Miss(ed) America, Susan Akin: The Making, Breaking, and Comeback of a Pageant Queen

Miss America’s teeth are missing — lost along with so many shattered opportunities and decayed dreams over three-and-a-half decades of substance misuse that took almost everything, from a breathtaking smile to money needed to run the air-conditioner on some sweltering, Deep South summers.

For so many years, she felt like the lowest of low – “scum,” she says — all but giving up too many times to count. However, for the first prolonged period since soon after turning in the crown when her reign was over, Miss America 1986 Susan Akin (Lynch) is sober, smiling again, and fighting for the life she wants, trying to better understand what happened and how, and where she goes from here. Susan wants to tell her story, “Because maybe I can help someone else,” and because, finally, at 60, she’s ready to face herself, and the world, as less than the picture of perfection she was trained from the age of four to represent.

Susan’s story begins with her parents, in the era when America’s peak Barbie culture met the dawn of the achievement culture.

Dot and Earl Akin of Meridian, Miss., wanted something in the 1970s — more than something.

They got the family a pet lion for Christmas, for instance. The Akins — Earl and Dorothy, or Dot, as friends called her, and their five children, including Susan, the oldest daughter — were so taken like the rest of America by Born Free, a movie about a married couple who raises an orphaned lioness before returning her to the wild, that Earl gave the family one for Christmas, declawed, and, surprise!

They named the lion Herman, and the children posed by the living room fireplace under the mantel adorned with stockings for a Christmas Day picture. Click.

The lion didn’t easily adapt to its suburban domicile. Earl left Herman in the garage overnight once and he ate the vinyl tops off Earl’s Lincoln Mark V and Dot’s Lincoln Town Car. Most days, it lived within a fence in the backyard, prowling, and roaring, loudly, until a neighbor had enough, throwing tainted meat into the yard, killing Herman.

And you might guess what happened next.

Earl got the family a new lion.

They named it Radar, after a character on the popular TV show MASH. But Herman and Radar were only the beginning for Dot and Earl, as they and families across the rural South were staking claim to dreams and status symbols that didn’t seem possible before.

Earl proudly ushered guests to his man-space, opened the refrigerator and offered a Coors beer from an impressive stash. Coors Light was a status symbol east of the Mississippi, highly coveted like Cuban cigars. Coors was hard to get in the South and East since it wasn’t pasteurized and didn’t have preservatives — therefore considered illegal, or bootleg, in many states. Earl didn’t much drink the stuff himself, opting for his favorite Seagram’s V.O., the Canadian whisky blend. His joy came in showing off his smuggled beer stash to guests.

When the family built a new home by Meridian’s country club, Earl designed the clover-shaped swimming pool.

He got a pilot’s license, bought an airplane, and built a landing strip at his mobile home sales business.

Earl had taken over the family’s mobile home business in 1968 when his father, Bernard, died at the age of 55. As business goes, the inheritance timing was perfect considering mobile homes sales were booming across the emerging deep South as affordability and construction advancements allowed young families with modest means to achieve their biggest dream – home ownership. The boom in business, with mobile home sales in the region growing four-fold in the late sixties and early seventies, enhanced Earl’s stature in the community, helping put the past behind, with all eyes on the accumulating flash.

The past was certainly worth leaving behind.

In 1964, Bernard and his son Earl, members of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter, were arrested on charges related to the Freedom Summer Civil Rights murders, also known as the Mississippi Burning murders.

Earl, tall, with a chiseled chin, aligned smile, dark hair, and personality known to captivate, if not take over the room, was arrested for misprision of a felony (failure to report a crime), while Bernard, his father, was arrested on a conspiracy charge in connection with the murder of the civil rights workers in Mississippi. Earl’s charges were dropped, while Bernard was acquitted.

It was undisputed that Bernard and Earl didn’t go along on what ended up a horrific abduction and killing of three activists near Philadelphia, Mississippi, roughly 45 miles north of Meridian. Still, the FBI and other witnesses said Bernard Akin’s gun was used in the crimes, spurring the charges, later dropped due to the lack of evidence, due in part to Earl’s silence.

It’s also undisputed that Bernard Akin’s mobile home lot is where the KKK members had met to organize before the abductions and killings. Earl was there, at the gathering, but said he couldn’t go due to work. Off went the others, allegedly with his gun, and the rest of the night became horrific American history, murders which sparked national outrage and helped spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

With charges dropped, his father’s death at the dawn of the booming mobile home business, and their growing family, Earl and Dot lived large, chasing all the 1970s offered to new money and big dreams.

