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26/03/2018
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By Bill Kirby
Posted Mar 25, 2018 at 9:25 PM
Augusta sent a Miss America candidate to Atlantic City in 1937, and then everything went wrong.
Someone shared a newspaper clipping of a photo from the 1937 Miss America pageant.
There, big as life, is “Miss Augusta, Ga.,” walking down the Atlantic City boardwalk with the other beauties of the era.
“Who is she?” the reader asked. “And what happened to her?”
Well, it’s not only a long story, it’s an unsolved mystery and an unpunished crime.
It is further complicated because the official website of the Miss America pageant, which is quite extensive, does not list a woman from Augusta as a competitor in 1937.
There is a reason for that. She wasn’t.
Here’s what happened, according to The Chronicle’s 1937 archives.
In late summer that year, a man named Richard Henry Marsden checked into the Richmond Hotel on Broad Street and soon convinced civic leaders, the Augusta Lions Club and the owner of an auditorium called the Cherokee Casino on Deans Bridge Road that he was authorized to conduct a pageant to select a “Miss Augusta” for the Miss America competition that September in Atlantic City, N.J.
Marsden had apparently done much the same thing in Savannah and Jacksonville. These productions ended up with a candidate “Miss” selected for those communities.
The Lions Club sponsored the local event, and Julian J. Zachry, the Cherokee’s manager, fronted Marsden money and ran advertisements in the newspaper.
Olga Strickland was selected Miss Augusta, although curiously she was not from Augusta, but from Douglas, Ga., 150 miles to the south.
She joined the two other Marsden pageant winners on their way to Atlantic City. To improve their chances, Marsden also collected money from the parents of the three girls, telling them it would pay to construct the floats that would feature them when the pageant began.
But that wasn’t what happened.
When the women arrived, pageant officials were surprised to see them. Georgia already had a contestant, they said, and Marsden was not connected to their organization.
He also was nowhere to be found.
Pageant officials felt sorry for the distraught young women and allowed them to take part in some public events, although not the official competition.
That is apparently how Olga from Douglas, wearing a banner from Augusta, got her picture taken in Atlantic City for a photo still featured on the Miss America website.
Newspapers across the nation reported the embarrassing deception.
Back in Augusta, warrants were issued for Marsden on numerous theft by deception charges. The parents of the three girls also sought the money they had given him, but it’s unlikely they got it because there is no public record of his capture.
They did find his car, but it had been bought on credit and the dealer wanted it back.
Marsden, if that was his real name, had disappeared.
Oddly enough, so did Olga.
The 1940 census taken 2½ years later had no record of her in Coffee County or the state of Georgia.
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