Massachusetts milagro!

Susie Castillo, representing Massachusetts, was crowned Miss USA on March 24, 2003, in San Antonio, Texas.

Ms. Castillo, from a historic mill town in the Bay State, is the second Miss USA from Massachusetts in the past decade. The bilingual beauty, the daughter of Spanish-speaking parents (Puerto Rican and Dominican), will represent the United States at Miss Universe in June 2003.

A shock to the system

On the day of the Miss USA Pageant, staffers at PNB were largely preoccupied with the war in Iraq. In their "real" jobs, most were involved in covering the war in one way or another. And they were concerned about former staffers now "embedded" with U.S. military units.

But at the critical moment, the real problems proved to be technical. Heavy traffic from pageant fans knocked www.pageant.com "off the air," and even rippled to other parts of the World Wide Web. It took hours to restore service, as the pageant came and went.

Gerdeen Dyer, chief editor of PNB, said he was "stunned" by the volume of log-ons. Dyer, a newspaperman who described himself as "knee deep in war dispatches right now," said he had expected unusually light interest in the pageant because of the serious world situation. "It goes to show that this business is as unpredictable as any field of news," he said.