Miss America 1985

Miss America 1985

Miss America 1985, After eight years wandering through the Nevada desert, Miss America has emptied the Las Vegas sand from her shoes and has finally come home. And while she couldn’t foretell the future 43 years ago, folksy pop singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell may have best summed up Miss America’s return in her 1970 hit “Big Yellow Taxi.”

“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” Mitchell sang.When the 53 contestants competing for the title Miss America 2014 made their debut during a Sept. 3 Boardwalk arrival ceremony, hundreds of pageant faithful — the majority of whom had local zip codes – greeted the women with a great big collective hug.

Gone were any feelings of bitterness and abandonment many felt in 2005, when the Miss America Organization — strapped for cash and without a network TV contract — asked city convention officials to be released from the final two years of its contract so it could seek a less-costly venue from which to stage its nationally television competition.

After 84 years in Atlantic City, Miss America pitched its tent on the Las Vegas strip, where the show originated from the Planet Hollywood casino’s 6,000-seat event center — half the size of Boardwalk Hall — and was televised on lower-tiered cable channels.

But with eight years of hindsight and retrospect from which to draw, it’s apparent Miss America had to leave Atlantic City in order for it to return.

“For (Miss America) to have left and then for it to come home, there is this wonderful renewed sense of appreciation for not only the history, but for the fabric of what it is,” says Sharon Pearce, president of the Miss America Organization, who spent more than two decades as an advertising and public relations executive for several Atlantic City casino companies before initially joining the Miss America Organization as its communications director.

Sharing the Boardwalk spotlight with the 53 contestants at the arrival ceremony were many of the public and private agencies and organizations whose collective efforts brought the competition back to its birthplace.