Earl expanded his business, with its motto “Akin to please,” to another 28 lots across Mississippi — pop-up businesses to feed the hyper-demand, and for a spell, it was as if the family had struck oil. Described by a friend as a high roller who liked to visit Las Vegas for “big-time parties,” Earl had a barber chair in his office at the mobile home dealership. A barber stopped by multiple times a week for the banter and to give him a fresh trim, and Earl hopped around to his many businesses across the state in his airplane, said to have a different girlfriend in every town.

Dot had dreams, too.

She moved the family from Meridian’s newer, suburban Fifteenth Avenue Baptist Church, filled with younger families and economic upstarts, to downtown First Baptist Church, anchored by Meridian’s well-known, longer-established business families. “Daddy would take us to Fifteenth Baptist every Sunday for Sunday School,” Susan says, “but once the money started rolling in, Dot said ‘hell no, we need to go to the bigger church (First Baptist),’ so that’s what we did.”

Dot was blonde, dimpled, neatly tucked, standing straight, a determined homemaker for Earl and their five children, including Susan’s two older brothers, Earl Jr. and Alan, and two younger sisters, including Janet, who had Down’s syndrome, and Lisa, the youngest. Dot made sure the family was together at the dinner table most nights, and she presented as Betty Crocker. Red lipstick, wearing an apron, not a hair out of place. Entrees and sides presented to the family in serving dishes, as the children told stories from the school day, and laughed with their father.

“They didn’t talk to us about anything important other than family,” Susan says. “Not church. Not what happened with the arrests before I was born. I never heard anything about it as a child. For a while, while it lasted, life felt good for our family.”

When 1960 Miss America and native Mississippian Lynda Lee Mead visited Meridian, Dot went for a look and was wowed by her beauty, presence and authority. Mead was from the small town of Forest and a sorority girl from Ole Miss, the affectionate name for the University of Mississippi. She’d won the year after Mary Ann Mobley, also a Mississippian, from Brandon, and also in a sorority at Ole Miss. The back-to-back wins earned the university the “Miss America U” nickname. Winning Miss America in that era was arguably the most significant accomplishment a young woman could achieve in the U.S., and half the country crowded around TV sets once a year on a September Saturday night to see who became the most recognized and celebrated miss in all the land, when a star, like Mead or Mobley, was born.

Dot collected newspaper clippings in a scrapbook about Mead’s visit, took a closer look at her oldest daughter, Susan, and saw possibility.

Lions and Lincolns for the locals were one thing.

Dot had her eye on something to show America.

Born in 1964, Susan Akin had blue eyes, blonde locks, and a look and poise for shining in the light of gaze at a young age. In 1969, Dot got little Susan a pretty yellow dress and entered her into her first pageant.

She won.

When Susan was six, Dot took her to New Jersey, entering the pageant known as “Little Miss America.”

She won.

Susan arrived in the pageant world when the ideal image of a young woman was projected with doll-like features, and parents told children they could be whatever they wanted – an astronaut, a movie star, President of the United States (if male), or Miss America (if female).

Dot believed, and she convinced Susan, who had a competitive nature which combined well with her captivating stage presence. Pageant champions required hours, days, months and years of lessons and practice, because beauty alone is not enough — you have to sing, dance, play an instrument, even learn some tricks, perhaps. The training became Susan’s childhood job, Dot as her coach and manager, with eyes in the earliest days on one goal: Winning it all.

From the age of six, Susan took dance lessons. For a decade, there were singing and piano lessons. She took magic lessons, too, because, Dot said, you never know when you might need to pull a rabbit from a hat. “Momma wanted it so much,” Susan says. “I always knew that’s what I had to do. Win. But I always wondered if (winning it all) would be enough.”

Dot drove and flew with Susan across the country to compete in dozens of pageants in Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas, urging her daughter in pre-puberty to eat more, as much as she wanted — more shape, the better for a pageant girl. Weekdays meant lessons and practice; weekends meant pageants, leaving Susan little time for just being a girl, growing and learning, and hanging out with friends.

