The date was November 5, 1921, and the place was St. Louis, Missouri, at the final night of the contest to find the most beautiful girl in the United States. Nervous girls and family members held their breath as the judges announced that they had unanimously selected a 19-year-old Pine Bluff, Arkansas, schoolteacher, Edith Mae Patterson.

The long wait had finally ended. More than 7,000 girls had entered the contest with hopes of copping the first prize, which besides the fame and opportunities to earn movie contracts, was worth $2,500. It isn’t often that a schoolteacher becomes an instant celebrity. But it happened to Edith Mae Patterson on that memorable night in the early 1930s. Her married name was Edith Mae Pennington.

Edith gave up a promising stage and movie career for the life of an itinerant Assemblies of God evangelist. Meetings Edith Mae Pennington conducted across America were marked by big crowds and old-fashioned revivals that lasted as long as 10 weeks. And when she told her life story – “From the Footlights to the Light of the Cross”– hundreds were converted and challenged to give up worldly pursuits to follow the humble man of Galilee. The crowds knew they were hearing one who was not asking them to do something she herself was not willing to do.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A BEAUTY QUEEN
The vital statistics on Edith Mae Patterson Pennington tell us that she was born June 9, 1902, and died May 16, 1974 – a few days short of her 72nd birthday. But that’s only the perimeters of her life. What needs to be told, of course, are the events between 1902 and 1974 – especially the years following her unusual conversion which happened in a small Pentecostal church in Oklahoma City. That was in 1925 after she had made lots of money and gained fame from coast to coast.

Actually, Edith Mae had nothing to do with entering the contest. Her aunt, Mrs. W. J. Miller, read about the contest in Pine Bluff ’s Daily Graphic and submitted Edith’s photograph. The paper named Edith as a regional winner and submitted her photograph to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, sponsors of the national contest. The judges were impressed with Edith’s naturalness. In 1921, Edith Mae Pennington was judged the most beautiful girl in the United States. Edith and her family and all of Pine Bluff were on top of the world. Unknown to Edith, she was being pulled into a lifestyle that she had never known in Pine Bluff or at Rice Institute where she had attended for a year in preparation for a teaching career. She would leave her beloved Lakeside School pupils in Pine Bluff and step into a world which she would later call a “modern Sodom.”

At first Edith Patterson enjoyed the fame and the excitement which had jerked her away from Lakeside School. Nearly 4,000 people wrote to her, several of whom proposed to her. The first year after winning the award, Edith appeared on 101 stages around the country. She developed an act and was graciously welcomed into country clubs, honored at banquets, modeled expensive clothing and jewelry, and was chauffeured in expensive cars. But the Roaring Twenties for Edith Patterson soon had a dull and empty sound. “It was very exciting, alluring, inviting, yet, I was far from being happy and satisfied,” she wrote later. Hollywood promised great prizes to the young Pine Bluff native, but God began to deal with her heart, even while she worked toward a screen career.

One day Edith told her mother that she was going to leave the entertainment field, that her desire for the stage and screen were gone. Her mother was delighted. “Edith, I have been waiting for you to say that,” she said. “I knew you would eventually make that decision.” Sometime later Edith was drawn to a Pentecostal church in Oklahoma City. Edith’s expensive mink coat, gold earrings and bracelets, and diamond rings marked her as one who didn’t frequent typical Pentecostal storefront missions. Certainly she would never be mistaken for one of the altar workers or a Sunday school teacher. But there she sat in a Pentecostal church, hungry for an experience with God. A woman member of the church spotted the worldly-looking Edith and knew from her appearance that she belonged on her knees at an old-fashioned altar. This worldly type, the woman probably reasoned as she approached Edith, needed the sledge hammer witnessing tactic. And so she immediately began to rebuke Edith for her worldliness. Others would have recoiled and stomped out of the church, but Edith had been on a spiritual search long before she entered the little building.

The rebuke was all Edith needed. “I tore the necklace from my throat,” she would say whenever she related her life story, “and rushing to the altar I stripped off my fur coat and cast it at the feet of the benevolent-eyed preacher.” The next day Edith sold her jewelry and donated the money to charity. That night she returned to the little church, looking more like the Pentecostals who sat around her, and preached an impromptu sermon. The break was clear. Edith – as she described it later – went from “Movieland to Canaanland,” and “From the Footlights to the Light of the Cross.” And she didn’t look back. Edith was later baptized in the Spirit and “received my divinely appointed call to preach the full Gospel.” Pentecostalism had snatched someone from the entertainment world, one who would become a big drawing card and an effective evangelist. What more could they ask for in the ongoing struggle with evil forces! A big question in the minds of a lot of people who knew Edith was how the folks in Pine Bluff would react to the conversion. They had a chance to see up close their former beauty winner when Edith returned to her hometown Edith Mae Patterson after being named the most beautiful girl in the United States, November 5, 1921.

