Daily princesses gather tor annual seminar
BY MARGIE FUSCO
Staff Correspondent
WILLIAMSPORT - With
apologies to the Brothers Grimm:
Princesses are made, not bom.
Pennsylvania Dairy Princess
Lynette Loper can attest to that.
“One year ago I sat in this room,
too. And I was just like you are
now,” she told the audience of
nervous county dairy princesses
and their alternates. Then she
went on to explain what the annual
Dairy Princess Training Seminar
did for her. “I learned how to walk.
I learned how to talk.”
She clearly learned well.
Scanning the 60 hopeful faces in the
auditorium now, you can’t help but
wonder which one will be her
successor. Were this a standard
beauty pageant, you might be able
to speculate about the blonde in the
third row or the brunette in the
back. But being a dairy princess
isn’t as simple as parading around
in a bathing suit.
“If you want to leam about
responsibility, try being a dairy
princess,” a friend recently
confided to this reporter. “It’s not
glamour. It’s hard work.” Tina
Shultz knows that. She cuts short
her dinner to go back to her room
and work on her presentation.
Wanda Love, her alternate, knows
it, too. She comes along, getting
ready for the day when she may
have to replace Tina for one of the
Theresa Tkaczuk, Chester County dairy princess, is the
model as Melinda Johnson experiments with cloth swatches
to find her best colors.
Princesses, alternates and advisors listen to a talk on dairy product marketing
the dairy princess seminaf at Lycoming College this week.
visits the princess and her alter
natives have to make to third
grade classrooms throughout
Huntingdon County.
“We don’t emphasize beauty
here,” says Jan Harding, who
coordinated this year’s seminar at
Lycoming College in Williamsport
for Pennsylvania Dairy Promotion
Services, Inc. “These girls have a
job to do.”
But if beauty isn’t the main
focus, it’s clearly evident. As the
first guest speaker. Scott Higgins
of Federal Order #36, takes the
podium and mentions the beautiful
looking crowd, the girls shift
nervously in their seats. They’re
self-conscious, unaware of the
fresh and healthy image they
project together
The job comes first. About half of
the three-day seminar is devoted to
teaching the princesses and their
court about the dairy industry. The
first day features a two-hour
capsule on the dairy promotions
that will be occuring over the next
year.
The candidates are treated to a
showing of television ad
vertisements that will run on the
local and national level. They
giggle at rock-and-roll parodies
that will promote milk to radio
listeners. They view the point-of
purchase displays that will appear
in stores they’ll be visiting during
their year’s reign.
In addition, they meet the in
dustry promotion people who will
help them arrange for materials.
The first day’s program also
includes an explanation of the
federal orders, their locations,
their market areas, and their in
tended plans for using the 15 cent
per hundred weight promotional
contribution state dairy farmers
are providing. As speaker Trish
Williams of the Mid-Atlantic Milk
Marketing Association explains,
the donations that are coming from
their own families’ farms will, in
large part, stay locally and help
the state’s princesses do their job
of promoting the dairy industry on
a grassroots level.
To augment that purpose, the
princesses later attend sessions on
how to deal effectively with the
print and broadcast media, as well
as a lecture on “What to Know
about Cows” provided by Ken
Ramey of the state Holstein
Association.
It’s not only the princesses who
must study. Their supporting
committee members and parents
learn about bookings, how to plan
school and public promotions, how
to fund the ventures, and how to
help the princess have an effective
year.
It’s an awesome task: to take a
room full of awkward teenagers
and, in three days, turn them into
spokespersons for the industry. If
the odds against success seem
overwhelming, one has only to look
at Lynette Loper to see that poise
and grace are endowments. There
is no fairy godmother available, no
magic dust to scatter over the
group and transform them. But
just as surely as there is no
available witchcraft, a different
kind of magic is taking place.
When they registered, they were
60 individuals, quiet and shy. As
they troop into the first seminar,
they hug close to the few people
they know, the alternates,
mothers, and committee mem
bers. At dinner, they sit in clusters,
most often by county. But after
three hours of lectures, they’re
more willing to talk.
By the time the first evening’s
seminar is about to begin, the
magic is working. There’s
someone from Clearfield County
asking about someone she knows
who lives in Adams County. As the
grownups begin to mingle, too, the
girls take their seats. Instead of
clusters of two and three, there are
rows of eight and ten now.
A zany talk about hair care helps
even more to break the ice. The
girls can’t help laughing along with
the speaker as she dscribes the
way cowlicks insist on sticking out
on your head and the “wild
raspberry” tint she’s added to her
hair.
(Turn to Page B 20)
mng
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