By the mid-1970s, the Akin family fortunes were turning south, because what goes up in a boom often goes bust. Mobile home sales collapsed due to less demand, inflation, and rising interest rates. Earl’s hard-living lifestyle intensified in the pressure. Susan recalls a tense family dinner: Earl was drinking. Dot was annoyed with his philandering, making veiled accusations about his unacceptable behavior.

Earl slammed his fists on the table, raised his voice and shouted.

“Woman, accuse me and accuse me, and I’m about to go get guilty,” Akin recalls.

The next year, 1976, Earl and Dot divorced.

The money went as fast as the love. They had to sell the country club house. Dot and the five children moved across town to live with Dot’s mother.

Dot felt burned, disgraced, which only enhanced her determination.

“She wanted me to win before,” Susan says. “Then, she really had something to prove.”

Susan’s senior year of high school in Meridian, she met her first devil. “My sister (Lisa) had handed me a cigarette and said, ‘Try this, you’ll get a little buzz.’ I did, and I got instantly hooked,” she says.

By the time Susan was in college, Dot’s 18-year-old daughter no longer a girl, she urged Susan to eat less, if at all, to keep the desired figure with her maturing body, molding her into the Barbie-like skinny waist and elongated thighs judges were known to prefer. Cigarettes helped keep the weight off, too, even if they weren’t in the pageant’s purity public image. Susan smoked in the dormitory and in the sorority house, but tried to hide it publicly, for pageant image, even though she smelled “like a chimney.”

Susan entered the Miss Mississippi pageant in 1983, after her freshman year, finishing as second runner up. To reach Miss America, she had to win the state pageant, and there was talk among state organizers and her mother that with some work, she had potential to win it all — five-foot-eight, a perfect smile, and an experienced stage presence was good. Still, “They thought I needed another year of growth,” Susan says. “I was told, sit out a year, get my voice stronger, get a new song.”

And a curvier figure.

Dot sent her daughter to see Earl to ask for $1,500 for skin abrasion, she said, for the removal of minor facial scars left by chicken pox. Earl handed over the money, thinking it was for the skin abrasion. Susan recalls her mother pulling her from the bed one morning for the doctor’s visit, but it wasn’t for the chickenpox scars. “‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we’re going to get a boob job.’” Susan arrived at the plastic surgeon as a college sophomore with B cup breasts, she says, and left with a DD.

“Momma had something to prove, I guess,” Susan says. “And I knew what that meant for me. She wanted it, and I wanted to please her. I wanted to win, too.”

Majoring in public relations at Ole Miss, Susan was active in her Pi Beta Phi sorority during her so-called redshirt season, a year out of competition to improve her odds of winning it all the next year. Susan wrote letters home to her mother from college, updating on her workouts – she did aerobics two, sometimes three times a day. She signed the letters home to her mother with, “Love, Susan, Miss America 19_ _,” leaving two blanks for the year she planned to fill in with a win date in the future.

Dot cherished the letters, and her daughter’s focus, and sent Susan to New York for voice lessons. There, she got a new pageant song, “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

In the spring of 1985, Susan was ready for her run at the crown. She entered Miss University, the on-campus preliminary to Miss Mississippi, beginning with some 250,000 other young women in local pageants around the country in the first stage of Miss America’s pageant championship.

She won.

The next stage, the Miss Mississippi pageant that summer, was barely a contest – the polished veteran Akin cruising to victory, the seasoned pro among amateurs.

She won.

Susan put herself through a grueling couple of months in training leading up to the Miss America pageant in the fall of 1985 to keep her weight around 119 pounds. She ate “little to nothing, starving myself, really,” she says, “on carrot sticks and celery as a main course,” while running four and five miles in the overnight hours. When her calves and thighs measured slightly big, by Miss America winning standards, in the weeks before the pageant, she was encouraged to swim miles a day, because swimming elongates the muscles, thinning the legs.

“I did it,” she says, “I did whatever they said, whatever it took, because I was expected to win. I wanted to win. I had to win.”

Susan trained for Miss America with a Sony Walkman, listening to Survivor’s hit “Eye of the Tiger” on repeat, followed by an audio clip recorded from the Miss America television broadcast of 1980, when Mississippi’s Cheryl Prewitt won. “Miss America is, Miss Mississippi, Ch….” Susan recalls, explaining how the tape cut off on the S sound of Cheryl, so she could envision the announcement with her name. “I listened to that thousands of times, picturing myself on the stage, getting the crown.”