Pine Bluff offered Edith a place of ministry, but down deep within her heart was an urgency to expand her borders, to preach in evangelistic meetings across the nation. Before that ministry could get off the ground, however, she went through the agony of a marital separation. She had earlier married her former business manager, J. B. Pennington, and had given birth to a daughter, Edith Lorraine. Edith Lorraine wrote that her father was saved at one time but chose not to follow Christ: “He seemed jealous of Mother’s love for the Lord and also of her call into the ministry.” To Edith Mae, forsaking the call of God on her life would be the worst thing she could do. She hoped and prayed that J. B. and she could minister together; but if it came down to either her marriage or the call, the call would come first. J. B. Pennington was not interested in the ministry and walked out of the lives of his wife and little daughter.

Edith Mae Pennington, like Aimee Semple McPherson, Maria Woodworth-Etter, and the Pentecostal social worker Mary Moise (who also were married to men who did not feel called to preach), had accepted what she understood as a divine call to preach. And she was willing to pay the price. There was no other choice. The old Arkansas-Louisiana District of the Assemblies of God ordained Edith on September 26, 1930. She would remain with the denomination for 20 years, first as an evangelist and then as the founding pastor of a church in Shreveport, Louisiana. Once Edith began holding evangelistic meetings, word traveled rapidly that a former beauty queen with an effective Pentecostal ministry was turning some churches upside down. And she wasn’t getting the job done just on her beauty and personal testimony – although people who saw and heard her rated her high in both of those areas.

Some people, however, questioned whether a woman should preach. Edith would answer with a question of her own: “If God calls a woman to preach the Gospel, and His blessings are upon her, ‘in confirming His Word with signs following,’ whose right is it to question her right to preach the Gospel, pastor a church, or lead a movement under God?”

Wherever Edith Mae Pennington preached during the Great Depression, reporters and photographers surrounded her for stories and pictures. They were anxious to cover the young woman who – as a St. Louis reporter described it – “traded a budding movie career for the pulpit;... swapped the stage for the sawdust trail.” Editors gave generous space for Edith’s meetings, and consequently the publicity put little-known Pentecostal churches on the map.

In a St. Louis meeting in 1931, Pastor Henry Hoar wrote that the meetings ran for nine weeks. Bethel Temple, where the meetings were held, saw 330 converted, 125 baptized in the Spirit, and 110 join the church. Another nine-week meeting was held in Springfield, Mo., at the headquarters church, Central Assembly. Jim Dutton, a 15-year-old Baptist at the time, came to a service to see what all the excitement was about. Dutton faithfully attended Central Assembly until he passed away in 1996. “I saw a whole row of people under conviction,” Dutton recalled, “and they all turned and kneeled to receive Christ.” A second meeting at the church ran for seven weeks. Edith moved into the nation’s capital at the invitation of Harry Collier, pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle. And the crowds came. Hundreds were turned away from the church before the meetings were moved to the Masonic Temple Auditorium.

Here again, newspaper publicity drew hundreds of people to the church. Pastor Carl O’Guin was past 90 years of age when he reported on the “landslide revival” Edith conducted at his Granite City, Illinois church in 1931. Conversions numbered 112, and 105 were baptized in the Holy Spirit during this seven-week meeting. The famous Glad Tidings Tabernacle in New York celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1932 with Edith as the featured speaker in a revival series. A four-column photograph of Edith appeared in the New York Evening Journal, accompanied by a story, “Beauty Winner Forsakes Hollywood for the Pulpit.” In the Glad Tidings meeting, Edith described herself as a “simple soul and a wanderer.” She doesn’t imitate other women evangelists, she added, but just goes around “saving souls.”

Edith Mae Pennington kept up her evangelistic pace from coast to coast between 1930-36. One of the meetings in 1936 was in Shreveport, Louisiana. Later, she announced that God wanted her to establish a church in the city. So, after traveling in evangelistic meetings for seven strenuous years, the former beauty winner settled down to found Full Gospel Temple (Assembly of God) in 1937. She would travel occasionally after founding the church, but most of her remaining years were spent with the local congregation.

As far as many of the old-timers who were in her meetings during the Great Depression are concerned, there never will be another Edith Mae Pennington. She could attract the crowds and draw the net for conversions. And few evangelists were as successful in leading believers into the Pentecostal experience. Many Pentecostal churches really didn’t get a good start until Edith Mae Pennington visited their cities. Her critics said she was foolish to give up a promising career for the ministry. Edith’s answer: “The Light of the Cross exceeded the bright lights of the stage. I exchanged the glamour of the world for the glory of the cross.” It’s pretty safe to add that she never looked back.