By RODNEY J. JALECOa
ABS-CBN North America News Bureau
VIRGINIA BEACH, Virginia -- A beauty contest sans swimsuits, where contestants don’t have to sell ballots to win and are still able to draw the crowd and sponsors. For the past 22 years, that has been the winning formula for the 45,000-strong Filipino American community here.
The Miss Philippines America pageant is one of the oldest and most prestigious Fil-Am beauty contests in North America’s eastern seaboard. Over the years, it has drawn contestants from as far north as Canada, all the way south to Florida.
Dr. Manny Hipol, a retired US Navy captain and chief organizer of the pageant, explained that Fil-Am community leaders thought of the concept in the early 1980s to offer an alternative to the common practice among beauty competitions then.
Most pageants, he explained, were fund-raising tools for their organizers. Notwithstanding the ultimate beneficiaries of such projects, Dr. Hipol said pageants lost their original purpose to celebrate the noblest virtues of young Fil-Am women.
"True beauty became only secondary," he observed.
When the pageant was launched, organizers also decided to shun the popular swimsuit category. The Filipinos in Hampton Roads – which lumps southern Virginia’s coastal cities of Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Newport News and Chesapeake, among others – is composed mainly of retired US Navy servicemen. In fact, Dr. Hipol says, 90 percent of the Fil-Am community here can trace their roots to service in US Navy.
TKPN
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