By the Miss America pageant, Susan’s figure measured 39-22-35, her proportion nearly the same as Barbie’s.

“But I was better, because I was real,” Susan says.

“Well, mostly, real” she adds with a chuckle, recalling the breast enhancement.

She’d arrived at the pageant as the favorite, odds set by a computer at seven-to-one early in the week, down to four-to-one the morning of pageant day, thanks to a win in the swimsuit preliminary, where she’d dazzled judges.

Media discussed the betting line in the days leading up to the contest like she was a preferred horse at the Kentucky Derby. Susan and Miss Pennsylvania, Lea Schiazza, became pageant besties, sharing smoke breaks and bonding like girls from the wrong side of the tracks at summer camp, while plotting to win the final night’s competition.

Susan Akin, the bombshell, won the Miss America crown in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on Sept. 14, 1985, her final of 113 pageants spanning 17 years, with tens of millions, or nearly half of all television sets in the country tuned in, as Gary Collins crooned, “There she is…,” tears streaming down Susan’s face.

On that magical night, she was as big across America as a NASA rocket ship launch, or a winning Super Bowl quarterback.

“It was a blur,” Susan says. “I’d worked for it most of my life. I remember finally getting to catch my breath, thinking, ‘Is this real?’ But I also thought. ‘Okay mother. Here it is. I hope you are happy.’”

In the press conference after winning the title, the young lady from the small city in Mississippi who had the right song, the pitch-perfect voice, the breathtaking swimsuit stroll, wasn’t quite ready for the interrogation.

Susan was asked about cosmetic surgery – she denied having any, chuckling through the answer. “Well, I’ve had a little dermabrasion on these chicken pox marks,” Akin said, “but they didn’t go away, so I guess I was supposed to keep them.” She was asked about her views on premarital sex. “No, I wouldn’t,” she’d said, though she was a junior in college with a steady boyfriend.,

Susan was asked about abortion, explaining that she respected a woman’s right to both premarital sex, and abortion. Though neither was for her, “if a woman wants to have an abortion that’s her own business.” Two days later, in a media interview with the New York Post, a reporter asked for her thoughts on interracial marriage. “I feel at this time, intermixing could lead to more problems because we have a lot of marriage problems now — divorce,” Susan said. “Intermixing cultures and things … of that aspect could lead to divorces, which I don’t like.”

Susan says she thought speaking against divorce “sounded good,” while echoing the sentiment of many Deep South residents in the mid-1980s, who’d say interracial marriage might be fine except that it’s “too hard” for the couple, facing what they had to face regarding shame and judgment.

In early October, just three weeks after her win, the National Enquirer, America’s largest tabloid at the time with more than 3 million readers who found the publication’s scandalous headlines screaming at them in the checkout lines at grocery stores throughout the country, put Susan on the cover. With Susan pictured in her white swimsuit from the pageant, the accompanying headline read: “New Miss America Scandal: Her father and grandfather were arrested in FBI murder probe…& were members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

She pushed back hard against the story in her first press conference after the report, flatly stating that she had no responsibility or knowledge of what family members did before she was born. “That’s something that doesn’t involve me,” she’d said in response, “I wasn’t even born and can’t be involved in this.”

Susan effectively shut down the story nationally, getting down to the six-day-a-week grind of fulfilling duties worldwide as Miss America. But internally, it shook her into the reality that winning the coveted crown came at a high emotional price, which she wasn’t sure she could afford.

Akin was a natural fulfilling the traditional smiling meet-and-greet role of Miss America for 12 months, wowing David Letterman on The Late Show, traveling the country and world for hundreds of engagements, captivating in conversations, flashing her blue eyes, Southern charm, and wit. She sat with President Ronald Reagan in the White House. She took the stage with Bob Hope. Still, the demands were rigorous, with a travel schedule arranged by the pageant staff, with visiting one city after another, one banquet after another. Akin went overnight from eating nearly nothing and running 4 to 5 miles a day to eating full meals, with rolls and dessert, and no time for exercising amid the travel and appearances.

“I was making daily appearances, sometimes two or three a day, much of it based around a meal,” Susan says. “A lunch, a dinner. I put on 15 pounds quickly, and it was obvious. People were concerned, and that was obvious, too. So, I started putting salt on dessert, and eating with my left hand, anything to make me eat less, anything to make the weight gain stop.

