant in an era when Miss America candidates represented cities, not states.

Kearney (eight years) and Lincoln (seven) have hosted Miss Nebraska most often after North Platte. Tied at six years apiece are Fremont, York and Omaha, followed by Grand Island (three), Fairbury (two) and Sidney, Columbus and Wahoo (one each).

Fremont had hosted Miss Nebraska five straight years when Alison Boyd of Nebraska City won the 1984 contest. But despite tireless local leadership, the event struggled to draw local residents, the Fremont Tribune lamented.

“Fremont will be poorer because the contest has moved west to North Platte — poorer not only because of the loss of revenue to motels and businesses, but also poorer because of the loss of statewide public relations gained through the event,” the Tribune wrote in an editorial on Dec. 3, 1984.

North Platte residents had learned in the Nov. 15 Telegraph that Miss America associate producer Bill Caligari visited their city the previous day to consider moving Miss Nebraska there.

Norfolk was the only other bidder, he said, and he preferred a more centrally located site. “It’s an up-to-date city, well-situated and an ideal location for this type of program,” Caligari said.

North Platte also had a pageant enthusiast living nearby.

Beverly (Hill) Brosius, who grew up in western Tennessee, had started competing in beauty pageants at age 7. A frequent 1960s entrant in Memphis-area contests, she had moved on to judging pageants and coaching entrants.

She was living in Hollywood, California, when she met Brady-area rancher John Brosius on a cruise. The couple married in North Platte in 1982 but divorced some years later.

Beverly Brosius had coached 1983 winner Kris Lowenberg of Kearney and then Boyd as each prepared for their Miss America trips.

When she learned the state pageant was looking to move, she wrote to Miss America headquarters in Atlanta. Look at North Platte, she said.

North Platte Chamber of Commerce President Al Silverstein said the chamber had teamed up with Brosius. Miss Nebraska would serve “as a lead-in to Nebraskaland Days … and get it off the ground,” he said.

On Nov. 29, Silverstein announced that Miss Nebraska would do just that the following May.

Telegraph Editor Keith Blackledge praised Brosius, who was named the pageant’s executive director.

“Let’s hear it for Beverly Brosius, who was instrumental in landing the Miss Nebraska pageant for North Platte and will be a driving force behind making it a whopping success,” he wrote in a Dec. 4 editorial. “It will be the best Miss Nebraska Pageant this state has seen in many years.”

The first 1936 Miss Nebraska contest at the State Fair had included Ada Jean Kirkman, winner of the city’s first Miss North Platte preliminary pageant.

The last local Miss Nebraska qualifier was held in 1969, the year after the Miss Nebraskaland pageant arrived with Nebraskaland Days. Miss Nebraskaland drew entrants from Nebraska colleges through 1974, then merged with the Buffalo Bill Rodeo Queen contest.

As North Platte’s first “classic” pageant in a decade neared, Beverly Brosius told Telegraph reporter Mary Frederick that “I owe it to my community to make this come off.”

She added that she had told Miss America leaders: “I won’t do it small.”

The 22 contestants began arriving on May 26, 1985. They were joined during the week by nine Miss America state queens, including Boyd; her predecessor, Lowenberg; Miss America 1978 Susan Perkins, as mistress of ceremonies; and the reigning Miss America, Sharlene Wells, as the first-night headliner.

While competitors rehearsed at the old NPHS Little Theatre, the visiting queens made local appearances and starred in a May 30 fashion show at the Holiday Inn (now Ramada by Wyndham) before an audience of more than 500.

The motel, serving as Miss Nebraska headquarters, donated a block of rooms to the contest. Businesses donated to the $10,000-plus scholarship fund, and restaurants hosted meals for contestants staying with 25 local families.

More than 200 people supported the competition’s 12-member local board, donating hundreds of volunteer hours. Impressed state queens told Pat Birge, hosting Miss River City Julie Meusburger of Lincoln, that North Platte “was the right size community for getting people involved in a pageant.”

By pageant’s end, Birge and her husband, Rich, had won an added bonus: They had hosted the winner.

Meusburger, a flutist, won the preliminary talent contest and Miss Omaha Jaymie Rizzuto the swimsuit contest as the contenders took the Little Theatre stage the night of May 30.

They joined the visiting queens in opening the evening with “One,” the show-stopper from the 1975 Broadway smash “A Chorus Line.”

“The pageant contestants, decked out in silver sequin top hats and red leotards, took a bow and walked the runway,” Frederick wrote.

Jim Otto of North Platte introduced the contestants. Perkins sang “A Salute to North Platte, USA.” Boyd performed the acrobatic dance that had won her a special Miss America talent award.

Wells performed a song she wrote, “Stand Up, America,” and University of Nebraska-Lincoln yell squad leaders, the Sutherland High School band and NPHS cheerleaders and drill team members joined the cast in a “We’re No. 1” tribute to Husker football.

Rizzuto and Meusburger switched places May 31, respectively winning the talent and swimsuit contests. They were clear favorites for Saturday’s final on the first day of June, which started with a Miss Nebraska downtown parade.

Before a house sold out before the week started, Meusburger topped Rizzuto and took the first Miss Nebraska title awarded in North Platte.

She won the top $5,000 scholarship, plus $750 more as the overall talent winner. “If I’m not Miss America, I’ll die trying to be it,” the UNL civil engineering major, then 22, later said backstage.

Ellen Withrow followed Rizzuto as second runner-up, with Mindee Zimmerman and Renee Cox next. Zimmerman, of Norfolk, would return to win the 1987 title.

Miss Dawson County Stacey Kogel won Miss Congeniality, while Tylene Sawyer, Jodi Elliott, Ginger ten Bensel, Jody Knapp and Wynne Adams rounded out the 10 finalists.

Given the fashion-show turnout and sellouts on two of the three nights, “I think the people of North Platte have demonstrated that they want the pageant,” Brosius said afterward.

Miss America leaders wanted North Platte to keep it, too. They told the chamber so before its board formally asked to retain the pageant that October.

“We’ve had nothing but good comments from the community and nothing but praise from the contestants about the way they were treated in North Platte,” Silverstein had said in June.

Meusburger flew to Atlantic City in September 1985 from Lee Bird Field, with local board member Nancy Arneson of North Platte as chaperone.

Like many Miss Nebraskas before and since, she didn’t make the top 10. But “I’m not disappointed with myself,” said Meusburger, who would graduate from UNL and marry Husker linebacker Grant Parsons in 1986. “I set out to be the best me I could be.”

Beverly Brosius, who moved back to California, wasn’t part of the local leadership team that saw Meusburger pass her crown to Donna Schieffer of Columbus at the end of May 1986.

The competition has launched every subsequent June in North Platte except in 1987 — when a one-year experiment moved it to July — and 2020, when it was canceled due to COVID-19. No pageant was held in 1939 or during World War II.

Two North Platte women, Vicki Linn Train and Jennifer Love, won Miss Nebraska before hometown crowds in 1991 and 1994 respectively.

Sixteen years after Love, 17-year-old Teresa Scanlan of Gering was crowned Miss Nebraska 2010 on her first North Platte try. On Jan. 15, 2011, she shocked and delighted all western Nebraska and her home state by becoming the first Miss Nebraska to win Miss America.

That was during the national contest’s 10-year sojourn in Las Vegas. It’s been back in Atlantic City since 2013 — meaning a victory in North Platte Saturday night, like 40 years ago, earns a trip to the Boardwalk along with a crown.