---
title: "Please, Meet Miss Body-and-Fender and Her Friends"
description: "In which we pique your previously unacknowledged nostalgia for car-wash beauty pageants."
date: "2015-12-03"
modified: "2015-12-03"
authors:
  - name: "Ben Keeshin"
    link: "https://www.thedrive.com/authors/ben-keeshin"
url: "https://www.thedrive.com/vintage/1099/please-meet-miss-body-and-fender-and-her-friends"
categories:
  - "Culture"
  - "History"
  - "News"
---

# Please, Meet Miss Body-and-Fender and Her Friends

![](<https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/images-by-url-td/content/archive-images/120315_nonseq_carwashcowboy_hero.jpg>)
*\<em\>www.thedrive.com</em>*

*Mad Men* did a stellar, highly stylized job of revealing the seamy underbelly of the Kennedy and L.B.J. eras. Under an amalgamated veneer of poodle skirts, Chevy Bel-Airs and brylcreem was a lumpen mass of DUIs, sexism, infidelity and racism. Rose-colored lenses: well-cracked. Roller skates: wheelless, up on tiny concrete blocks.

Still, there were charming moments. Though beauty pageants themselves have a mixed reputation—as do most institutions with [Donald Trump’s imprimatur](<https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-takes-full-control-of-beauty-pageant-1442024012>)—a homespun car-wash pageant is pretty charming. Miss New Jersey, Miss Universe, [Miss Cornfest](<https://obioncountycornfest.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ENTRY.pdf>), keep your industrial-strength Aquanet and white-hot ambition on the bigger stages. This pageant is for the women of one particular Los Angeles car wash, circa-1951. Unphased by the potentially unwelcome smooches of the dude in the Stetson, Misses Control Tower, Body-and-Fender and Tire-and-Battery bear their weird titles with elegance, curls set, one-pieces fitting snugly.

In the right, an older woman looks on with an ambiguous gaze. A prudish pearl-clutcher? A former Miss Exhaust-and-Muffler wistfully recalling her glory days? The Auto Part Brigade beams on, unaware.

## Author
Ben Keeshin is a former staff writer for Maxim, and before that, contributed writing to the digital sides of Road & Track and Vanity Fair.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://twitter.com/BnKshn>)