“The problem was I got good at eating with my left hand, I did it so much. Momma said, ‘Susan, you’ve put on some weight,’” Susan says. “Well, hell yes, I put on some weight. What did she expect?”

However, the weight she carried was more than the added pounds. It was a feeling of being unprepared for the future, a future that was uncertain and daunting. This feeling, along with the weight of her family’s past, something she’d never considered or understood before because it was never discussed in the family like it never happened, made her feel irrelevant when the time came to hand in the crown, the thing she’d been groomed for and worked for all of her life—conquered and completed at the age of 22.

“I didn’t want to give it up,” Susan told People magazine in 2000, months after she’d wrecked her car into a ravine on purpose. Without the crown, “I didn’t feel important anymore. I didn’t feel wanted. And I think from those feelings start the fall.”

Two years after winning Miss America, Akin was a newlywed, living in Los Angeles, touring with Hope, planning to have a career like Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America of 1959, who went on to co-star in two Elvis movies, and make appearances in dozens of popular TV shows like The Love Boat and Diff’rent Strokes. But there was much Akin had never processed or dealt with, so busy in her quest to win: her parents’ divorce, and subsequent financial strain; the death of Janet, her sister with Down’s syndrome whenSusan was in the 10th grade; her father’s drinking; her father and grandfather’s alleged connections to the civil rights crimes; years of life as a child object, pushed and trained and prodded like a horse groomed to win the Triple Crown; a sudden change from a life of extreme structure, with one goal in sight, to a life without structure or a goal.

“It happened fast,” Akin says of her decline, fueled by self-medicating substance misuse.

To her consumption of alcohol and “lots of cocaine,” Susan says she added painkillers, prescribed after a car wreck. She took one pill, and everything changed.

“I had no anxiety, no resentment,” Akin says. “I said, ‘I will never go a day without those pills.’” The cocaine, she said, was bad enough – but it kept her moving. The pills, though, slowed her life down to a crawl. And that’s pretty much what happened for the next several decades. Akin returned to the South, started a family, and disappeared from public appearances.

“Once my mother wasn’t over my shoulder,” Akin says, “it was such a relief. But it had been that way for so long, I didn’t know what to do. I had a lot to deal with, I guess, but I didn’t know how or understand what I needed to deal with. Those pills made it all go away. That was it. I’d plan to stop, I’d mean to stop, but it went on. I lost so many years, too many.”

Her daughter, Alex, was born, but soon after, she and her husband got divorced. “I cheated on him with his doctor,” she says.

She married again, two years later, taking her husband’s last name, Susan Akin Lynch, her name today. She had another child, a son, Preston, and took on the role of stay-at-home mother, leaving dreams of speaking, singing or acting behind for parenting, as best she could while battling addiction, shame and depression.

“I thought when I won Miss America I was set for life,” Akin says. “Little did I know that I was completely unprepared to give up that crown, the thing I had worked for, that my mother had pushed me toward, since I was a little girl, because once it was over, I thought, ‘I’m not good enough to do anything else.’ All I’d learned to do was, ‘Look at me.’

“Once it was over, I was tired of being seen, tired of being judged, tired of being in front of people. My dream when I was a little girl was being a momma. That’s what I wanted. But even that was hard, because addiction is exhausting.”

The household was volatile, with periodic anger bursts, and cover-ups. They’d moved to the Chattanooga area, on Signal Mountain, where her husband sold insurance, and she worked at motherhood, substances and denial. One day lost, became a month. A month became a year. One tooth lost to substance misuse, a molar in the back, became another, decay inching toward the front of her mouth. One arrest, for DUI, became impersonating a nurse to obtain a painkiller prescription.

“(The impersonations) worked for a while,” Susan says, of the prescription fraud. “I’d looked up online how to do it. No insurance involved, so you had to pay full price. But I’d call up, acting like a nurse, using fake names and addresses, until it didn’t work. Stupid. That’s addiction for you. You can’t think of anything but, ‘how can I get those pills?’ “I’m sure when they caught me, they probably thought, ‘wow, this is Miss America.’ Yes, that’s right. But I’m human, too.”

Akin’s mug shot ran in the local arrest tabloid, under her married name, Susan Lynch. Still, she’d feared her picture might get recognized, picked up by the tabloids, but, worse: Nobody much noticed.

