Miss Universe
When Kuusela won her country's national pageant, Suomen Neito, on May 24, 1952, she was awarded a box of chocolates, a gold bangle, and a two-way ticket sponsored by Pan American Airways to the United States. On June 17, Kuusela took a flight to Long Beach, California and the first Miss Universe contest.
Thirty contestants participated in the first Miss Universe pageant in 1952. The pageant was held on June 29, 1952, and Kuusela, as Suomen Neito, captured the crown. At her crowning she was only 17 years old. At the time she weighed 49 kg (108 lb), and her height was 1.65 m (5 ft 5 in).
Immediately after her winning there was a Finnish movie made of her, called Maailman kaunein tyttö (World's most beautiful girl) where she played herself, and Tauno Palo acted Jack Coleman (opposite role). It was directed by Veikko Itkonen, with writing credits going to Mika Waltari.
Read more about this topic: Armi Kuusela
Famous quotes containing the word universe:
“The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)