The closest it’s come to its original home was in Los Angles in 2006.This Sunset Beach, California hotel is located on Huntington Harbor beautiful Huntington and Sunset beach. It moved to Miami in 1960 and, since 1971, it has been held in different cities all over the world, including Bangok, Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Quito, Ecuador. Over the years Miss Universe pageant itself, was liberated, at least from Long Beach.Īlso liberated was the pageant itself. I would say they were ‘liberated,’ rather than ‘swiped.’”Īt any rate, they’re there, fairly intact but for most of the brass numbers that indicated the year of each pageant. More reasonably, she said, “they just appeared one day. The original owner, Dick Harrison, died in 2004, but his daughter told us he didn’t “swipe” them. “I think the original owner swiped them.” When we asked the current owner how they got there, he said he didn’t know.

Presumably not to be scattered around the entry of a bar in Sunset Beach. During one, the slabs were carefully cut out and stored in a warehouse, presumably to be reinstalled in a prominent location in some part of town at a later date. Pine went into a locally famous collapse in the 1970s and underwent a half-dozen facelifts.

The couple and one of their children died in a private plane crash in 1996. David Schine, an heir to a hotel fortune and a central figure in the Army-McCarthy hearing and friend of Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s utterly out-of-whack chief counsel. The most notable Miss Universe in the Long Beach era was Hillevi Rombin, Miss Sweden, who went on to marry G. Miss America won the contest twice in Long Beach, with Miriam Stevenson of South Carolina getting the crown in 1954 and the overwhelming crowd favorite Miss Iowa, Carol Morris, the daughter of an Ottumwa preacher man, winning in 1956. Part of the pageantry included the winners and Miss America signing their names in concrete along the then-bustling Pine Avenue business district. It was televised nationally, starting in 1955 and was covered extensively by the international press and Life magazine. Parades featuring the beauties in open automobiles drew thousands of spectators. They were held in the magnificent Municipal Auditorium, and it was a huge deal, with contestants from about 30 countries (it ranged from 26 to 36) appearing all over town in the days prior to the contest. The Miss Universe pageant started in Long Beach in 1952 and was held here for eight years before leaving for Miami in 1960. The easy part of the question is where the concrete slabs came from. Maybe the pageants were held in Long Beach or maybe in L.A.? Maybe you could find out, because I haven’t had any luck.” I don’t know where the slabs came from or how they got to King Neptune’s. “As you head south on Pacific Coast Highway, there’s a notorious old-time watering hole called King Neptune’s and around the front and side are some slabs of concrete with the names of winners of Miss Universe and Miss USA etched in and the years they won - mostly in the 1950s. The Mailbag served up a nice, slow softball this week, with “faithful reader” Dan of Seal Beach, who called with this:

King neptunes sunset beach