While searching for something else I came across this August 3, 1957 clip from the Lebanon Daily News:

The Donna in that clip was my three year old sister. I was eight at the time.

Meanwhile, their Myerstown competition was detailed in this August 9 clip:

The king and queen of the Lebanon County playgrounds were to be chosen on a WLYH-TV Channel 15 live broadcast, and that’s the only thing I really recall about this incident. My family piling into the car to drive to the channel 15 studios on August 17 for the competition.

Actually there’s one other thing. This was the summer of 1957 when we were still living in the apartment on the second floor of Isobel and Lynn Klopp’s house, and that was the first time that my father began to wear shorts. Bermuda shorts, I think, were in vogue at the time, or at least I seem to recall the name Bermuda shorts being bandied about.

Anyway, my mother finally got my father to try on shorts, and once he did, he never went back. In hot weather he always wore shorts after that. Must have had something to do with leaving the farm.

Anyway, I remember being excited to actually go to a TV studio to see what it was really like, so we piled into the car and headed to the WLYH studio, which as I recall wasn’t actually in Lebanon.

When we got there, there were a lot of people milling around. I think the contest was going to be in the back lot, not inside the studio itself, which I found disappointing.

Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the car ride, or maybe it was the excitement, but suddenly my sister got sick. Happily we were outside and not inside the studio, so there were plenty of places for her to throw up without becoming a spectacle.

This was the same little girl who just a few months earlier had fearlessly faced down a barnyard full of steers, and now she was cowed (so to speak) by a TV studio.

But my parents decided that that was enough excitement for one evening, so we went home without entering the contest.

I have no idea who won.