17-yr-old becomes youngest to win Miss America in 90 yrs
By ANIMonday, January 17, 2011
WASHINGTON - A 17-year-old from Nebraska has become the youngest ever to be crowned Miss America in 90 years.
Teresa Scanlan won a 50,000 dollar scholarship and a yearlong run with the crown at the competition at the Planet Hollywood casino-resort in Las Vegas, giving the Cornhusker State its first-ever win at the pageant, reports Fox News.
She is the youngest Miss America since the pageant’s first competition in 1921, when Margaret Gorman of the District of Columbia won at age 15.
According to her pageant biography, Scanlan, a recent high school graduate from the western Nebraska town of Gering, plans to study American politics at Patrick Henry College in Virginia after her reign as Miss America.
She also hopes to attend law school, become a judge and eventually a politician.
Scanlan won after strutting in a black bikini and a white evening gown, playing ‘White Water Chopped Sticks’ on piano and telling the audience that when it comes to Wikileaks, security should come before public access to government information.
“You know when it came to that situation it was actually based on espionage, and when it comes to the security of our nation, we have to focus on security first and then people’s right to know, because it’s so important that everybody who’s in our borders is safe and so we can’t let things like that happen and they must be handled properly,” she said. (ANI)
