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Meacham’s Bathing Beauties
In the mid-1920s, the summer bathing season at Lake Worth was opened with a big splash. On June 6, 1925, the Queen of Lake Worth was crowned from among 100 beautiful girls taking part in the bathing beach pageant. The Water Pageant staged on June 12, 1926, was a ‘spectacle of a magnitude never before attempted at a Lake Worth opening’. Rivaling that created annually for the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show, it included a musical program by local amateur and professional musicians, an afternoon style show of street and beach wear, and the crowning of Dorothy Scott Rohades (sic) as daughter of the American ambassador to Venice. Miss Dorothy arrived on a launch accompanied by her court and Venetian nobility riding in gondolas along a lane of Japanese lanterns resting on floats
The H. C. Meacham Co., the premier Fort Worth department store of its day, entered eight lovely young ladies in the 1926 pageant. This bevy of ten bathing beauties photographed atop Meacham’s at 12th Street between Main and Houston, is thought to have represented the department store in an undated event, perhaps the 1925 Lake Worth pageant