“I felt like scum,” she says. “I lived miserable.”

She’d mean to do better tomorrow, as those in active addiction do, promising their loved ones and themselves, but then, tomorrow came, and it only got worse. Susan’s experience with prescription opiates is common. Middle-aged women in the United States have been prescribed more opioids than other groups – more than twice as many as middle-aged men, according to a 2017 report. Once prescribed opiates, research shows that women may have more difficulty stopping because hormones make them more sensitive to opiates. Also, women are less likely to seek substance treatment than men due to barriers including stigma and concerns about logistics and childcare.

Susan worked at motherhood, the best she could. Where she never wavered in conviction is that Alex, her daughter, never got near a child pageant stage. “I don’t think little girls should be looked at that way,” Susan says.

Alex (now Taylor), 30, says her mother’s accomplishment, the work ethic and ability to win on such a big stage, was a source of pride growing up. “I dressed up like her at school,” Alex says. “I felt so important, so beautiful, pretending to be her.” But Taylor recalls how her mother battled substance misuse, depression and expectations associated with her image, undulating stories of how she and her little brother saw Akin passed out on the couch, or how their mother refused to leave the house when she looked in the mirror and didn’t like what she saw.

“The, ‘I can’t let them see me like this’ has always been there. It’s been a struggle for her, but some days are better than others,” Taylor says.

There’ve been joys along the way in the decades since Susan disappeared from the public into the depths of addiction. Preston, her son, graduated from Ole Miss last spring. Alex has three children, Susan’s grandchildren, and they live nearby. Susan is actively involved in their lives. But it’s been one struggle after another—guilt, shame, tension with family, and finances, the typical pitfalls of addiction, like how, when her second husband died, she inherited some money, but eventually, it was gone.

She’d gotten off opiates, her devil for so many years, with prescription Suboxone, but that was too expensive once money ran out. Intended as a short-term fix for opioid addiction, Suboxone is frequently prescribed long-term, though quitting it is considered harder than quitting heroin or even fentanyl because the withdrawal is so intense. Also, Suboxone, a narcotic, is acidic, and the solution can wear away tooth enamel, leading to decay, tooth loss, and long-term side effects can include depression, anxiety, and social isolation. Susan suffered all of it.

“I was on it for a decade,” Susan says. “It was trading dope for dope. Insurance didn’t pay for it, and I couldn’t afford it. I was paralyzed by this drug that was supposed to make it better, and it was ruining my life. I had to quit.”

The only option, Akin says, because she was “broke and broken,” was reaching back to the grit that helped her train for Miss America, finding a strength she hadn’t tapped into for many years to get off Suboxone cold turkey. “I had fits at night in withdrawal, my legs and shoulders hurt so badly, the joints, down into the bones. I felt like someone came into my room at night, grabbed hold of my spirit, and ripped it out. It was the devil. Didn’t think I’d make it.

“But I did, I got through it.”

The drinking didn’t stop, however.

She’s lived on a sparse income, using a smartphone bought with the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. One summer she couldn’t run the air conditioner. When she didn’t have money to buy her children and grandchildren Christmas presents, she took a job squirting jelly filling into doughnuts in the 4 a.m. solo shift at Shipley’s Do-Nuts in her hometown of Meridian, Miss., still half-drunk most days because she hadn’t yet gone to bed.

“I was night drinking,” Susan says. “I’d try to stop a few hours before the shift to sober up, best I could, get to work and squirt, squirt, raspberry, blueberry, then come home and crash, like I’d been doing something hard. But I liked that job because there wasn’t anyone to look at me.”

Susan can’t help but frame her life in highs and lows by her physical appearance, something she assumes she’ll always battle, because, once Miss America, always Miss America.

She worries about wrinkles caused by decades of cigarette smoking, though she’s reduced that to vaping in the past year. Her weight is down, too. “I peaked at 224 pounds,” she says. “That was several years ago. I couldn’t look at myself, much less let anyone look at me. You must understand I won a beauty pageant. They liked to call it scholarship. There was some of that. But let’s call it what it was first and foremost: a beauty pageant.”

Once you’ve been judged before millions on beauty, it’s hard to stop judging yourself.

“Look at these wrinkles,” Susan says. “And scars. I’ve got nine or ten on my body running every which way, under my boobs, on the sides, from two hip surgeries, one from a C-section. I used to take a bath or shower in a swimsuit because I couldn’t stand seeing my body.

