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22/07/2017
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Jeff Suess, jsuess@cincinnati.com Published 9:09 a.m. ET July 21, 2017
(Photo: The Associated Press)
Every story about Venus Ramey mentions that she was crowned Miss America in 1944. It’s a significant achievement, to be sure, but she didn’t allow the title to define her.
The outspoken redhead with the hourglass figure popped up in the most unexpected places. In Over-the-Rhine restoring the historic neighborhood. On the ballot for Cincinnati City Council. On a tractor, plowing a sorghum field in Kentucky.
Ramey passed away on June 17 in Agoura Hills, California, at the age of 92. To the end, she was far more than her measurements.
Born Sept. 26, 1924 in Ashland, Kentucky, Ramey moved to Cincinnati with her mother after her parents divorced, and attended Withrow High School for a time.
As a kid, she was a page for the Kentucky House of Representatives, where her father was elected. When she was older, she was a showgirl at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate.
“Whoever named her Venus wasn’t kidding,” the Washington Post wrote in 1944. It was her given name, chosen by her mother to start a showbiz career. She won several local beauty contests, including Miss Northern Kentucky, and tried modeling.
She was in Washington, D.C., supporting the war effort when she entered a local contest on a lark and won. She then represented Washington in the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.
Ramey, at age 19, was named Miss America on Sept. 10, 1944, the first redhead to do so, and her life changed completely – just not the way she’d thought it would.
She became disenchanted with the crown, as recounted in a 1946 “Life” magazine feature. Handlers told her what to wear, where to go, and it didn’t sit well with her. Told she would be paid for a promotional tour “after the trip if you’re a good girl,” Ramey turned them down.
“The most important thing to Venus Ramey is to keep on being Venus Ramey,” Cincinnati Post reporter Erwin Below wrote in 1944. “Miss America plays second fiddle.”
Ramey was the first Miss America to be politically active, advocating for voting rights in the District of Columbia. She received a citation from the U.S. Treasury Department for selling $5 million in war bonds. The 301st Bombardment Group painted her on the nose of their B-17 bomber.
“I look forward to retirement on a farm,” Ramey told reporters the day she won the crown. And she did, converting her father’s cannery in Stanford, Kentucky, into a sorghum farm. She drove the tractor, operated the mill to press the juice from the cane, and jarred the syrup.
Following in her father’s footsteps, Ramey ran in the Democratic primary for a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1951. On why she didn’t win, Ramey said, “The men figured I was a little too young to be a representative and many of them believed the old canard that beauty and brains don’t mix.”
Former Miss America Venus Ramey ran unsuccessfully for Cincinnati City Council in 1979. (Photo: The Associated Press)
She later moved to Mexico, where she designed clothes. She returned to Cincinnati in the 1970s, and lived in a rundown 18-room building in Over-the-Rhine while working as an activist to salvage the neighborhood’s historic structures.
“The only way to clean this place up was to move in and do it,” Ramey told The Enquirer in 1979. That year she ran unsuccessfully for Cincinnati City Council as an independent.
Even the quiet life didn’t slow her down. Ramey made headlines in 2007 when she stopped scrap-metal thieves on her farm in Waynesburg, Kentucky. Balancing against her walker, the 82-year-old shot out their truck tire with a snub-nosed .38-caliber pistol, preventing them from getting away until the police arrived.
“I didn’t even think twice. I just went and did it,” she told The Enquirer. “If they’d even dared come close to me, they’d be 6 feet under by now.”
The incident got her guest spots on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
As always, Venus Ramey was just being Venus Ramey.
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