Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 29, 1995 TAG: 9507310066
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SHANNON D. HARRINGTON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Amber Medlin has held the Miss Virginia title for four days - and pageant officials say they're ready to put the last four weeks behind them.
But the officials say they won't forget what's happened and they'll try to learn from their experience.
On Tuesday, Medlin became the second Miss Virginia crowned this month after pageant officials took Andrea Ballengee's crown away for falsifying her fact sheet.
"Obviously there was a hole, and it had not come up before," pageant board member Ralph Smith said.
Before, "we just accepted the fact sheet more or less, without asking for details," board member Elizabeth Bowles said.
To repair the hole, the pageant's Executive Director Margaret Baker said she and the board will look into several possibilities.
The pageant may "require that every fact sheet has transcripts of grades attached to it," Baker said.
Also, she said, contestants who claim to be members of national honor societies may need documentation.
And the requirement that contestants list their grade-point averages on the fact sheet probably will be discontinued, Baker said, because the question is ambiguous.
"We are certainly going to go over all the procedures we follow," Baker added.
On her contestant's fact sheet, Ballengee had listed academic and athletic honors that she had not achieved. During the pageant itself, she also said she'd been accepted into law school when, in fact, she had been placed on a waiting list.
Board members say that not everything that came out of the Ballengee controversy was negative.
"When bad things happen, I think some positives come out of it," board member Steve Musselwhite said.
He said the issue has brought an awareness to the entire pageant community - statewide and nationally.
"It's forcing everyone to live up to a higher standard," Musselwhite said.
Smith said the attention the issue has drawn shows just how seriously the public takes Miss Virginia and the pageant.
"It has proven that more people have an interest in the pageant," he said.
"We put [Miss Virginia] on a pedestal," Smith said. "Naturally, we want as credible a person as we can get."
The pageant board has had to deal with criticism for not taking Ballengee's crown away after the first questions were raised about her fact sheet. The pageant's initial support of Ballengee was questioned in newspaper editorials, letters to the editor in papers across the state and other public forums.
Musselwhite said he understands those criticisms. The problem was that the board didn't have all the information it needed at that time.
"Based on the information given at that time, we made the right decision," Musselwhite said. "What the public doesn't understand is that we weren't presented with all the facts.
"The wrong decision would have been to have made a knee-jerk reaction."
Baker said the pageant was satisfied with Ballengee's claims that the first four mistakes were misunderstandings and were not intentional.
"The whole thing is, after we made the first decision, other things came to light that we could not ignore," Baker said.
"It was a very difficult situation, but the person was always placed first," spokesman Bud Oakey said.
Others feel that the pageant may have handled the problem adequately for now, but problems could recur.
Marshall Fishwick, a professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech, says the controversy could hurt the whole pageant concept.
"The process of putting physical beauty on a pedestal is doomed," Fishwick said. Because of the emphasis on diversity, a new definition of beauty has been created, he said.
"You can't have diversity and the old-time fairy-queen beauty," Fishwick said.
Baker argues that the Miss Virginia Pageant isn't a beauty pageant.
"A young woman does not have to be beautiful to be Miss Virginia," she said, defining it as a scholarship pageant.
"But, I know by the general public, it may be conceived as such," she added.
Baker said she's proud of the pageant and what it has accomplished in its 42 years in Roanoke.
"This is probably the largest scholarship competition for young women" in the country," Baker said.
"I've seen how much it's done for women all over this country," Baker said. "Whether they win or not, it helps them so much."
by CNB