“The boobs are the worst,” she says. “The tissue is damaged, and they hang so low, I can barely carry them. I was a 36 DD. Now, I’m a 40 long. Get it? Stole that line from Phyllis Diller.”

These days, Susan, 60, is working to recognize her beauty in a different light and win at something bigger than a pageant.

Life.

She is sober, delightfully sober, with a young girl’s giddiness at the sweetness of feeling these days, the array of emotions, and engagement with others, for the first prolonged period in nearly four decades. She’d tried sobering up herself a couple of years ago, like quitting the Suboxone, and had some success, for a few months, but relapse is common without the tools and support and eventually she was drinking again and misusing Suboxone.

When pushed earlier this year by family, a friend, and a DUI arrest, to make a change or else, she opted for change.

“I’d had enough,” Susan says.

She was referred to Lakeside Health in Jacksonville, Fla., for residential treatment in the spring of 2024, and Silverbell Global, a foundation, paid what insurance didn’t cover, as well as paid for her intensive outpatient step-down treatment back in Meridian.

Susan re-emerged with the new beginning she longed for, saying it’s been better than winning the crown. These days, she’s likely to attend two Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a day and makes public appearances to tell her story to benefit others and herself. Susan is fighting for the day at-hand and future for perhaps the first time since her mother laid out the goal of Miss America. But this time, “it’s my goal,” Susan says, to climb out of the hole she’s been in for so long — a broken-legged Barbie forgotten in the bottom of the toy chest. She’s working to pull herself out, hoping the world still has a place and heart for a scarred and wounded comeback queen.

“It’s a miracle,” Taylor says, watching her mother interact with her youngest grandchild. “She’s still young enough to make a difference, to get her life back. She deserves that.”

Susan says she’s eager to tell her story publicly, understanding that it can help herself and others, while giving her the opportunity to make amends – for herself, and for her family.

Since she went publicly dark decades ago, she and her family’s digital remains were frozen online, stuck in time without edit or apology, as she drowned in the shame of it all.

“I need to talk about it,” she says, referring to her father and grandfather’s KKK association.

Still, it’s hard, because, “It was my father, and it was my grandfather. It wasn’t me, and it was before I was born. I don’t know what to say, other than, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Susan admits she still has learning to do about race, and family, and about herself, but she says she’s embarrassed and sorry about the interracial marriage comment, from nearly 40 years ago, and says she wasn’t even sure of what she was saying. As for her father and grandfather, she’s been reading and learning, digging up the past in her clear-minded days to better understand what she’d buried for so long. “Most of what I know is from reading historical accounts,” she says, mentioning FBI files available and a book that discussed her father and grandfather.

She does, though, have one related memory.

Akin says she recalls seeing an orange card in the glove box of her father’s pickup truck when she was a little girl that had the words Ku Klux Klan on it. Thus, she’s never doubted the reports that at one time, her father was associated with the KKK.

“Family is complicated,” Susan says. “I got a lot of love from mine, and I got a lot of pain. I’m sure many people can relate. But none of us are better than another. I know I’m not.”

For Susan, the family pain she must reckon with and resolve extends well beyond what happened before she was born. She remained close with Earl until he died in 2020 because he doted on her, but their relationship was complicated. Earl battled addiction to alcohol and pills. He did time in a federal prison, unrelated to the Mississippi Burning case he was questioned in, and had a handful of stops in the local jail.

Dot, who’d remarried and made a career in the insurance business, died in early 2022 at the age of 83, and her presence loomed large over Susan. It’s something she’s working to better understand through counseling.

“I resent her for pushing me so hard to win,” Susan says. “But I’d do it all over again. It meant so much to me. I just wish I’d known how to handle it all better, so I could do something to make a difference.”

“Well, Mom,” says Alex, reminding, “you still have time.”

Susan smiles.

“Yep,” she says. “That’s right. That’s what I’m learning. It’s not too late.”

David Magee is a podcast host, speaker, and the bestselling author of Dear William: A Father’s Memoir of Addiction, Recovery, Love and Loss and the new book A Little Crazy: A Memoir of Finding Purpose and Joy Amid the Madness (Sept. 17). David helped create the William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education and the William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing at the University of Mississippi.Learn more at www.alittlecrazy.com.