I had an email forwarded to me stating, "Who was Miss Lube Rack 1955?", referring to the 1st photo of "Miss Lube Rack."
After the photo, the text of the email said,"Nancy D'Alesandro (Pelosi) \ Miss Lube Rack 1955 "
This piqued my interest. I had serious doubts as to whether the photo was of the current Speaker of the House. As I traveled down the rabbit hole, I found this website filled with vintage automotive photos.
http://johnstraub.blogspot.com/…/boulevard-beauty-queens-mu…
This was my reply:
Mildly amusing photo. “Cheesecake” Pin-Up photos were a thing back in the day.
In 1951 the Mueller Bros. Oldsmobile dealership in L.A decided to hold a promotional beauty contest. Many of the contestants were photographed with different "Miss" designations. The person that took the photo, Allan Grant, was a Life magazine photographer.
In the photo with all of models in the parking lot of the dealership, you can see "Miss Lube Rack" second from the left. She appears to be relatively tall.
Here is a link to a website dedicated to automotive photos with a page focused on the Mueller Bros. promotional shoot. Some of the photos are quite amusing.
http://johnstraub.blogspot.com/…/boulevard-beauty-queens-mu…
The car in the background of the Miss Lube Rack photo is a 1950 or 1951 Oldsmobile 88. The photo was taken at an Oldsmobile dealership. Oldsmobile had major model changes in 1955, 1958, and 1959. It is very doubtful that a dealership would have used a 5 or 10 year old model in a promotional photo.
Speaker Pelosi was born in 1940. She would have been 11 years old when these photos were taken.
Here is a photo of Speaker Pelosi in 1961 with President Kennedy.
She was 21 years old. She seems to be somewhat diminutive.
Speaker Pelosi grew up in Baltimore where she lived until 1958. She then went to Trinity College in Washington D.C. of which she graduated from in 1962.
I doubt very much that she would have traveled 3000 miles from the east coast to the west coast so that she could participate in a low-budget beauty contest at an L.A. car dealership, no matter what age she was.
As I said, the photo is mildly amusing. The sad thing is, people are distributing this photo, presenting it as truth when is in fact a complete and total fallacy.
Even if the photo was accurate, there really isn't anything wrong with someone participating in a beauty contest.
It's not like having an affair with a porn star, just after your third trophy wife gave birth to a baby, then having your lawyer pay the porn star off and then having your lawyer end up in jail for violating election finance laws.
Nope, being in a beauty contest is nothing like that.